Tag Clouds and SEO

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A recent phenomenon, tag clouds are commonly seen on blogs, ecommerce sites and several ‘Web 2.’ portals. Other than their visual appearance and ‘coolness’ factor there are benefits for your web site, especially for SEO.

What is a Tag Cloud?

A tag cloud or word cloud is a visual depiction of user-generated tags. Sometimes, they are just the word content of your site, typically used to describe what it is about. They are usually single words and are listed alphabetically. The importance of a tag is shown with its font size or color, and they are hyperlinks that lead to a collection of pages associated with the word.

Because of their role in search engine optimization of web pages, tag clouds have become even more popular. When properly implemented tag clouds make your web site appear more interlinked to search engine spiders, and this improves search engine ranking

How Are Tag Clouds Used?

There are two common ways of using tag clouds – by popularity and by relevance.

• In the popularity model, the most frequently used keywords used are displayed as tags on a web site In this method, the most commonly used tags or keywords are displayed in larger font sizes in the tag cloud. Less frequently used tags or keywords are displayed in smaller font sizes.
• The other method to use tag clouds is by relevance. When a user lands on your web page, the tag cloud displays related tags or terms. Clicking on a tag in this cloud would list all the pages or articles associated with that term. This acts as a search-assist, and helps visitors find other relevant pages in the site.

How Do Tag Clouds Impact SEO?

When used correctly, tag clouds can improve the internal linking of your web site, the internal anchor text relevance of pages in your site, and by extension, its SEO. They also increase the keyword density of a page but are better left unused for this specific purpose. This is because of the risk of abuse; keywords stuffed in the page content would make search engines ignore your web site. .

How Are Tag Clouds Used for SEO?

You can either custom build your tag cloud or pick one from the internet – both free and paid versions are available. For the latter, select the tag cloud carefully because most off-the-shelf versions have built in JavaScript or AJAX, and a few even use Flash. These do not help your web site SEO, because search engines ignore content served by JavaScripts, AJAX and Flash.

The best way to use Tag Clouds would be to custom build them using tag micro-formats.

The Ideal Tag Cloud

It is better to have tag clouds that list tags by ‘relevance’ rather than by ‘popularity’. Tag clouds need to be useful to the your site’s visitors, help them find other relevant content, and aid their navigation. Do not use tag clouds that list “most popular searches” or “what others searched for” or “most commonly used terms”. Instead, build tags that list “you may also be interested in”, “other relevant searches”, and “related content”.

Do not compromise and pick a tag cloud for how ‘cool’ it looks. Build a cloud that helps navigation on your site, and it will aid your site’s SEO.

References include: Search Engine Land, Webtop, several other snippets of insight from the web and Position² internal analytics data.

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Tags: search engine optimization, SEO, Tag Clouds, Tags