Is tag cloud useful, does it give SEO boost, where to place tag cloud?

How to define a tag cloud?

First what is a tag? It is a keyword or phrase assigned to a piece of information (such as a photo, a blog, an image, a video extract). The tag has a descriptive function but also a function of classifying information. In Flickr , for example, tags can help users find a set of images stored in a theme.

The tag cloud organizes and classifies articles by keyword. These can be presented in a cloud or a list on the home page of a blog or site. In a tag cloud, the font size of each word is proportional to the number of times a keyword has been used as a tag. In other words, the higher the items were associated with a tag, the more the font size of the character grows.

Tag clouds have found their first popularity on Flickr then on the social bookmarking site such Del . icio . us. A cloud of tags allows users to see quickly and intuitively what the most popular tags for a blog / site. It provides a concise overview of the content of the blog / site. Click on a keyword (or key phrase) of the cloud, you get an article or a list of items classified under this keyword.

The tag would be a powerful weapon for the optimization of search engines. Indeed, the tag would optimize the structure of internal links. In other words, you can optimize the flow of links flowing from a Web page to another, that is to say, the link juice to your site. One more reason is that the links created by the tags are text links rich in keywords. In terms of the SEO tag cloud is far superior to traditional navigation bar.

The use of tags applied to a blog can increase the number of visitors significantly . Take for example the case of our own blog, this is a tag on every page that gives a high rank, and was created automatically the first time we associated the tag to one of our post.

“Windows 7 Tutorials” is perhaps not the best example because it is very common subject. Over the period from 22 October to 14 March this tag generated traffic of 4252 unique visitors, 8057 page views alone and average time spent on the page of 3 minute and 48 seconds.

It is good for search engines, and is useful for visitors who would have had more choice of reading. The tag allows you to group several items of the same theme, in the same category.

TAG clouds: useful or useless?

Do people click on it? It is likely they click on the tag on the bulk of the cloud. Part of the Internet like the tag clouds, while others do not and think they are there to look the site pretty or they interfere normal browsing. The system of tag cloud is a good thing for search engine optimization or is it advisable to add to in your blog? In a well known SEO forum, the issue was repeatedly debated. What we can say is positive or negative, in one way or another, the tag cloud will depend on how the tags are built. It will also depend on the number of tags. The more you use the same tags, the more they will grow in importance in the eyes of visitors to your blog and search engine.

Ideas from SEO professionals

The tag cloud is an interesting concept. For a little over 6 years, professionals and users of the Web have divergent views on the usefulness of the tag cloud. This blog does not claim to affirm or refute the idea that tag cloud is effective or ineffective in a blog. There are pros and cons, the positive and negative, the question remains open. It is for you to experiment. What type of tag cloud you use? What code do you put in place to ensure that these tag clouds optimize your blog? We collected some ideas from across the Internet that we are explaining. These concern the usefulness of the tag cloud, we are sure it will cause some in your responses:

• A tag cloud may increase the number of pages on your site, but it could also increase the duplicate content on the site. Can we talk about duplicate content?
• When you use a widget tag cloud on WordPress, each tag created a new URL that shows the items associated with that tag.
• The tag might be a better alternative when search engines have not found other ways to query typed. This happens more often for short queries phrases, however applications for keyphrases are associated with content of your web page.
• The tag cloud, it is like the meta keywords tag of the past, avoid abuse.
• Tags create subcategories for your articles.
• Allow good navigation.
• The tag cloud is useful for users for example if they want to read the most written articles. It as for e-commerce sites that display the most popular products on the homepage. More cloud is visible, the better it is seen by Internet users, and by spiders. This cloud will save additional levels of hierarchy to specific product data sheets.
• Some blogs organize their archives by month, it is a shame, it is best to organize them by keywords and phrases. SEO (Search Engine Optimization), it is rather advisable to optimize your anchors, you will go in the right direction if you hold your old articles into categories and sub ??categories (tags clouds, clouds of keywords).
• The tag would be particularly effective for a long tail traffic.
• Search engines do they give more importance to words that have a larger size for small to medium blogs / websites like us (Page views 1500 to 50,000 per day).

Search engines love content under categories, here are some rules for tags:

• Do not repeat a class name as a tag.
• Make sure to repeat (re-use) tags. Avoid creating variations of a word in order to keep the posts organized for all.
• Keep your tag cloud at the bottom of your sidebar (we kept for experimentation at top). It must be displayed prominently. The ideal is to place it over your content. Some suggests click tags.
• Ensure that all names tags round out the category name. In addition make sure they all belong to subsets of this category.
• Avoid placing an article in a tag that does not match.
• Place two or three tags per item that is enough, but not twenty.

All pictures posted here are created by using Wordle.