Tag clouds are a basic feature on most blogs these days, and a number of websites are using them as well. Although they sometimes look clunky, tag clouds can be a great way to further optimise your web pages.

There are plenty of webmasters out there who are against tag clouds. The main objection is the lack of aesthetics in a square crammed full of words that takes up a large chunk of your page. Also, when you get too many tags involved, the usability of a tag cloud goes down and makes it no longer a helpful feature for your site’s viewers.

The benefits of a tag cloud outweigh these objections. (For a start, you can format your cloud so that it’s slightly more pleasing to the eye.) Tag clouds are great for search engine optimisation purposes, because they increase the frequency of your tags without breaking the rules of keyword stuffing. Better yet, they make your content more accessible to viewers, and help you more efficiently direct a viewer’s attention to the content most relevant to them. Streamlining your viewers’ experiences in this way is exactly what SEO is all about.

Your tag cloud can also allow more interaction with viewers on your site. This has positive and negative aspects. Like any direct interaction on a site, allowing viewers to tag your content can lead to a lot of mess. Viewers aren’t guaranteed to tag universally relevant things, and sometimes deliberately cause havoc. On the positive side, visitors can provide you with invaluable tagging information, providing you with alternative spelling and helping you to see which tags are naturally popular. This is just the sort of information you could spend weeks looking for when developing your keyword list.

The use of tag clouds on social media sites has been a boon for SEO keyword researchers. The tag clouds on popular blogs and bookmarking sites means you are able to see at a glance what tags are hot on any given day. Monitoring these kinds of tag clouds is a good idea for any business, just to keep an eye on the trends in your industry.

There is some difficulty with tag clouds, in that they reflect the popularity of a tag rather than its relevance to your business. You can control this to some extent. This means that you have to keep an eye on the tags you most frequently mention. A good SEO campaign will ensure that your more common tags are the ones most relevant to your business.

One thing you need to keep an eye on is what format your tag cloud is in. A lot of ready-to-go tag clouds are written in AJAX, javascript or Flash. These will not be of best benefit for your site’s optimisation. Talk to our experts at SEO Consult about the best format to use for your tag cloud.

Tag cloud software is freely available, although you might choose to get one custom built. The benefit of a custom built tag cloud is that it should save you time in the future, although designing and implementing it might take time right now. Off-the-shelf tag cloud software is unlikely to serve the specific needs of your business, and there is a danger that your viewers could be bored with seeing the same tag cloud formation all over the net.

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