Blogging

I Wandered Lonely as a (Tag) Cloud

By DOM Team| 3 Min Read | August 6, 2008
LinkedInFacebookTwitter

If you go and take a look at the new archives page I’ve thrown up, you’ll notice (in descending order) a search form, monthly archives, archives by category with their own RSS feed, a latest posts section, and a TAG CLOUD. This just allows you to scavenge through our past piffle in a manner you may find suitable.


It’s all too easy for us to assume you know what we’re prattling about, but I can assure you that I wouldn’t have the first idea about the jargon associated with the inner sanctum of any industry. And nor would most people unless they’d spent a bit of time working in it. I wouldn’t have the first nor faintest idea of even burger flipping [or insert other stereotypical menial career smackdown here] lingo were it the first I’d ever clapped ears on it.

Because we have these little chats on the blog quite often and because we think you care enough to listen, we have it in our minds you’ve taken most of this on board.

But that probably isn’t the case, is it? You haven’t exactly memorized our Internet Marketing Glossary, have you?

So, today I’m going to quickly explain what a TAG CLOUD is and why it’s useful from an SEO and usability perspective.

If you trot over to the archives page itself and scroll towards the bottom of the page, you’ll come across a whole heap of words jumbled-up in various fonts sizes. The reason why some of these words (or tags) are bigger than others is due to the numbers of times they’ve been used at the bottom top of one of our blog posts.

So, the bigger the tag, the more times it’s been used and you can safely deduce that that’s what a blog’s content waffles about the most.

A tag is much more like a specific keyword that you associate with a post and provides more of a detailed description about a post than a more generic category does. For example, if you click on one of the tags at the bottom top of this post (underneath the title), you’ll be taken to a separate page that contains this posts and any other posts that have been similarly tagged along the way.

These useful little tagged keyword snippets are then picked up by blog search engines. Users can search and find recent and not so recent posts that have been tagged with that particular keyword.

They also provide an extra semantic meta layer of context to the meaning of a post.

Has that cleared that up – like a prescription ointment? Or was it something you’d never thought about and now hate me for having made you done so?

Please feel free to add anything you think I may have missed or to ask any related questions in the comments below.

Related Articles

All Blogs
Internal Links SEO - How Much Do They Still Matter In 2022?
By Jonathan Bentz| 20 Min Read | March 9, 2024

How Much Do Internal Links Affect SEO? (Updated March 2024)

Every business on the planet wants its website to rank number one for every keyword…

Read Article right arrow
Impact of Historical Optimization | Historical Optimization for Blogs | What is Historical Optimization, and Why Should I Do It?
By Chris Loren| 10 Min Read | November 28, 2022

What is Historical Optimization, and Why Should I Do It?

Historical optimization is one of the most powerful tools in our SEO arsenal. It revives…

Read Article right arrow
Top WordPress SEO Plugins | Best SEO Plugins for WordPress | Top SEO Plugins for WordPress blog graphic
By Chris Loren| 14 Min Read | August 3, 2022

What Are the Best WordPress Plugins for SEO? (Updated 2022)

Ah, WordPress. We love it. You love it. Everybody loves it. In fact, almost a…

Read Article right arrow