Benefits Of A Tag Cloud On Your Blog

A tag cloud is an aesthetic piece of design for your blog but it’s useful as well. If you have a WordPress blog, it’s as simple as adding a tag cloud widget to your blog sidebar. Then, use a group of tags regularly in your blogging.

A tag is equivalent to a category or topic on the page. Search engines read them and they can be used by web surfers looking for information on a particular word or phrase. By using tags, you’re making your subject matter more obvious to search engines and people.

Benefits Of A Tag Cloud

On your blog, your tag cloud will show a list of popular tags. Tags, or subject keywords, will appear based on frequency of use. If your blog is about dieting, you might have many diet-related words in the cloud but the most popular tags will appear to be the largest.

Not only does the cloud show popular words but is clickable as well. If someone sees a word that appeals to them, they’re going to click it and be taken to a category search, where they’ll be directed to a results page filled with blog posts of yours that use that tag in them. Each click that is made on your site could be a click closer to a sale.

The tag cloud shouldn’t be overbearing or incredibly large on the blog but it’s a good idea to make sure people can see it. You might place it on a sidebar just below the fold, for instance.

Choosing Tags

Keyword research can help you choose tags to use. Using tools that help you determine keywords to use and then sprinkling those words throughout your text can help you get search engine traffic based on those words. When creating your WordPress blog post, be sure to enter those tags into the tag field as well as use them in the blog post itself.

It’s a good idea to pick a few standard tags that you’ll use regularly. Overdoing it will make the cloud really large and will reduce the likelihood of several important phrases being depicted as popular. It’s a good idea to have a few keyword phrases really stand out. It might be a good idea to choose 2-3 primary tags that you use on just about every single post, for instance.

There are a lot of different aesthetics for blogs and tag clouds are just one of them. Again, whatever you can do to grab people’s interest is going to keep them on your site longer. Don’t forget to use tags when doing social bookmarking as well. You can add them on many social sites and create your own tags on Twitter (known as hashtags, by putting a # before a popular phrase in the Twitter update). People visiting home pages of those social sites will often be able to search on tags and could find you as a result of their search.

How To Add A Tag Cloud For A WordPress

Go to the appearance/widget section of your Wordpress blog and you can generally choose tag cloud from a list of available widgets. Just drag it and drop it where you’d like to put it on your sidebar. You can preview to see if it’s in an ideal spot. If none of these are to your liking, you can also go to “add plugins” in your Wordpress dashboard and do a search for tag cloud, there are plenty available.

Have a most outstanding day.

Sean Rasmussen
Aussie Internet Marketing
www.SeanSEO.com © 2008 - 2010