Andrew Watson

Tag Clouds – What Are They?

Posted on 29. Oct, 2008 by Andrew Watson in Blogging, Online Marketing, SEO & Search Engines, Social Networking

Generally a tag or word cloud is a visual representation of user-generated tags. They provide visitors to the website with an additional path to navigate the website, and search engines an additional route to use when indexing pages.

Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically with the importance of a tag shown through font size or colour. Site visitors can use this additional navigation to find tagged pages alphabetically and by tag popularity.

Tags are then displayed as hyperlinks, leading visitors to a collection of pages associated with the tag, similar to a results page provided to visitors who use a sites search functionality.

Are Tag Clouds Useful?

Tag clouds allow users to find information faster and quicker, providing a better user experience. Providing better usability experiences online, ensures visitors not only return to your website, but that they are more likely to make bookings, purchases, visits and interact with your website. The better the experience for a user, the greater the the chance that they will recommend your website to others.

Not only do human visitors benefit from tag clouds. Tag clouds can help to make indexing of your content easier for search engines. This in turn helps them to index more pages and more content, improving positioning within their results listing pages.

Tags: SEO & Search Engines, Usability, Web 2.0