Allchorn Design

Having only now been exposed to tag clouds, in so far as actually using them, I guess they’ve intrigued me somewhat. I’ve known what they are and how they work for some time now and if you’re not sure, I’ll try to sum it up.

Essentially tag clouds are a bunch of words or phrases known as tags that relate to some piece of content (article, blog post etc.). The tags are presented in what is called a cloud. The tags representing content items that more frequently featured are visually larger than the others to assert their popularity.

What I was interested in finding out, since the concept behind these structures are pretty simple, is if and how they could positively or negatively effect your SEO. In my research, I have not found anything which would constitute tag clouds having a negative effect, and quite to the contrary, they seem to be quite a healthy and beneficial asset to a website with frequently updated content.

If you stand back and think about it, they are all keywords/phrases pointing to an article pertaining to them. Isn’t that what we suspect to be one major part of the search engine’s algorithm? At least Google’s?

Personally, I’ve very rarely used a tag cloud as my browsing a site has normally consisted of navigating using the traditional vertical or horizontal navigation or typing a search string and hitting enter. I think I’ll embrace this concept however and see if it makes things easier or more difficult for me in the long run. I guess that means there will be a follow up to this.

Anyway, an interesting, topic for me anyway.