What exactly is a Tag Cloud?

No, a tag cloud is not a meteorological phenomenon. Nor is it a children’s game. In order to really understand tag clouds, we first need to understand tags. Tagging is a way to label, categorize, archive and find things on the internet. For example, you might tag a collection of photos on a photo sharing site with the word “Amsterdam”. You would then be able to find themt, and associated photos with the tag “Amsterdam” more easily the next time you visit that site. Sometimes tags are automatically generated by the Website’s software based on the number of times particular words are used in an article or other piece of content.

Sites like Flickr (pictures), Technorati (blogs), Del.icio.us (bookmarks), Last.fm (music) and many others allow users to "tag" their content, find similar objects by searching for tags, etc. Clicking on a tag will display a page with all of the other content with the same tag.

A Tag Cloud is a visual representation of the most active tags on a particular Website. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. You can see them in action on the Network Solutions e-commerce forum here.

After clicking on a tag within the Tag Cloud, the user will be taken to the list of items that are associated with that tag.

Can adding a Tag Cloud to my web site help with search engine rankings?

Tag Clouds are generally considered to be a feature that makes a Web site easier to use. Users can easily find topics that interest them, and see what other visitors are interested in by looking at the Tag Cloud. However, when tagging is applied to a website, it can help the site's traffic by achieving visibility within the search engines for a much larger number of words. This is because tags provide an additional way for Search Engines to navigate through your site, by providing links to content associated with each tag. This in turn can help your search engine rankings for particular terms.

Another inherent benefit to a tag cloud is also that the search engines (and you) can see what is of interest to people visiting your site. It may surprise you to find out what is of most interest. And because the tag cloud is updated in real time as people interact with your site, it means that the content on your site is constantly being refreshed, which is another good thing for attracting search engines.

The downside of tag clouds is that the search terms are generally limited to a single word. Unless your site has a very niche focus and target audience, you are unlikely to improve your search engine rankings for a single word search term. In addition, tags do create the opportunity for users to spam the tags cloud with unrelated content to draw attention to particular content or links on the site. Your probably won’t want a high search engine ranking for these spam words so will need to pay attention to this. Many tag cloud programs allow you to set a list of banned words, so if you find that spam I is a problem, you can block these words.

How do I add a Tag Cloud to my Web site?

One easy way to add a Tag Cloud is by setting up a blog. There are many blogging packages available, but probably the most popular is WordPress ®, which supports the capability to add tags to blog posts. If the WordPress theme you choose supports tag clouds, then a tag cloud will be automatically generated for your Web Site.

Network Solutions offers WordPress as part of its standard web hosting package .You can even set up multiple blogs around different subjects on the same hosting package, each of which could generate a tag cloud around its subject matter.

In summary, tag clouds can be a great way to help visitors find content on your site, but also will definitely not hurt your chances of being found as the result of a search engine indexing your site! However, they are just one of many other ways to improve your search engine rankings  and should not be relied on as the only way to promote your site.