Tag Cloud - Do You Have One On Your Site?
February 3rd, 2008 • Related • Filed Under
WordPress 2.3 added much needed tag support, but I haven’t seen a lot of sites making much use of the capability. One feature I haven’t seen many live examples of are Tag Clouds. I tried adding a tag cloud to my sidebar today, but I ran into a few problems which exposed problems with the way my designer setup my sidebar.
I think Tag Clouds can look very cool (just look at these sexy examples), but do you think that readers actually find them useful? Would you rather stick to using a search engine to finding the content you want on a site? I’m interested to know what you think, as adding a Tag Cloud to my site could be a lot of work.
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Comment by Zath on 3 February 2008:
I quite like the look of tag clouds, they’re particularly useful for me if I’m visiting a site I haven’t used before and can browse older content easily.
A regular site I visit, I probably prefer to search to find what I’m looking for.
Comment by Tim on 3 February 2008:
I quite like tag clouds myself, I find them useful for finding related articles (by category) rather than a site generated ‘related articles’ list. As Zath said, they let you see a more specific index of related content.
Comment by Collin LaHay on 3 February 2008:
They are also used for search engine optimization rather than JUST traffic. I am going to be adding one to my blog (after I figure out how!)
Comment by Pete on 3 February 2008:
Tag clouds look cool, but I never find myself using it when I come across them on websites…
Comment by Niro on 3 February 2008:
You now what I think. I personally don’t look into tag clouds in small sites. Well if I get into technorati or some Blogcatalog I might. I feel tag cloud is good only for big sites with so many posts. Anyhow this tag cloud is basically a web2.0 style so I really love the concept.
Comment by Tim on 3 February 2008:
They are easy enough to develop, I hadn’t thought about the SEO benefits, but i guess it would allow it to find relevant content more easily
Comment by kpriss on 3 February 2008:
Could be useful. Visitors can see older articles without too much searching.
Comment by Joseph Plazo on 4 February 2008:
I think they look snazzy in the beginning- but after a bit, they strike me as a tad unprofessional. Imagine seeing tag clouds on washington post or wall street journal…
Comment by How To Tutorials on 4 February 2008:
A Tag Cloud is certainly useful. You can only show so many posts on your front page and in the ‘Recent’ and ‘Top’ posts. Your site visitor can easily navigate to any topic if the blog has a tag cloud.
Comment by Jalaj on 4 February 2008:
Since I have a redesigned blog (on sanbox theme) using tag cloud would require me to add CSS code for it without which it looks absurd.
Comment by Shashank on 4 February 2008:
I think you should add tag cloud as there’s a lot empty space in your sidebar.
Comment by Jeffro2pt0 on 4 February 2008:
I use a tag cloud but I’m soon going to figure out how to display the tags that a post has been assigned like I use to be able to do with the UTW plugin. The tag cloud on my site has become an eye sore.
Comment by Henrik on 5 February 2008:
I must say I prefer some well-defined categories to a tag cloud. But that’s probably personal preference…
And on a SEO note, with those categories in place a tag cloud just creates some possible duplicate content issues
Comment by Mark from Bloglyne on 7 February 2008:
We use a tag cloud on Bloglyne.com but I don’t ever notice anybody using it. Of course, I do not have the volume you do, but, we will continue to use it.
We are using Ultimate Tag Warrior, which tags comments and keywords.
Comment by Jawwad on 9 February 2008:
Actually I have added Tag Cloud (courtesy of Simple Tags plugin)but removed it in the end because I did not like it in the end because sidebar was not looking as clean and tidy after adding it. I think it is more of matter of preference of an individual webmaster.
Comment by Marie - Wipe Out Cellulite on 11 April 2008:
I think Tag Clouds can be eye catching (that can be a good or bad thing) and perhaps keep your readers on your blog that little bit longer, but are you simply creating lots of extra pages with similar content.