The MaGic of Lexical clouds: for higher rankings and enhanced user experience

January 21, 2008 – 4:15 am

Web BuzZ-BuZz, Web 2.0 BuzZ-BuZz
There has been so much of buzz about Web 2.0. Many webmasters have embraced weblogs, mash-ups, RSS feeds, bookmarking, social networking, tag clouds, wikis etc. But what excites me most about Web 2.0 are Tag clouds that so many website owners are using these days, for higher website rankings and an even richer user experience. For those who haven’t heard of these lexical clouds before, this is how a tag cloud for flickr looks like:

There are so many websites today, that are using tag clouds but the reason why I mentioned only flickr is because flickr was the first Web 2.0 website to use this concept successfully. Check out the tag cloud for Technorati:

Tag clouds, for better user experience
Tag cloud according to Wikie is - “ A visual depiction of user-generated tags used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information”. Flickr says - “Tags are like keyword or category labels, and they can help visitors find items which have something in common“. The simplest way to explain a tag cloud is that it is a Web 2.0 way of categorizing, organizing and navigating your website content with keyword links.When a user saves, bookmarks or votes (what ever they may call it) for some blog post, picture, video etc on a web 2.0 website like flickr, technorati, del.icio.us etc, he/she has to enter a keyword that the user thinks best describes it.

If you look at the picture above, you will notice that each tag (or keyword link) have different font sizes. The font size of these tags depend on the number of times keyword has been used to tag that an item. More the items are associated with the keyword, the more it is popular and bigger will be the size of the font. So it’s an intuitive means of navigation on a website.

When the user clicks on a tag, he/she is navigated to a tag page which on flickr looks likes this:

The tag page comprises of the most recent items tagged by visitors using that particular keyword they have clicked on. Please note that these tag clouds are not necessarily the only way to reach to the items on the website, but they serve as an alternative & intuitive way of finding them. Most often then not, you will also find the item’s tag adjacent to the item, clicking on which will take you to the other items tagged using that keyword tag. ‘Related tags’ are the other common tags which contain that same item.
Tag clouds: not just usability, it’s also an amazing SEO tool
So you still have doubts, if you should incorporate these lexical clouds on your website or not? I will give you one more good reason to do so - With Tag clouds, you consolidate your website’s internal linking which means you have better strategical control on your link equity (juice) and since the anchor text of these tags is extremely keyword rich, it boosts the ranking of your website or weblog far more than what conventional navigation bar does and hence increases the website’s ranking for significantly larger variation of keywords. You yourself will be surprised to see the keywords tags (including long tail keywords) that people will associate your content with (even wordtracker would have failed to find those). Bloggers will be glad to know that WordPress 2.3 comes with tagging in-built. Ultimate tag warrior is an awesome plugin to create a colorized tag cloud or heat map.

Other Tag cloud resources:
How to make Tag clouds using PHP, MySQL, CSS
Tag clouds using ASP.Net