WordPress tag cloud — overall in SEO
WordPress blogs tend to be able to rank high in Search Engines, like Google, Yahoo, and others.
This is due to the wordpress SEO plugin that you can use for free, and they are always up-to-date. Though they are also very good SEO premium plugin that free ones can’t do, for example besides free SEO plugin, i also use this best SEO plugin.
Let’s mention, All in One SEO Pack (related: configure All In One SEO), robots meta, and other SEO plugins you probably use, they are empowering your blog to get the most of it for gaining visitors.
Apart of using plugins, wordpress itself is already loved by Google as a blogging software. More and more people use this software to build and start their blog or even business website, by using wordpress as a non-blog website.
Very easy to use, and you have so many options inside your dashboard that you can use to change a very plain new installed wordpress blog to a more advanced blog. One example, you can use wordpress tag cloud to show your readers which tags are mostly have the posts, and which not..
WordPress tag cloud — the journey of using wordpress tags in this blog
If you are my regular reader, you probably will notice, few months ago, i did not use wordpress tag cloud widget.
And then i placed my wordpress tag cloud in my sidebar for a few days, and then removed it again. Why did i do that?
At that time, i have checked my stats, especially in Google Analytics, what links do my visitors tend to click in my blog?
By testing and analyzing, i have come to conclusion, that my site is actually confusing for a new comer which wants to read or watch wordpress video tutorial ONLY.
As you may notice, i mixed my contents, there are technology, windows tips, and wordpress itself, it is hard to find out where they should start.
Of course, i encourage them to see my “starting wordpress” category, but in that category page, it is also hard to find, for example, only posts which are related to “twenty ten theme“.
So wordpress tag cloud has been very useful for my readers since i have it in my sidebar again.
WordPress tag cloud — is it useful? is it good for SEO?
The answer is a big YES.
To me my wordpress tag cloud is very useful for my readers. For SEO, i set them to “nofollow” and make sure you have excerpt only or post summary in your category page if you give them to “index” and “follow”.
See more about category wordpress, index or noindex?. Or the better solution, use Thesis theme, without worrying this nofollow or noindex thingy.
If you click on my category pages, you will just see the title on my page, and no content even. It avoids Google bot or other search engine bots to be confused indexing your site, due to the “similar” content if you don’t use excerpt.
WordPress tag cloud has been very useful to me, how about you?
Thanks for the information, I agree, Tags are very important when it comes to SEO, and a tag cloud is God sent .. haha
I’m new to SEO and just when I made my own discovery about how Google indexes the keywords that are displayed in the tag cloud, I was able to watch Google’s Matt Cutts video clip explaining that tag clouds could be bad for SEO when it gets abused. By this he mean that bloggers would tend to load the tag clouds with keywords to the point that it becomes a keyword stuffed tag cloud. While you will increase the number of pages that Google indexed via tag cloud and it looks great on the SEO side, I think it won’t add much if Google sees that those pages are just keywords and nothing else. As long as you don’t abuse creating the tag cloud by stuffing it with keywords, the tag cloud would always be a great SEO help in the area of site navigation and even contents.
Hi,
I’m in Barcelona right now, attending to a few conferences about SEO in the gaming area. My website has been reviewed, among others, during one of the conferences and the SEO gurus said that the Tag Cloud is not a good idea. By the way, they also say that the less links you have on one page the less you loose your link juice….. I’m talking about duplicate links like the “read more” link which leads to the same page as the link on the “post title”, etc.
my understanding of tags cloud are generally a waste of time but they can be useful with stuff like joomla and javascript but you need to check the links populate right other wise the links will reduce to no value. and as for plugins i recommend yoast wordpress seo.
Really helpful article! Tks