SEO Tag Clouds

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See the above line of text? You have probably seen similar things at other sites while searching the web (though theirs tend to be larger, I made a small model of it). It is commonly known as a tag cloud or keyword cloud. Now you can obviously see that it is a waste of space and words, adding no enrichment to an article or blog post.

So why then is it seen so often?

This is a poor SEO (search engine optimization) technique. It does work on a superficial level. You have indeed clicked, and may have browsed the site a little, but that is about it. After a few minutes you leave.

If the person who published the site is looking only for hits without any contribution from visitors, they have achieved their goal. This can work to make a site popular and make it seem good for ad companies to place their ads on the site while paying the webmaster.

But there is an obvious dark side. This technique quickly dwindles your audience. You may have every keyword available, and that will lead people to unknowingly go to your site, however the number of people will go down as they figure out this scam technique being employed.

Not only that, but Google tends to drop your ranking after they find out your site is little more than a tag cloud. They are experienced with this type of publishing, and refuse to let you stay on the front page of any search for long. Also, most companies that pay you to place their ads on your site (like textlinkads.com) will refuse such sites. They recognize that you are only gaining clicks to the website, but you will rarely contribute anything to their customers (businesses hoping to gain their own traffic from yours).

Though not yet illegal, it should be as it is a type of fraud. In my example, I am saying I will show you SEO topics. While I truly am in this article, most sites have random, miscellaneous, and unconnected topics smashed together and offer no information on any of them.

But can the tag cloud be used effectively? Actually, yes it can, and you can still hold you integrity and offer great content. In your HTML Metatags, something else Google uses to test the relevancy of your site against the search, you can type in every keyword and its derivatives (for SEO you can use SEOing SEOed, etc) to ensure that your site will show up in the search engine. Just make sure they are really relevant and not there just to get you meaningless traffic that will die sooner than later.