[Phpwm] tag clouds

[pete graham]

I think they're useful on Blogs to see what subjects people write about a lot.

Not sure if they help much with SEO apart from providing the links to
other pages, they aren't really good semantic markup if you us <h>
tags as your having lots of headings with no content.

I've seen an interesting search that used tag clouds to "drill down",
I think it was on IMDB or something similar. You could choose a film
genre from the first tag cloud, for example "Vampires". You could then
choose another genre from the second tag cloud, for example "Hot
Chicks". This would then give you a list of films that are tagged with
"Vampires" and "Hot Chicks" or you could choose to "drill down"
further.

Pete Graham

On 05/10/2007, Phil Beynon <phil at infolinkelectronics.co.uk> wrote:
> > > So I pretty much understand the concept, how the CSS works, how
> > you derive
> > > the words from the database, how you make the actual word cloud
> > for search
> > > engines and how it intergrates with the searching functionality
> > to present
> > > the pages with those words to the s/e.
> >
> > I didn't realise search engine's understood tag clounds -
>
> Yeah thats why you use different size fonts, Hx tags etc as the search
> engines do traditionally rank something thats in say an <h1> higher than a
> <h6> etc.
> Thats a fairly standard SEO technique.
>
> >  I'd just
> > assumed they were a visual guide to the content of the website.
>
> I've seen pages with them on, and they look utterly crap :-)
> I don't think they impart anything useful to the human reader at all.
>
> > > But where the heck on the site do you actually put it?
> > > Are search engines looking for an unlinked root page called
> > tagcloud.html or
> > > something similar, along the lines of robots.txt?
> >
> > Not that I'm aware of.
>
> This is what I'm starting to think - I'm wondering if in fact they are one
> of these things that has run into an evolutionary cul-de-sac in that they
> are interesting from a statistical and expressional viewpoint but stuff all
> good for anything else.
>
> Phil
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