What is SEO Internet Marketing & Related Definitions

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Lynn Epstein on February 3, 2009 at 8:49am

I have a question. The tag section of our blog has become very long (we used to use the cloud format and changed to the list format several months ago). How important is it to include the tag list/cloud on the blog site rather than just the blog posts.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and insights.

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Pittsburgh SEO Marketing on February 6, 2009 at 9:11am

The fact of the matter is that either is useful to the search engines, though a tag cloud provides the perfect way to organize, accommodate users and is a powerful SEO strategy if done in HTML or even asp / php dynamic links are read by major engines and directories.. When clouds are developed with flash, ajax, javascript - this is for the convenience of the user and not as efficient for your SEO, though they still contribute to usability and overall time spent on your site; hence "popularity". It is best to use Google and Yahoo specific widgets.

Alternatives:

- You can remove the tags from the side bar and link them from a page that is part of your main menu links (added to sitemaps & rss as well).

- You can also RSS your tags for boost - like you have the comments RSS.

Lynn Epstein said:

I have a question. The tag section of our blog has become very long (we used to use the cloud format and changed to the list format several months ago). How important is it to include the tag list/cloud on the blog site rather than just the blog posts.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and insights.

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Chris Morgan on February 10, 2009 at 12:50am

Studies have shown that tag clouds because they are text based can cause sites to rank faster within the search engines due to the use of site keyword terms.

I use cloud tags and studying my stats many site referrers have been a result from the cloud tags.

I did some surfing tonight looking for the answer to this question, cause it got my interesting going since I use it on my blog sites and have gotten good results.

An Excerpt taken from http://searchengineland.com/effective-tagging-for-both-usability-se...http://searchengineland.com/effective-tagging-for-both-usability-seo-12708Search Engine Land
When tagging is applied to a website, such as a blog, it can significantly increase the site’s traffic by achieving visibility for a much larger array of search terms. Consider, for example, the case of my own personal blog, StephanSpencer.com: simply by tagging one of my posts with the keyword “blog optimization,” I received a top 10 ranking in Google for the query “blog optimization” — within only a few weeks and without any additional effort. It was a tag page that achieved the high ranking for me, and it was created automatically the first time I used the tag. (Note: I use WordPress, which now, as of version 2.3, has tagging built in.) A tag page, by its very nature, is designed to have its tag as its keyword focus. So, simply select a relevant keyword to rank for when coming up with tags for your content, and presto! — instant rankings.

One corporate site where tagging has been utilized, to great effect, is my company’s website, — Netconcepts.com. Tagging was largely responsible for a more than doubling of pageviews — within two months.

Many other reputable SEO companies have quoted this site when this question came up. Read the complete article by going to Search Engine Land.

▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Pittsburgh SEO Marketing on March 4, 2009 at 4:34am

That is a rather old post about tag clouds. If you look at the most recent articles and forum posts, you will see that there are some that support using tag clouds and some that do not; some are actually blocking the search engine robots from indexing per risk of those being considered duplicate content. I have not had that issue, but I am not an avid blogger. Has anyone had that problem?

▶ Reply to This

▶ Reply to This