A Very Easy WordPress Tag Cloud Web Page
A Tag Cloud Can Get You There Fast.
You may be aware that the Internet is becoming very crowded. Google will attempt to help you get where you want to go, but is having increasing difficulties. Part of that is Google’s doing. Their methodology depends on links from other web pages, so naturally, everyone is producing web pages. Indeed, some use computer software to generate thousands of web pages to influence their Google ranking. Since Google will only use computer based algorithms, it becomes a battle of the giant computers.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, seems to be acknowledging that his prot�g� has problems. He has accepted one of the Knight News Challenge 2008 awards for a project that will create a technology to give users more information about the origins and sourcing of digital content. He will be working with the BBC and Reuters on what has been dubbed “source tagging“.
Tags To Bring Order To The Cyber Sphere
Tagging certainly seems to be something that has real potential in helping us all navigate our way through the World Wide Web. Tags do of course come in two flavors. You can take a body of text and use a computer to determine what are the most frequently used terms. That is one way and it may be the route that Sir Tim is following. What is much more powerful is to encourage authors to choose a few tags that they feel will best represent their work. Thankfully this version seems to be attracting more and more attention, perhaps given the problems that Google is having with computer based algorithms.
A good example of the approach can be seen in the excellent blog of Kate Trgovac. Just look at her post on links for 2008-05-13. You will find for every entry she has added tags. If you wish to see more on what she believes is important on any given tag, then you can click through on that tag. There you will find the favorites she has collected, which are typified by that tag. She is using the website, del.icio.us, to hold these favorites. That is a free service and anyone can do it.
Picturing Tags – The Tag Cloud
If you want to get a sense of what Kate Trgovac feels is important and worth tagging, how can you best do that? The del.icio.us website does give a listing of all the tags she has used (1203 in all at the moment) with the numbers of web pages for each tag. Such a long listing is a little indigestible, so a visual approach seems more appropriate. This is where the tag cloud comes in. You can see a mini-example at the top of the right sidebar. Perhaps we should mention that the tagcloud.com website is somewhat confusing here, since it seems to be only a register of RSS newsfeeds.
If you’re working with del.icio.us, it would be nice to be able to easily display a tag cloud of your favorites. Nick Bouton seems to have attempted that in 2005 but apparently ran into problems with the server capabilities of the del.icio.us website.
It is perhaps an indication of the attraction of tag clouds that a number of people have worked on appropriate software. Eric (engtech) developed one in 2007, which was somewhat complex. If you can accept complexity, then you may even be tempted to use a Flash Tag Cloud WordPress plugin that Alex Cristache found. It is one developed by Roy Tanck and is called WP Cumulus, in a pleasing play of words on the notion of a tag cloud.
WordPress Has A Tag Cloud Feature
Luckily for those who are enthusiastic about tag clouds, and are authors of WordPress blogs, the whole situation has become dramatically simpler. With the latest upgrade (version 2.5), tags are now much more effectively supported. In particular, there is now a template tag function, wp_tag_cloud. That makes the addition of a mini tag cloud to a sidebar almost child’s play. You may have noticed a small example in the right sidebar when you arrived at this blog.
Making Your Very Easy WordPress Tag Cloud Web Page
Displaying the full set of tags generated for a blog is clearly inappropriate for a sidebar display. What is much preferable is a web page displaying the full set of tags. As it turns out, with a little ingenuity there is a very simple way of creating such a web page. This is done by creating a specific page template just for that page, which we suggest should be named tags.php. A suitable code for this in the basic Kubrics theme is shown below.
tags.php
<?php /*
Template Name: Tag Cloud
*/ ?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">
<?php if ( function_exists('wp_tag_cloud') ) : ?>
<div style="margin:25px;border:1px solid #111;padding:15px;">
<ul style="margin:0 0 0 8px;padding:0;">
<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=24&number=0'); ?>
</ul>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
<p style="margin-left:33px;">
Tags:
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tagcloud" rel="tag">tagcloud</a>
in Technorati |
<a href="http://del.icio.us/bwelford/tagcloud" rel="tag">tagcloud</a>
in del.icio.us</p>
</div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>
An example of the output can be seen in the tag cloud page for this blog. The only point to note is that the tags shown below the tag cloud are not a natural feature of a WordPress blog page. Wordpress posts do have tags, but WordPress pages do not, unless they are added manually as is done here. The left-hand tagcloud tag for Technorati is applicable to all tag clouds and can be left as is. The right-hand link for the del.icio.us tagcloud can be modified to link to the individual author’s del.icio.us tagcloud favorites, if so desired.
You can copy and paste the above code to create your own tags.php file and it can be FTP-ed to your own Theme folder. The properties of this file should be set to Read and Write for the Owner and Read only for others.
Once the tags.php file has been uploaded, the Tag Cloud web page is very easily created as a New Page in the ‘Write Page’ Subpanel. Select the template to be used at the very bottom of the Subpanel from the drop-down list. Its name is Tag Cloud. In the Title field, type a suitable Title such as ‘Tag Cloud for this Blog’. Within the Content field, type the text which should appear as the heading within the Page and this is all that is required. This could appear as follows:
<h2>Tag Cloud for this Blog</h2>
The template will then automatically add in the complete tag cloud together with the two tag links for tagcloud which appear below it.
Once the Tag Cloud Web Page has been created, a link to it can then be displayed at an appropriate point on the Home Page. Visitors to the blog can then easily use it to get a sense of what subjects the blog covers.
Related:
Tags Attract Eyes
Tag Clouds To Guide You
Go To Top
BPWrap
May 21st, 2008 at 9:28 am
Hi, Barry!
Great piece! To me, tag clouds are one of the most useful things about the whole Web 2.0 movement. I flip back and forth a lot on my delicious account between the list and the tag cloud. And I also find the tag cloud particularly useful on Flickr. I also like that Typepad (the blog service I use) will allow you to list your categories in either list or tag cloud form – similar to your WordPress feature.
Cheers .. Kate
May 21st, 2008 at 9:38 am
Thank you, Kate, for stopping by. I really appreciate your comments. I’m sure we haven’t seen the end of the way tags and tag clouds come to influence the search process, particularly given the continuing difficulties the computer algorithms have with the growing mountains of the Web.
June 27th, 2008 at 4:52 am
Hello Barry,
This is my first visit to your site and your tutorial on tag cloud pages is fantastic. It must have taken you some time for sure.
I also run a blog for fun besides my business and use tags a lot myself. But I learned a few new things from you.
Thank you
July 11th, 2008 at 7:37 am
Hi,
Very useful tips, thanks. you wrote wonderful tutorial. it is very useful for all who are like me.
July 20th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
I am increasingly getting request for blogs from clients and the tag system seems to be a great way to enhance any project, thank you for the useful information!
July 24th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Thank you for the great information. I have used a few plugins for wordpress but none of them seemed to give me the flexibility that I needed. I am going to try to create it using your instructions, and I’ll let you know how it turns out.
August 12th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Must say tutorial is great:)
August 22nd, 2008 at 2:54 pm
WOW, thanks for the awesome tutorial! I have been looking for something like this as i have not had any luck with the plugins I used before. I will update as to how it is going. again thanks!!!
August 22nd, 2008 at 8:18 pm
I’ve been debating using tags for some time now, I’ve always been under the impression that using tag clouds could lead to the creation of too many pages and also dupe content penalty. Great write up though, I’m now reconsidering my position.
August 23rd, 2008 at 8:27 am
Interesting point of view. I’ll consider changing my mind about this but for now I still don’t see things the same way you do.
August 29th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
I had no idea that implementing tag clouds would be so easy.
Good article straight forward and easy to understand.
Thankyou.
October 12th, 2008 at 5:42 am
Hm, interesting post.
I will definitely be trying this out.
Cheers
October 22nd, 2008 at 8:22 am
Hi,
Very useful tutorial on the topic of tag clouds. I am sure to implement that on my blog.
November 3rd, 2008 at 9:58 am
I have used different tag cloud tools but all seem to be the same. I would want to see a tag picks up words as the appear on competitors pages as well. By a mile,outstanding than the rest.
Mon
November 4th, 2008 at 7:10 am
I have been trying many different tag cloud plug-ins for wordpress, none have really suited what I wanted. This code and explanation provides me with the opportunity to hack something together myself that will suit what I have been looking for. Thanks for the post!
November 6th, 2008 at 12:10 am
Hi Barry,
I really like the simplicity of the tag cloud feature – I will give it a try on my blog. I did try to add a keyword cloud on a Keyword density checker i put together. Rather than using tags it showed the most frequently used keywords on the page. It worked ok in that showed the keywords nicely but not a clean as this one.
Cheers, Jen
November 12th, 2008 at 1:23 am
tags are really important on blogs.. but i prefer not to put in on the sidebar..
November 17th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Tag clouds is a greta feature for websites, it allows easy access to key word related content and keeps previous viewers posted on changes and additional information that may have been included at a later phase.
November 20th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Quick question for you, should we nofollow tag pages that are created from within WP? Isn’t that considered duplicate content and thus can be discounted already? I’m looking into this now but look forward to hearing what you think…
November 20th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
This depends how you handle your tag pages. The same problem might occur with category and archive pages as well. We solve the problem here by having all these pages show only the titles of the posts. The content is not displayed on these web pages. So there is no possibility of duplicate content.
November 22nd, 2008 at 2:52 am
Great tutorial mate, learned many things from this one,I Usually don’t find such good ones.Great effort.Cheers!
November 30th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Once the tags.php file has been uploaded, the Tag Cloud web page is very easily created as a New Page in the ‘Write Page’ Subpanel. Select the template to be used at the very bottom of the Subpanel from the drop-down list. Its name is Tag Cloud. In the Title field, type a suitable Title such as ‘Tag Cloud for this Blog’. Within the Content field, type the text which should appear as the heading within the Page and this is all that is required. Thanks pal for info
December 22nd, 2008 at 7:12 am
I had been looking for tags cloud and came to know about a flash tags cloud which was so easy to load and implement. I wondered why we don’t have such tags cloud on our blogs. The only problem for me is that it took a lot of space to show that cloud, otherwise it was excellent.
December 27th, 2008 at 7:24 am
Just started using Wordpress – on a fairly steep learning curve at the moment. This looks useful – thanks much.
January 2nd, 2009 at 5:34 am
Great insights. I was not aware of this. You have nicely described. This information is also helps to those who have no idea about it. Thanks for sharing…
January 2nd, 2009 at 1:13 pm
All tips on Wordpress gratefully received. Had heard about Tag Clouds and after reading your post understand a little more of their significance. Thanks.
January 13th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
New version of wordpress is very good so that it clears my mind and set me free from many fears. For many weeks I am still exploring it and I think there is much more to explore yet. That tag feature is amazingly good and makes a wordpress blog suitable for web 2.0 Projects. Thanks for sharing that code and explanations.
January 15th, 2009 at 11:30 am
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January 27th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
I just launch a website with tag cloud in it.
Wonder thing is that firsts page indexed in Google are some tag pages, not my home page.
How it can do that with Google ?!
January 28th, 2009 at 9:29 am
Thanks for sharing, very useful. In my opinion tag clouds are a useful thing about the whole Web 2.0 interaction, a must on most websites.
January 30th, 2009 at 9:29 am
what is the point of the tag cloud anyway? does it help with seo at all? it is all autogen
January 30th, 2009 at 9:40 am
I would think any effect on SEO is minimal, Alex. It is there more for visitors who may wish to follow a particular topic.
February 12th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
In many cases, tags are misused and treated like categories. If one wants to use Tags like categories, then what is the point? Tags should be used for specific keywords, not generalized keywords that categories would handle.
If you plan to use tags, be sure they are used properly.
February 17th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Nice blog dear!
I am increasingly getting request for blogs from clients and the tag system seems to be a great way to enhance any project, thank you for the useful information!
February 22nd, 2009 at 7:12 am
Good information. I always believe that an attractive tag cloud plays a major role in a blog.
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Luckily for those who are enthusiastic about tag clouds, and are authors of WordPress blogs, the whole situation has become dramatically simpler
March 2nd, 2009 at 6:24 pm
You know tags are actually very useful for SERPS.
Thanks for sharing this man.
March 7th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Tags are extremely useful, and a must on 2.0 sites.
March 11th, 2009 at 7:18 am
Tags are a great way to add semantics to content. I also think that tag clouds can add to the useability of a website and are mutually benificial to the webmaster and the end user. Both Web Designers and Web Site Owners both need to stay informed about semantics, tagging and other design and SEO trends, to provide a better experience for their users and to stay ahead of thier competition.
May 9th, 2009 at 3:27 am
Finally someone who can write a good blog ! . This is the kind of information that is useful to those want to increase their SERP’s. I loved your post and will be telling others about it. Subscribing to your RSS feed now. Thanks