What is that tag cloud in the new blog?

Down at the lower right of the blog (on the bottom on your mobile device) is a little clump of words called “Tags.” They’ve been there since the beginning. Honest, take a look at this screenshot from 2012, you can see it there, called “CMS Tag Cloud.” You can click on the image if your eyes can’t quite spot it.

In fact, when I put it in, one of our older beta testers told me there was some sort of error because the blog was spitting out clumps of words.

Maybe it’s a concept that you’re familiar with, or maybe you’ve just been ignoring it and you’re happy to go on doing that. That’s totally ok with me, you play with the blog any way that makes you happy. You probably want to click on one of the thousands of other articles now, because we’re going to talk about the tag cloud, how it makes sense for you, and how it keeps this blog popular.

First of all, almost every article here is has at least one tag. The tag tells you what they article’s about, and you’ll see the tags shown as “FILED UNDER” at the top of any article you ready. (This one’s filed under “COMPUTERS.” Click on the word next to “FILED UNDER” and you’ll see other articles about computers.

(Go on, try it, I’ll wait.)

The tag cloud is sort of a visual representation of what tags are most important here. What you see is a list of almost every tag (the ones with very few articles are not shown.) The bigger the word, the more articles have that tag. So if you were to guess that we talk about DIRECTV a lot, you’d be right.

Now, the tag cloud at the top of this article’s a picture, but if you go to the “real” tag cloud near the bottom or right of this site you can click on any tag and it will take you to all the articles that have that tag. It’s an easy way for you to get the information you need, and read articles that make you happy. Read “tbt” for all the Throwback Thursday” articles or “best of the blog” to find out the articles that have impressed us.

The tag cloud has another purpose which is to make sure that the words that mean the most to us here appear on every page. For the most part search engines are immune to this little trick (which used to work great in the past) but hey, every little bit helps.

So, that’s probably everything you ever wanted or needed to know about a tag cloud. Curious? Try it out now… you’ll find some great stuff here!

About the Author

Stuart Sweet
Stuart Sweet is the editor-in-chief of The Solid Signal Blog and a "master plumber" at Signal Group, LLC. He is the author of over 10,000 articles and longform tutorials including many posted here. Reach him by clicking on "Contact the Editor" at the bottom of this page.