Understanding Tag Clouds: Enhancing User Experience and Content Strategy

Tag clouds are a visually appealing and effective way to display the most frequently used tags or keywords on a website. They provide a quick overview of the site’s main topics, making it easier for visitors to navigate and find content that interests them. Moreover, tag clouds are a valuable tool for website editors to ensure their content stays on target and aligns with their overall strategy.

Martech Zone’s Tag Cloud

Here’s my tag cloud:

Benefits for Site Visitors

When site visitors see your tag cloud, they get a clear view of the content that you’re providing.

1. Easy Navigation: Tag clouds allow visitors to quickly grasp a website’s main themes and click on tags that interest them, leading to related content.
2. Discovering New Content: Visitors can discover new articles or pages they might not have found otherwise by highlighting popular tags.
3. Improved User Experience (UX): Tag clouds’ visual nature makes the browsing experience more engaging and interactive, encouraging visitors to explore further.

Benefits for Site Editors

When site editors see your tag cloud, they get a clear view of the content that you’re providing.

1. Content Strategy: Tag clouds provide editors with a bird’s-eye view of their site’s content, helping them identify the most frequently covered topics and ensure they align with the website’s goals.
2. Identifying Gaps: By analyzing the tag cloud, editors can spot areas that may be underrepresented and create new content to fill those gaps.
3. SEO Optimization: Consistently using relevant tags helps search engines understand the main topics of a website, potentially improving search rankings.

Implementing Tag Clouds in WordPress

Tag clouds are native to WordPress, utilizing the tags that you apply to each of your posts.

Widget

Select the Tag Cloud widget and insert it into your sidebar. If you’re using the Gutenberg editor, you can also add it in any page or post content.

Using a Shortcode

Tag Clouds are native to WordPress but they are in widgets. If you’d like to add a shortcode to your site for displaying Tag Clouds (as I did above), you can add the following code to your site using your child theme functions.php file or a better approach is to build a custom shortcode plugin. Here’s the code:

function custom_tag_cloud_shortcode($atts) {
    $atts = shortcode_atts(array(
        'taxonomy' => 'post_tag',
        'smallest' => 8,
        'largest' => 22,
        'unit' => 'pt',
        'number' => 45,
        'format' => 'flat',
        'separator' => "\n",
        'orderby' => 'name',
        'order' => 'ASC',
        'show_count' => 0,
        'echo' => 0
    ), $atts, 'tag_cloud');

    $tag_cloud = wp_tag_cloud(array(
        'taxonomy' => $atts['taxonomy'],
        'smallest' => $atts['smallest'],
        'largest' => $atts['largest'],
        'unit' => $atts['unit'],
        'number' => $atts['number'],
        'format' => $atts['format'],
        'separator' => $atts['separator'],
        'orderby' => $atts['orderby'],
        'order' => $atts['order'],
        'show_count' => $atts['show_count'],
        'echo' => $atts['echo']
    ));

    return $tag_cloud;
}
add_shortcode('tag_cloud', 'custom_tag_cloud_shortcode');