5 Reasons To Add A Tag Cloud To Your Blog
You may have noticed that I recently added Tag Clouds to the sidebars of both this blog and Lightening Online. I haven’t used them in the past because I haven’t really understood the benefits of doing so.
Benefits Of Having a Tag Cloud in Your Sidebar
1. Help Google to Find Your Keywords for Search
Assuming you use tags for your blog posts, a Tag Cloud is a simple and automatic way to include a summary of your key words on each page that your sidebar appears. This can help google understand what your site is about and direct relevant traffic your way.
2. Give Readers an “at a glance” Overview of What Your Blog is About
Tag Clouds use size of text to highlight the tags you use the most. A new reader to your blog can view your tag cloud and see quite quickly what topics you blog about most.
3. It Enables Your Readers to Find Posts On Various Topics Easily
If you spot a topic in a tag cloud that interests you, simply clicking on that word within the tag cloud will take you to a list of posts that have that tag. It can make navigation around your site just that little bit easier and hopefully encourage your readers to browse other posts.
4. It Gives You as a Blogger Some Great Feedback
At a quick glance, your tag cloud will tell you what you’re blogging about more frequently. For instance, on this blog, my tag cloud is currently telling me my most frequent postings are “Entrecard” and “Blog Reviews”. As I don’t actually want this blog to be MORE about these topics than other blogging topics, I’m choosing to slow down the frequency of posting in this area to allow a better balance.
5. It Looks Pretty
Yes, I know, this isn’t a very “scientific” reason to have a tag cloud. 
But I’m not a very scientific blogger. I LOVE the way my tag cloud for this blog looks. I LOVE the red colour and feels like it adds something to my sidebar in terms of appearance.
How To Add a Tag Cloud To Your Sidebar
Wordpress
Wordpress makes this SO easy for you. All you need to do is go into your widgets list and add the “tag cloud” widget to your sidebar.
Blogger
While blogger don’t provide an instant tag cloud as part of their program, many designers have come up with simple code that you can copy and paste into a HTML box to enable a tag cloud for your blog.
I haven’t actually tried this for my blogger blog so I can’t recommend a particular widget but here is a list of possible tag cloud widgets for blogger.
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Comments
i was thinking to add tag clouds on my blog. after reading ur post it’s time to install tag clouds on my blogspot blog.
Thank u for this great article.
Guardian Angel - you should only be worried if you don’t want your blog to be primarily about Entrecard. Plenty of people are interested in reading posts about Entrecard.
Kazi - I notice that you’ve now done so. Let me know how useful you find it. 
[…] willing to be convinced that appending a tag cloud can be a smart search engine strategy Perhaps this is their real utility: providing another way for the machines to read […]
I did not know the importance of the tag cloud until i read your article.Thanks for the information.
i’ve been thinking about this as well. still, the simpler aesthetic of a categories or labels list wins out for me. thanks though for pointing out the benefits.
The best reason I feel is so google can find you and place you properly. But yeah a little cosmetics never hurt anyone either.
Well I’m out for now.
Take care,
Ryan
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Nice explanation. I am also worried about having a tag cloud because just like you, I have numerous posts about EC.
But I think I have to give it a try.
Thanks.