Design and implementation tips for Building Tag Clouds

[mandy]

Tag clouds can be used effectively, and provide real value to a web site, or they can be tacked on as an afterthought, simply because they look cool, or to make the site appear similar to other, better web sites that offer them. Ultimately, you need to keep in mind their dual function, both as a graph of current activity, and as a navigation aid. Here are some design and implementation tips:

Make Your Tag Clouds Visible to Search Engines

You can make tag clouds fairly easily in Flash/ActionScript and JavaScript, and you can make them look much snazzier-flashier, even. However, I don't think these client-side languages are as good a choice as the server-based scripting languages. Why? Because you want search engines to see your tag clouds. Both of these technologies would effectively blind most search engines to the content of your tag clouds. If you do pursue a Flash or JavaScript solution for the interface, consider including the actual tags in a comment block in the HTML...

full article: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/...louds.html