Adding A Search Cloud To Your Website
One of the best ways to get targeted traffic to your website is through the search engines. And how much traffic you get will be based on how high you appear in the search engine rankings. So it is important to spend some of your marketing time trying to improve your search engine rankings. There are many ways to do this, but the two main ways are changing the text on your website, and increasing the links to your website. You also need to look at the actual links on your website- make sure you link to your important pages, and use good anchor text (which is the text that your link appears as, eg a link to bluewidgets.com might appear as "blue widgets", so "blue widgets is the anchor text"). A great way to optimize your internal links is to use a "search cloud".
So what is a search cloud? It's similar to a "tag cloud". It's basically a big list of phrases, with the individual phrases varying in size. Each phrase represents a search term that someone searched for, and then clicked on and visited your site. And the size of the individual phrases shows how many people searched for the individual terms- if a lot of people search (and click) for a specific phrase, then that phrase will appear bigger than the other phrases in the search cloud.
Search clouds help with search engine rankings. One of the on-page factors that search engines use is your internal links- these are used to see what YOU think your site is about. A search cloud helps with this, because it gives you internal links for phrases that you are already ranking well for- and the extra internal links will hopefully help you to rank even higher.
This can be shown with an example... Suppose you have a widget website, and you rank on the first page for "green widget". When people search for "green widget", and click the link to your site, the search cloud will add "green widget" to the cloud, and link to the "green widget" page on your website. You now have more links to the green widget page, which will help you to rank higher for "green widget".
There are other benefits to search clouds as well. They can help lead your customers to your more important pages. If someone searches for "red widget", and then sees that the biggest phrase in your search cloud is for "blue widgets", they instantly know that your site is popular for blue widgets, and may go and visit the page. Search clouds also encourage visitors to explore your, which will help increase the average page views per visitor. This can mean more income, whether it's in the form of extra sales, or more revenue from advertising.
You can usually add a search cloud quite easily to your website. If you're interested, I have a PHP based search cloud, called "Simple Search Cloud". It's easy to install, and won't cost you anything. You can download it from: http://www.buymyscripts.net/Free_Scripts.html
Dan Fletcher.
Ebook store scripts, scripts to make baby name sites, a great membership site script and more are all available
Source: http://ezinearticles.com/
Added: May 1, 2008
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