Purpose of tags?

[shockie]

apart from visually seeing what keywords dominate a website, are there any practical applications or benefits of tags?

i find that all they do is obnoxiously display the main keywords and a whole slew of words written in very small text... :red:

 

[Albino]

what tags do you mean?

meta tags?

 

[shockie]

no, not meta tags.

i'm talking about tag clouds, ie: http://www.joelamantia.com/images/blog/best_practices_textcloud.jpg

 

[Albino]

ahh right

they are just a "web 2.0" trend.

useful in sites with lots of dynamic content to find similar content (with the same tags).

Some sites like that way of displaying links, and so just use them as a nicer way to dispay links.

 

[shockie]

that's what i was thinking as well. i guess whether to use them or not really depends on how visitors use your site.

 

[Albino]

yea true, also the type of site you have

personally, I like them, but i'd only use them in certain situations

 

[Flaming Ice]

IMHO, they're nothing more than a trend. Want to find something based on a tag? Use the search. Tag clouds serve no real purpose to me, except for taking up space.

 

[jimlast]

I think they can be useful for showing a scale of what content sites have. In my photo sharing site for example you can tag images, a tag cloud is useful for showing the most tagged images from all users.

 

[webd]

Tags clouds also have some SEO benefit because they link to important (popular) pages on your Web site. They will create pages organized by keywords.