In search of tag clouds

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By Ravenhawk | April 15, 2007

I’ve been reading recently about Search Engine Optimization and increasing your page rank. Like most bloggers, I’d to make my blog accessible to the widest possible number of people. This is hard to do when you’re buried at the bottom of google.

In my reading, I saw a lot of this speaking of your inbound/outbound link ratio. Basically, you want number to be equal or better, else you’re leaking page rank. Well, according to my google webmaster tools page, I have 32 inbound and 42 outbound. I figured an easy way to remedy this would be to build a tag cloud. However, as I began googling how to make a tag cloud, it turned out to be not so simple.

There were many plugins available for wordpress users, but I use blogger. Searching specifically for blogger, I found a lot of posts, however, most of them led back to the same post which talked about how to build a tag cloud on the new blogger. I use the version of blogger before the horrible WYSIWYG thing was put it: My template editing is html. Without a CSS sheet to edit, I couldn’t use the system.

Finally, I discovered that Technorati has a system that you just stick into your blog and it reads your top tags list off their site which is in turn reading it off your feed..
A pain, yes, but hopefully it’ll work.

I’ve stuck it on the left, it’s supposed to take awhile before it pings for the list, so I’ll have to wait to see if its working.

Edit: April 16th, 9:36 am

Well, Alas, it still isn’t showing my tags, maybe I did it wrong, but I don’t appear to have anything resembling a tag cloud. I guess this is a failed experiment, but I refuse to move over to the new blogger as I would have to totally recode my layout since the new blogger doesn’t have any three column templates.