keyword cloud or SEO cloud

Does anyone have any thoughts on this strategy? I have seen a few sites with keyword clouds.....and was wondering if these violate the Google searchengine at all?

Here are a couple of examples of keyword clouds
check the right column of this site under "tags"
http://www.creativeaftermath.com/screens/u/u32.jpg

Check the bottom of this page just above the nabbr video widget
http://www.coolchaser.com/layout/keywords/hollister


Please advise if these are inline with google rules....or if I put one on my site....will I get penalized?

-KD

 

i dont think these are anything more than another type of navigation structure are they? you do see them on a lot of successful blogs, cant see that it would be a problem

 

on a good blog - yeah it's ok, on a cloud site only - no no

 

Those are only Tags, keys to related contents, I think

 

it should be fine, blogs along with forums use this as a way to show people the most used keywords on the site or the most searched and etc. I think most of these are insite links anyway, rarely few go outward

 

I do not think this violates google's rules in any way.

 

no it does not violate google's rule

 

It's okay to use it as its not the only content on your website and the bigger the tag font is the more that people are interested in it's subject. just don't spam it and repeat keywords 'stuffing'

 

Tags are fine to use with Google Adsense. I've used tags on a Joomla site and it helped me to get my 200 + pages indexed ultra-quick and without a site-map! My tags were amongst the first pages indexed by Google after the home page.

The tag iteslf serves as anchor text for your article/post and is a great way to provide linking between content on your site. This should help with your SERPs eventually. Make sure you get all your rich keywords included as tags.

Another point to consider is the number of tags in your cloud. I have actually taken the tag cloud off the home page of one of my sites as I realized I had about 70 extra links going out!(which isn't a great idea for PageRank).

Also with Wordpress, I think the tags are considered the same as categories ( my RSS feed can't tell the difference anyway) so think about your information architecture carefully.

I would hazard a guess that using link text in the body of the post is more effective but there's no doubt that search engines love tags.
Hope this helps.