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Improving Your Search Engine Ranking With A Search Cloud

by: Dan Fletcher

There are many ways to improve your search engine rankings. There are off page factors (basically link building), which can include techniques like article submission, blog commenting, forum posting, directory submission and more. And there are on-page factors- like keywords, markup, etc. Both are important, and if you wish to do rank highly on the search engines you need to focus on building links, and improving on page factors. If you're looking for an extra boost, you may like to consider search clouds- An on-page factor that is often overlooked by many people.

A search cloud appears on your website (often on the side), and is a large list of words. Each word is a link, and they are all different sizes. Each word is something that someone searched for when they came to your website. If a lot of people search for a certain word, then that word will appear bigger in the cloud.

One of the best benefits of a search cloud is that it gives you more internal links to the pages that are important on your site. And it uses the "right" anchor text, because it uses the anchor text that people are already searching for. This will help with search engine rankings, because it adds more links to your pages, with the correct anchor text. These links may not be as useful as links from other domains- but they still help!

Lets say that you get some traffic for the search phrase "blue widgets". If someone visits your site after searching for "blue widgets", then the search cloud will now show "blue widgets", with a link to the relevant page. Now you have extra links to "blue widgets", you are more likely to rank higher for that term.

There are plenty of other reasons to use a search cloud as well. Visitors find them interesting, and will often visit some of the links in the list. This will increase your page views, whilst decreasing your bounce rate. A search cloud also provides social proof to the visitors- they see that they are not the only person to visit the website, and they can see that other people (like them), also came to your site. This can help build up trust, which will hopefully translate to extra sales.

A search cloud can normally be set up quite easily- particularly if you have a PHP based website. Most forums, script sites, and blogs are written in PHP, so a search cloud can usually be added with a small change to your template. If you have a normal HTML site it's still possible to add a search cloud- you may just need to do a bit more setup. If you're interested in trying a search cloud on your website, checkout the "Simple Search Cloud", available as a free script from: http://www.buymyscripts.net/Free_Scripts.html