"You can't see the forest for the trees" is an old saying that holds much truth when we are trying to analyze our own content. You've looked at your own content so much you probably no longer see it the way your visitors do (or the way search engines will). Sometimes I find it useful to look at the words on my site in a completely different way. By viewing your content differently than you've ever done before, you open up the possibility of seeing the individual trees within your content forest again. Here's a little exercise I like to use now and then.
Go to wordle.net and generate a word cloud of your page's content. If you have lots of pages to analyze, you might want to delegate this to someone else, but have someone generate a word cloud for every important page of your site. You won't be publishing these images. You'll strictly be using them for visualization analysis of your content. By seeing your content reflected in a hierarchical way based on frequency, you can suddenly see where you might be going wrong in the way your content comes across to users and search engines. Of course, you may also see what you've done right! The point is to get a birds-eye view of what impression the page is giving to others. Is it really emphasizing what you wanted it to emphasize? Would a search engine be able to properly evaluate what the page is about?
Let's take a look at some examples to show what I mean. I created a wordle word cloud for each of the 7 main menu links from SearchEnginePeople's home page. At a glance, I'd say SEP did an excellent job of emphasizing the key aspects of each page, but I'm not an employee of SEP, so I don't know for sure what their goals are. If I were an employee, I would study these images to help me determine what content I should tweak to better convey the important aspects of each page. Here are the word clouds for each of SEP's main pages.
Search Engine Optimization
Local Search
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Social Media Marketing
Reputation Management
Usability
Google Analytics Services
By seeing these pages represented as word clouds, we can more easily understand what our content is "saying" to our users and to the search engines. This ability to "see the trees in the forest" enables us to make changes to content if needed, so that we are sending the message we thought we were sending all along - but possibly failed to do.
Note: I'm not suggesting you should display the word cloud images you create anywhere publicly. I'm simply suggesting you use them as a visual tool to aid you in analyzing the content on your site's main pages.
About the Author: Donna Fontenot
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Very cool idea, especially for those of us who understand things visually. THANK YOU!Plus cool use of typography in those representations. very nice
Great idea! I noticed that some keywords are somewhat over-used on one of my websites as well. It does not make much of a visual impact when you look at it in keyword density %
PS: These clouds can make great poster.
Wow!
I’d thought of the Wordle clouds as a bit of fun, never thought about using them for SEO, nice find, thanks Donna!
Humm I never visualized the word clouds before in terms of seo, it makes alot of sense now, that your main keywords should be what stands out to amongst a forest of words. I tested it out for my website, and it worked out pretty good =D
This is a brilliant way to pick out some of the keywords you are targeting. A graphical display of how you view text on a web page is an interesting way to look at things.
Awesome visuals! The bird’s eye view idea works for me, and it just looks soooooo good! I am definitely going to pay a little attention to wordle.net!
I have been using this for a while now and I think it’s really great for usuability.
Use of differential fonts and typography is being done by website designers for better impact. Their use and selection is although restricted to some fonts only as practical ones for writing the site content.