Search Engine Optimization’s useful “toy”: Wordle

I have recently found Wordle, “a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”

You can paste your own text in a textbox or you can give Wordle the link to the page you want to pull the content from and it will create a very nice looking tag cloud for you. You can tell Wordle to remove common words (it supports many languages too), to use different fonts, colors, etc… But what I found immensely helpful is the tag cloud itself. A tag cloud, according to wikipedia is “a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color”.

Just by looking at this visual presentation of content you can easily check your keyword density (the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page). I have found that it helps me a lot to QUICKLY get an overview of the content I wrote and see where I can improve.

Enjoy the new “toy” and hope you find it useful.