A Comprehensive Review

Introduction

The SEO Friendly Tag Cloud Widget Advanced is a WordPress plugin designed to enhance your website’s SEO. It generates a tag cloud, a visual representation of the content tags on your website. Each tag in the cloud is a link that leads to the associated content. The links are SEO-friendly because they include essential attributes such as title, rel, aria-label, and itemprop.

• rel="index, follow": This attribute instructs search engines to index the page and follow the links on the page. It helps in improving the SEO ranking of your website.
• aria-label: This attribute is used to define a string that labels the current element. It is used for accessibility purposes, helping screen readers describe what is in the tag link to their users.
• itemprop="keywords": This attribute is part of the Schema.org specifications for structured data. It helps search engines understand the content on your page, leading to better SEO performance.

Plugin Settings

When you install and activate the plugin, you’ll find its settings under the “Tools” menu in your WordPress dashboard. Here’s what each setting does:

1. Number of Items: This setting lets you control how many tags you want to display in the cloud. If you have a lot of tags but want to keep the cloud manageable and easy to read, you can limit the number here.
2. Item’s CSS: If you know a bit about web design, this setting lets you add your own CSS code to change how the tags look. For example, you could change their color, size, or spacing. You can find predesigned tags here: Styling Tags.
3. Open Item’s Link in New Tab: This setting controls what happens when someone clicks on a tag. If you choose ‘Yes’, the tagged posts will open in a new browser tab. If you choose ‘No’, the tagged posts will open in the same tab, replacing the current page.
4. Item’s Link on Hover Text: This is the text that appears when someone hovers their cursor over a tag. It’s an additional opportunity to provide information and context about the posts tagged. The plugin uses the title attribute in the HTML of the tag link, automatically inserting the tag word. This title attribute is important for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) as it provides more context to search engines about the content of the link, potentially improving your site’s search rankings.
5. Text for Aria-Label: The “Text for Aria-Label” setting is primarily aimed at improving accessibility, rather than SEO. The aria-label attribute is used to provide a label for screen readers and other assistive technologies, making your website more accessible to users with visual impairments. However, while the primary purpose of aria-label is not SEO, making your website more accessible can indirectly benefit your SEO. Search engines like Google consider user experience as a ranking factor, and a website that is accessible to all users provides a better user experience. So, while aria-label may not directly improve your SEO, the improved user experience and accessibility could have a positive impact on your site’s search engine rankings. It’s also worth noting that creating an inclusive and accessible website is a good practice beyond SEO. It ensures that all users, regardless of their abilities, can access and interact with your content.
6. Exclude Items: This setting allows you to specify certain tags that you don’t want to be displayed in the tag cloud. You can list these tags here, separated by commas, and they will be excluded from the cloud. This can be particularly useful in several scenarios. For instance, if you have some tags that are very common across your posts but don’t provide much value in terms of content differentiation, you might choose to exclude them to make the tag cloud more meaningful. Similarly, if there are tags that are not relevant to the majority of your audience or do not align with the main topics of your site, excluding them can help maintain the focus and relevance of your tag cloud. This feature gives you greater control over the content of your tag cloud, allowing you to tailor it to your specific needs and audience.
7. Disable Transients Cache: This setting is related to how the tag cloud is created on your site. If you select ‘Yes’, the tag cloud will be freshly generated each time a page on your site loads. This can ensure that your tag cloud always reflects the most recent tags. However, it might slow down the loading time of your pages, as generating the tag cloud from scratch requires processing power. If you are using a caching plugin or server caching, reloading the page won’t necessarily refresh the tags in the window, but they will be different on other pages. On the other hand, if you select ‘No’, a previously saved version of the tag cloud will be used for faster page loading. This might mean that very recent changes in your tags might not be reflected in the tag cloud immediately. This setting allows you to balance between having the most up-to-date tag cloud and maintaining optimal page loading speed. The setting should be set to ‘No’, because the transient cache is cleared when a new tag has been added to a post, a tag is excluded, or the number of displayed tags is changed. In other words, the cache is cleared automatically at relevant occasions.
8. Delete Data on Uninstall: If you ever decide to uninstall the plugin, this setting controls whether all these settings you’ve configured should be deleted as well. If you choose ‘Yes’, everything will be wiped clean. If you choose ‘No’, the settings will be saved in case you reinstall the plugin in the future.

Behind the Scenes

While you don’t need to know this to use the plugin, here’s a simplified explanation of what’s happening behind the scenes when you use the SEO Friendly Tag Cloud Widget:

• When you activate the plugin, it registers itself with WordPress and prepares to add its widget to your site.
• The plugin creates a new widget that you can add to your site from the “Appearance > Widgets” menu in your WordPress dashboard.
• When someone visits a page with the tag cloud, the plugin generates the cloud. It fetches up to 700 tags from your posts, applies the settings you’ve configured, and then displays the tags in a cloud format.
• If you’ve chosen to use caching (the ‘Disable Transients Cache’ setting is set to ‘No’), the plugin will save the generated tag cloud and use this saved version for a while to speed up page loading times.
• The plugin also listens for certain events, like when you create a new post or change the settings, and updates the saved tag cloud if necessary.

I hope this helps you understand the SEO Friendly Tag Cloud Widget plugin better! If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.