Are you strategically using keywords in your blog posts? Do you know the words you use most on your blog?
In a cool tool called Wordle, you can find out exactly what words you emphasize in your content by creating a word cloud. This can be revealing and enlightening to demonstrate the keywords that you are actually using and for which you might show up in search engine results.
Here's the Wordle for this site:
Even though I write about "visibility" a lot, it's interesting to see that it's not a dominant word.
Here's how Wordle describes their "toy":
Wordle is 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.
Creating a Wordle is super easy. Paste your blog URL into the correct field and click "Submit." A cool alterntive is creating a Wordle from a specific set of words. I can see doing this to create an image to promote a product, book, services and featuring words that convey the emotions, benefits and features.
Regardless of how you use it, Wordle is a fun tool to play with (you can tweak the colors, fonts, and layout) to discover the primary words you use on your blog or to create a specific message.
If you create a Wordle, post a link in the comments so we can check it out!
Marcie_Hill
This is great. I have never heard of this, but it will be on my list of tools to use.
DeniseWakeman
I like your Wordle, Carla, it speaks to me!
DeniseWakeman
Good idea to pull a category feed…thanks for that tip, Kim.
DeniseWakeman
Nice Wordle…like the colors and seems like it gets your primary keywords highlighted.
Stephanie LH Calahan
Denise –
Pretty cool tool. I’m shocked at how fast it processes. I agree with Cheryl and Sandi — The one it created for me was most definitely based on my most recent post.
I decided to try it out on my twitter stream this
Then I did the same for my Facebook page and realized I’m missing out big time on SEO b/c when I post linking to my content I’m not using keywords much at all! (Bad Stephanie)
Thanks for the eye opener.
To your success!
Stephanie
DeniseWakeman
Good tactic, Stephanie. This where this tool can be helpful. I’m going to check out my facebook page now, too.
SandiThompson
I agree with Cheryl’s observation. My latest blog post is from a guest blogger named Bernie Burson. The word Bernie was one that showed up in the wordle. I’ve included it here, but it is teeny-tiny and looks like a cockroach!
DeniseWakeman
Sandi, it looks like your Wordle truly reflects your business!
Anonymous
I wonder if it weighs your most recent stuff more heavily. It showed that I use the word “vanilla” as much as business which is far from true. Granted, I used vanilla several times in today’s post, but never before today. Still fun to play with 🙂
DeniseWakeman
Good point, Cheryl. My recent posts have been about list building and content and those are the words most heavily weighted. I wonder how much content they actually process to create the word cloud.