A tag cloud and tag pages are a blogger’s secret weapon. I can’t believe how few bloggers do this. I’m not talking about Technorati tags, although those are useful too. I’m talking about using a plugin like Ultimate Tag Warrior, which is exactly the plug-in I installed to create tag pages like this one.

So now, if I want to target a new search term in the search engines, I just start tagging some posts with that search term and, presto!, I’ve got text links everywhere pointing to this new tag page (notice I’ve put a tag cloud globally at the bottom of every page so such links are ubiquitous throughout my blog). And of course I made sure the tag name is mentioned at the beginning of the title tag and in the body copy! I’m going to further optimize the tag pages by adding some keyword-rich intro copy to each tag page, but I haven’t gotten to that yet.