[Post inspired by Hamlet Batista]

Remember those days where all the websites had a tag cloud? It was completely useless. Word clouds were an ineffective way for users to discover new content. They are extinct now.

There was one thing you can’t deny: they looked cool. So why do we want to bring them back? Word cloud might not be functional, but the code to generate them has some value.

Instead of using your site categories as a data source, let’s use your sitemap. We can pull all your links, extract the titles, and count how many word occurrences.

In the script below I’ve used WordCloud and Matplotlib python libraries.

Replace the “site” variable with your own sitemap’s URL. Below is the results for my blog:

This is one step forward to optimize your titles around keywords. The script is using Pandas to count words, but if you can pull all the transactions for each link, you can build a cloud of the most used words in the top converting titles.

Leo Celis