Heuristics can be used to reduce the size of the tag cloud whether or not the purpose is to cluster the tags.

Tag cloud visual taxonomy is determined by a number of attributes: tag ordering rule (e.g. alphabetically, by importance, by context, randomly, ordered for visual quality), shape of the entire cloud (e.g. rectangular, circle, given map borders), shape of tag bounds (rectangle, or character body), tag rotation (none, free, limited), vertical tag alignment (sticking to typographical baselines,