How To Let Blog Visitors Social Bookmark Your Page

Is your blogger gaining in popularity? Have your happy readers help you back!

Do you have comments thanking you for your help? Great time to let commenters know that they can bookmark the page with their favorite bookmarking services. Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon are some of my favorites.

I have been using Onlywire bookmarking button on some of my blogs. This button is a bit overwhelmingly complicated so I decided to standardize on AddThis.com for my blogs. AddThis claim to be the one of the most popular bookmarking and sharing service on the net. I'm sure you must have seen their button in many places.

You will see the AddThis button on the bottom of this post. To see if this is something you want to add to your blog, try it out right now!

Locate the Bookmark button on the bottom of this post, hover over it, and select your favorite bookmarking service. Click! It is not as simple as bookmarking with your browser, is it!

However, it works and it will increase the visibility of your blog, both through referrals and through higher search engine rankings.

AddThis has made it very simple to include their bottom in various publishing media. Login or register at AddThis.com. For blogger, you will have two options.

First, include AddThis button as an element in your sidebar. That one is straightforward and highly automatized as you will see.

I recommend the second option. Here, add AddThis button on the bottom of each of your blog posts. To do so, you must add the button script as directed. To find the place they refer you to in your blogger template, go to Customize/Layout/Edit Html. You must select "Expand Widgets Templates". Use Ctrl-F or find to locate the <div class='post-footer'> tag as directed by AddThis. Insert the code.

You're done!

From now on just gently remind your happy commenters to bookmark the page they found useful.

What do you say? What bookmarking service do you use on your blog? Have you seen increase in traffic since you have implemented it? Have you seen referrals from social bookmarking sites? Let me know, please comment below!

A Surprising Way to Get Dofollow, High PR Backlinks from Technorati

I was just telling you about signing up for Google Webmaster Central. The main purpose was to find out more about which links to your blog Google deems to be high quality. I was surprised to find a technorati.com backlink there. It was pointing to a specific post of my blog! A deep-linked, dofollow, possibly high Page Rank backling from a trusted Page Rank 9 site! Nice find!

How did that link end up on Technorati? Simple. As a member of Technorati, my blog is regularly scanned by Technorati. Whenever I link to another blog that is also a member, that blogs ?reactions page gets updated with a direct, dofollow, possibly high PR (up to 6) backlink to my page. Technorati also extracts the text from my post around the reference. The reactions page looks like this:


http://technorati.com/blogs/echoesofwisdom.blogspot.com?reactions

Here's what Technorati says about Blog Reactions. The blurb also explains what Technorati Authority is:

What Are Blog Reactions?

Technorati defines Blog Reactions as the number of links to the blog's home page or its posts from other blogs in the Technorati index. A subset of blog reactions, Technorati Authority is the number of unique blogs linking to this blog over the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has. To see reactions to specific posts, you can find them listed on Technorati post pages.

Translation: Blog Reactions are Technorati version of Backlinks for Technorati member blogs only.
And the Technorati Authority is akin to Google PR, again for Technorati member blogs only.

How can you take advantage of the high PR, dofollow Technorati links? Well first, go ahead and register and authenticate your blogger with Technorati right away. While you are there, you can find dofolowcool.blogspot.com and favorite it ;) Also, write a short description and the most important tags for your blog. And, on the same page, you will see code to a Technorati favorite link widget that you want to place on your blog. That way, you will score favorite points on Technorati, and Technorati will possibly get a new blog-member. Not sure yet how being a favorite will help you. A good question for another post.

When you are writing a new post, do not link to Technorati member blog posts just for a sake of getting a Technorati dofollow backlink. However, if you are looking to refer to a blog post with specific information that is widely available you may want to search Technorati blogs first. I did that today when posting about the free image manipulation program Gimp for Windows.

Why Register Your Blog with Google?

The main reason why you want to sign up with Google Webmaster Central is to find out what backlinks are pointing to your blog. Especially which are the backlinks to your blog that Google values.

You will get the most comprehensive list of backlinks to your site through Yahoo by using Yahoo Search  link:yoursite.blogspot.com  feature which takes you to Yahoo site explorer like this: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdofollowcool.blogspot.com&bwm=i&bwmf=u&bwms=p&fr=moz35&fr2=seo-rd-se .You can see the comprehensive list of backlinks there. However, most of the search traffic comes from Google and you do want to know which of these links are valued by Google. Dofollow is only one of the qualities of a link Google is looking for.

When you try the same link: search at google.com, you will see that Google hides most of the backlinks jealously. You will find many more links through yahoo search.

So to get a bit closer to understanding what backlinks Google appreciates, sign up with Google Webmaster Central. Choose the META TAG authentication for your blog as the file upload version will not work with your blogspot blog. Then check up on your backlinks. Here are the current stats for a site that shows you how your parking ticket pays for itself:

Yahoo Siteexplorer: Pages: 38, Inlinks:174
Google Search Link: 5 sites linking in
Google Webmaster Central: 88 links to your site.

You see, not all links are created equal in Google's mind. Google is a jealous god. Backlinks play an important role with Google. However, you will need to work just a little bit harder to find out which backlinks really count for Google. Sign up for Google Webmaster Central. There is other very useful information there. I'll let you discover it on your own. In my next post I'll tell you my discovery.

How To Make Your Craigslist Links Dofollow?

Here's a neat trick to get your Craigslist Ads to Follow!

Craigslist allows you to use links with anchor text in the posts. Normally, these links will be nofollow.

When you edit the post, however, you can delete the "no" from "nofollow" in your links, repost, and the links will stay follow!

Craigslist gone Dofollow!