Blogger: Social Bookmarking Widget – Link Baiting

I promised Hong Yi’s mum that I would write a social bookmarking widget for her blog on Google‘s Blogger so I’ve spent part of my valentine’s day writing this widget for her.

The purpose of utilising social bookmarking widgets is to allow you to expand your reach of readership to literally hundred and thousands to millions of readers on these social bookmarking websites. Therefore, you are not limited to your normal direct traffic, existing referrals traffic and organic traffic but if I may use a SEO term, using ‘link baiting’ to bait readers in an ocean of readers to your website in the hopes of driving traffic, increasing visibility and branding, and ultimately getting links to your website.

One of the most important SEO aspects is link building or in other words, to increase the amount of links to your website. It creates authority, trust and relevancy to your website, thus improving your organic rankings on the search engine results page (SERP). You can also read my post on how to optimise your page.

Of course it is important to remember that before you submit your own articles, make sure that you write well, have a very attractive and optimised title, and a great first paragraph. In addition, write about what people would love to read about, things that are useful, relevant and informative to them. Never submit articles that are too “salesy” in nature and obviously useless information to the general public (i.e. how you’re emo-ing about the rainy weather).

Include pictures, videos and space out your paragraphs. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing a screen full of words bunched up together.

Social Bookmarking Widget

I’ve only created this widget to include some of my favourite social bookmarking websites. Feel free to modify the code and stylesheet to your preference.

Here’s a screenshot of what the widget should look like once implemented (highlighted in yellow). You can visit my old blog to see how it looks like (make sure you turn off javascript or else you’ll be redirected back here).

Before you do anything to the Blogger template, please make sure you that save a backup before making any changes!
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