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Sunday, November 16, 2008

AddThis Social Bookmark Widget for Open Web Award


I have been a strong advocate of the AddThis widget to ease social bookmarking since I first spotted it in September of 2006 and did an emailed interview of co-founder Dom Vonarburg here at RealitySEO.

Since then, it has spread like wildfire to major media sites like Time.com, CBS, ABC and a long list of web publishers that needed a scalable way to do link building. As you can see from this blog, I use it here at the foot of every post.

For me, the single AddThis dropdown widget has always been preferable to what I've heard called "Iconistan" - where sites show a collection of up to a dozen social bookmarking site icons on every article page.

This single tiny social bookmarking widget allows visitors to any site where it is used to bookmark the landing page easily at up to 39 social bookmarking services.

Here is an example inline so you can view details by hovering as you read.



Since the beginning, AddThis has offered publishers new tools, like branding the popup window which results if users choose the "more" option on the dropdown, customization of the sites shown in that dropdown, and tracking for publishers of how many times the widget is used by visitors and for which bookmarking services.

AddThis has constantly added new services to the pop-up as they have become popular and this makes it easier on publishers to keep up with the ever-evolving world of social media. The single tool gives you access to 39 social media sites in a single widget and adds trackability.

AddThis is the perfect win-win - ease of access to social bookmarking sites for users and trackability and link building scalability for publishers. Recently AddThis was acquired by ClearSpring and those added resources and reach will no doubt allow improvement of the tool.

I was happy to see that AddThis has been nominated for the Mashable Open Web Awards and, as a big fan of widgets, I want to make it possible for readers to vote using the widget below. Simply enter your email address and you'll receive a follow-up email from Mashable to confirm your vote.

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Sunday, September 23, 2007

SEO & New Traffic Generation Tool for Bloggers


Every once in awhile a new tool emerges intended to increase visibility and traffic. I've discovered a tool that may help bring privacy to more bloggers and those involved in building the technologies of the web.

It's called BlogRush and works on the principle of the old banner exchange model - but this one operates with an embeddable widget. The more times you display the BlogRush widget, the more "credits" you get for your posts being displayed within the widgets of other members of the BlogRush Network. The concept is extended beyond simple one-to-one numbers as those who get their widgets from you, then expose your widget to their own audience and you gain more credits for display of your post headlines across the network on all bloggers using the widget. It seems like the model will overextend itself at some point unless growth is phenomenal and sustained over time.

Nevertheless, I'm happy to try it out and see if the model works for extending the SEO conversation through the world of influential bloggers. Take the BlogRush widget you see to the right on this blog and see how it works for you to increase the visibility of your most important topic. If your topic involves SEO at all - try out our SEO Guru Search Engine which draws ONLY from authoritative SEO sources via the Google Custom Search Engine and if you like that one, try out the SEO Job Search Engine.

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