How to place Social Bookmarking on my Website

How to place Social Bookmarking on a WebSite

Website Administrator Quick Tips

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is currently a very commonplace method of adding quick website links into your website pages that allows your visitors to share your pages with their friends etc. This method also encourage more traffic to your website which may never have found it's way there otherwise.

Or perhaps you would like just the simple facebook like button instead. We show how simple it is to add like in our 3 easy ways on How to add a facebook Like button to your web pages. Else continue on with this page and learn how to add many, many social bookmark icons to your page. We have listed a small sample of the social networks available in our buttons above.

Especially in a small or localized community, social bookmarking can be a very effective tool.

Bookmarks of the Social variety has not gone unnoticed by the larger business sector, probably due to it's nature which can be likened to a grass-roots network. Word of mouth is one of the best ways to get something known and this is the cyber version of it. And some of the most interesting of things can be well hidden on the internet (Not all pages are indexed by the search engines, this is especially more noticable if you use Bing, they tend to drop indexed pages from their list very quickly. If you want lots and lots of choices, Google is still King by a long shot). So bookmarking is one of the great services put forward by the ever evolving social networks.

Large businesses do target social bookmark groups with the aim of capturing the largest slice possible of any market share. Many currently hire social network savvy staff to help tap into this market to help fill their coffers as fast as possible. For the smaller businesses, the amount of time needed to create the link for each of these networks can swiftly add up to too much and so they can miss on a lot of incidental business income. Anyone who has a small business or an idea that can make more than a hundred bucks a year with the help of a bit of internet exposure could take advantage of the 10 year website deal we offer, and siphon some of this away from greedy corporates.

But if you wanted to do this for yourself, there is hope for you yet...

The smaller blogger and business with no spare tech staff can now also easily add this word-of-mouth medium swiftly and effectively to his site. There are a few free online tools that can help with this. Google is the master of search tools and a quick search for bookmarking tools can give you some great free packages you can download, or use online that can help you to add your very own social bookmarking links on your website.

To show you how simple this can be, let's visit a site like say bookmarkcraze.com. And a quick little tweak of the resulting code gives you a fast array of social booking links on your site for the any page you would like to share.

There are a few sites which offer an online service, i have selected this site to demonstrate for you as it has current social bookmarking code and a large selection for you to choose from.

In this example site, you can either hot link the icons directly (this means the icons don't need to be uploaded to your website first, they are loaded directly from that website), or you have the option of downloading a zip so that you can the upload the icons to your website. If you chose to server the icons from your own website, it is recommended you make a separate folder for icon type images on your website if you haven't already done so. I personally would prefer to host the icons on my own website, so i would make this my first step and download / unzip / upload the social bookmarking icons to their own special folder [eg. /soc/] at my hosted website address. This means we can begin to fill out the form on the website to generate our html code.

Now we can add the full path to your icons folder as requested:

http://www.websiteadministrator.com.au/images/soc/

Copy/paste the URL (or type it in) which is of course the location of the page we would like to share:

http://www.websiteadministrator.com.au/articles/How-to-put-Social-Bookmarking-on-my-Website.html

Then add the title of our page:

How to place Social Bookmarking on a WebSite

And we are nearly done.

You can add individual bookmark types or select from a predefined group - which is a great feature this site has. Let's do that and choose the most popular group to make this simple and quick. Click in the code box and there you have it, a bunch of copy / paste code you can the place into your website html which then makes the page social bookmark friendly.

The raw code is fine for most, but i would rather tweak the code a little.

note: if you prefer serving the icons from your site, the current auto-generated code assumes you have placed the icons in a /bmc/ sub folder, so you may need to edit this out or create that sub folder and move your icons into it, this might be a small inconvenience for some. I would just search-replace it out in a few seconds. You don't have this issue if you don't check the i want to host my own icons box.

The only real code tweak i would strongly recommend is to add "no follow" to all these new links except the very last one, you should give credit to where-ever credit is due (and perhaps even add a little extra blank space between the bookmarking icons... ).

At the start of each new line of bookmark code, you would simply replace this part of the code:

<a href="http://

with

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://

Upload it and that is it. You're done.

Here's how social you can now get...

As a final reflecting thought, i would be inclined to drop technorati and twitter icon links. Technorati doesnt really like to share and this twitter method, though simple, better and less invasive than twitter's own button links, it does pass the user name and password to another. You will see if you click the link. And using the official twitter button is also drag on your webpage load time (which drops your google rating) so is really not worth bothering with at this writing Also, it is almost guarenteed that any twit-ter user will also have at least one of these other social network links to share your pages with. You will note on my other pages i dont use these two icons and have swapped them out for Linked-in and NewsVine instead. (I also prefer a different method for displaying the icons but decided i should keep this pretty simple for you guys getting started by using this page).

fin.