Adding Social Bookmarks To Wordpress Posts

The concept of storing and organizing bookmarks online has been around close to ten years. The idea started with a simple concept of putting bookmarks online that could be accessed from remote locations. In summer of 2003, the current Social Bookmark King, del.icio.us opened. This new bookmarking phenomenon has grown into a very popular way to locate, share, classify, and rank a website’s content. Ranking happens when a visitor tags a website’s content or post, which in return gives it a slight boost on the Social Bookmark network.

The advantage to Social Bookmarking is surfers tag or rank websites. This allows the Social Bookmark sites to offer a unique listing of sites, all content rich, and all tagged as relevant by actual viewers of the site. As one produces a more content rich website the Social Bookmark Networks will send targeted visitors.

Once inside the Social Bookmark world many realize that many bookmarks contain adult themes, which is good news for us! Beyond adult there are many different businesses, financial and technical info, hobbies, cooking, anything one can think of. There are many different Social Bookmark sites, however only a handful have a decent PR rank with an Alexa ranking, however some of the sub-niches of the Social Bookmark network probably contain a strong-targeted visitor base. When researching Social Bookmark sites there are certain things to note including: listings contain good content, the categories for of the site actually have people bookmarking and finally skip sites that are littered with advertisements.

The table below lists some of the more popular Social Bookmark Sites with the current PR rank and an Alexa Ranking.

.	Social Site	Alexa	PR	.	Social Site	Alexa	PR
	yahoo.com	1	7		digg.com	89	8
	del.icio.us	149	8		earthlink.net	218	6
	technorati.com	220	8		reddit.com	960	7
	furl.net	2,353	8		newsvine.com	3,029	7
	blinklist.com	3,296	6		ma.gnolia.com	8,435	7
	spurl.net	10,762	7		shadows.com	13,571	7
	simpy.com	14,219	7		onlywire.com	16,213	6
	blinkbits.com	19,651	6		netvouz.com	24,237	7
	rawsugar.com	25,133	6		scuttle.org	39,602	6
	feedmelinks.com	40,437	5		gravee.com	41,654	5
	citeulike.org	49,398	7		connotea.org	48,832	7

 

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Having a Social Bookmark link allows visitors to rate the relevancy of blog posts or any content area that frequently updates. By adding the tag links to posts visitors will quickly be able to tag the ones they find informative and relevant and thus they end up sharing their new find with the rest of the world. Depending on the website’s content and how often it updates can possibly earn the owner a free hardlink from a popular site. Some webmasters scour Social Bookmark sites for interesting sites or posts that they can write about and link to from their own sites, which can increase traffic and backlinks.

The following will explain how to add a Social Bookmark within a blog or archived posts: The site used is del.icio.us, so take a few moments to create an account and surf the site to get a feel for it.

Now on to adding a del.icio.us tag into a Wordpress2 Blog. We will be editing two files from an active wordpress theme, the index.php file and archive.php. Either through WP Admin or FTP, open the files/directory for an active theme.

Normally found in: /wp-content/themes/YourTheme/
Example done from: /wp-content/themes/default/

Download the index.php and archive.php files, open the index.php file in a text editior. In my default theme it’s line 17, it says Posted in..” The entire line has been posted below. We will be adding some simple html to this line.

The full line from the index.php file:
<p class=”postmetadata”>Posted in <?php the_category(’, ‘) ?> | <?php edit_post_link(’Edit’, ”, ‘ | ‘); ?> ADD-HERE <?php comments_popup_link(’No Comments »’, ‘1 Comment »’, ‘% Comments »’); ?></p>>

The html we will be adding: (yeah, that big’ol line)
Post to: <A xhref=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>”>del.icio.us</A>

What it looks like combinded together.
<p class=”postmetadata”>Posted in <?php the_category(’, ‘) ?> | <?php edit_post_link(’Edit’, ”, ‘ | ‘); ?> Post to: <A xhref=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>”>del.icio.us</A> | <?php comments_popup_link(’No Comments »’, ‘1 Comment »’, ‘% Comments »’); ?></p>

This line will read:
Posted in BlahCategory | edit if admin | Post to: del.icio.us | No Comments

 

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It’s as simple as that. Now do the same thing to the archive.php file. The Posted in… line is half way down the file, about line 46. Backup the old index.php and archive.php files, upload the new copies, and test the links for del.icio.us at the bottom of your posts.

You can also use a Social Bookmark Wordpress Plugin to add Social Bookmark buttons and links to a blog. I picked up a copy of TwisterMc’s Social Bookmark Creator and gave it a quick test run. And as expected it worked and it doesn’t clutter up the site. Wp-plugins.net also offers a plugin page for Social Bookmarks or use this free Social Bookmark Link Creator.

This information should give you a good start on Social Bookmarking. From here you can read the 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization, - SMO - It’s more like 16 rules but it is packed with a ton of great information to better help you understand how to build a social bookmark network and drive more traffic to your blog.

Hope you enjoyed the tutorial ~ TheDoc