Sexy Widget

Widgets and SEO: an Example

I recently grabbed the embed code from Blog.Pmarca of Bill O'Reilly losing his cool.  I embedded the video in a Bill O'Reilly section on RateItAll.

I then noticed the following text showing up just below the embedded video (note the anchor text):

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

Curious, I did a search for "funny videos" on Google.

Lo and behold, this is what I found:

I'm guessing that owning the top spot for the query "Funny Videos" translates into high hundreds of thousands of visitors per month by itself, if not millions.

Nice work College Humor guys.  As I respect a job well done, I'll gladly throw you another link from this post.

MyBlogLog: Build out your destination site already

I was doing a little research on Yahoo Site Explorer on a widget provider that is claiming some pretty big traction (more on this later).  In the process, I did a reality check of backlinks against MyBlogLog.

MyBlogLog is showing up as having more than 3.5M backlinks.

Gulp.

If these guys would build out a destination site with some landing pages that people actually search for (as opposed to MyBlogLog profile pages), they could turn a fire hose of organic search traffic on.

This is a great example of how successful widgets can be a tremendous aide to your site's SEO / Linkdev efforts.

Interesting Phenomenon with Squidoo

An interesting thing that I've noticed recently via site submissions to RateItAll's various directories is an increase in folks submitting Squidoo lenses.

So Squidoo users are doing linkdev for Squidoo.

While there are pluses and minuses associated with building a service that appeals to the SEO crowd, the fact that your users are out seeking links for your site would definitely fall into the "plus" side.

MySpace, Outbound Links, and SEO

I've heard some whispers that the SEO crowd may be finding ways to get around MySpace's deactivation of outbound links in widgets.

If you read one SEO post this year...

... read the one linked to below.  Todd Malicoat, aka Stuntdubl, has put together the best collection of content and link building resources that I've seen on the Web.

Widgets and SEO

Widgets and SEO is a big topic, and one that is deserving of a full post one of these days.

In the meantime, check out my friend Stefan Juhl's excellent overview of how to maximize inbound link clout from your widget.