Web Widgets – A Great Way to Get Links

December 14, 2006 @ 12:18 am · Filed under General Web Publishing, Increasing Traffic, Link Building

One of my favorite sessions at PubCon was Viral and WOMM Marketing Management. All the speakers were good, but I found Lawrence Coburn’s talk about web widgets particularly interesting. A widget is a small piece of code that can be placed onto a website that will provide some kind of functionality to the users of a site. Some example of popular widgets is the embedded YouTube player that you see on countless blogs, or StatCounter. For some more examples of widgets see Steve Rubel’s blog post.

One reason web widgets are good for publishers is because they are a great way to build links. The HTML for the widget almost always includes a link back to the site of the widget creator. This can be a very powerful source of links. Statcounter.com, for example, has over 50 million backlinks, according to Yahoo. This is because whenever someone uses a counter widget from StatCounter.com, they get a backlink. StatCounter.com is the number one result for “web tracker”, “hit counter” and “web stats” on Google.

One great piece of advice that Lawrence gave during his talk was rotating the text of the link back to your site. Having identical text in your links doesn’t look very natural to search engines, so rotating the text that is displayed can help with rankings. It also allows you to target different keyword phrases. Another good idea is to provide links to different pages of your site, not just the home page. Again this is something that looks more natural to the search engines.

Web Widget Resources

Lawrence has a blog about widgets called Sexy Widgets.

One interesting service is, MuseStorm, which provides tools for building widgets. However, as far as I can tell, a widget built with MuseStorm do not contain links back to your site. Update: It appears that publishers can have links back to their own sites using MuseStorm.

3 Comments

  1. Ori (MuseStorm) Said,

    December 15, 2006 @ 12:27 pm

    Hi,
    small correction – widgets produces using the MuseStorm publisher service (now in closed beta) contain multiple links back to the publisher website. Some of these links are part of the dynamic content displayed on the widgets, some are configurable by the publisher.

  2. Toivo Lainevool Said,

    December 15, 2006 @ 12:29 pm

    Ori, thanks for the update. I’ll fix the original post.

  3. Tracker Web Publisher Said,

    March 12, 2008 @ 11:46 am

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