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8. Adding Social Bookmarking Functionality

Social bookmarking web sites allow users to bookmark and tag content with keywords and commentary.

The aggregate of this information is used both to cite popular content within certain timeframes and

niches, as well as by query. Popular content may be featured on the home page of such a site or ranked

well for relevant keywords. Adding icons and buttons to web pages that facilitate the process of book-

marking will likely increase the number of users who bookmark your content.

Social bookmarking is discussed in Chapter 7, “Web Feeds and Social Bookmarking.”

9. Starting a Blog and/or Forum

Blogs and forums both may attract traffic and links in droves if approached correctly. Bloggers readily

exchange links amongst themselves, and a blog may also afford a company a more casual place to post

less mundane, fun content. Whereas a humorous comment would not fit in a corporate site proper, it may

be more appropriate for a blog. Blogs work quite well in harmony with social bookmarking functionality.

Forums, once they gain momentum, also attract many links. The trick to a forum is building such momen-

tum. Once started, much of the content is generated by the users. If a web site does not already have many

thousands of unique visitors per day, though, a forum is most likely not going to be a success.

Chapter 16, “: Creating an SE-Friendly Blog,” shows you how to install and optimize

, a popular PHP-based blog application.

10. Dealing with a Pure Flash or AJAX Site

Flash sites present many problems from a search engine optimization perspective. There is really no way

to approach this problem, except to design a site that replaces or supplements the Flash design that is

not

Flash-based. There are other less onerous “solutions,” but they are less than ideal.

Flash sites are discussed in Chapter 6, “SE-Friendly HTML and JavaScript.”

11. Preventing Black Hat Victimization

Black hat SEOs are always on the lookout for places to inject links, JavaScript redirects, and spam

content. Properly sanitizing and/or escaping foreign data can prevent or mitigate such attacks. Where

links are appropriate to post, if they are unaudited, they should be “nofollowed.” Known, problematic

anonymous proxies should be blocked. Vulnerabilities to such attacks are typically found in comments,

guestbooks, and forums.

This material is covered in detail in Chapter 8, “Black Hat SEO.”

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Chapter 15: Site Clinic: So You Have a Web Site?

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