John Shehata - Marketing Strategist

The main goal for widgets, so far, is its viral effect in increasing traffic. But with the recent Facebook.com updates (allowing spiders to their members profile pages) and the increased use of widgets on social networks, it is important to build SEO friendly widgets. In other words to utilize widgets in link building. if you are going to have a Widget, you should get some SEO link benefit out of it, in addition to its viral benefit.

To discuss how we can use widgets for SEO benefits, let’s dissect widgets into 3 main parts; header, footer and body.

1- Header/Title:
- Link the title to your search results page (this page should display all related search results for the widget title “SEO Jobs in CA” or link back to the most relevant category level page.
- Make the link hard coded and not a part of your javascript code.
- Allow users to generate their own titles for your widget. You will be surprised how many good keywords you will get into your backlinks. (Indeed uses users’ terms and location to create the widget titles)

2- Body:
- The body should include your updated items list linking back to your deep pages (product level pages). Most developers use JavaScript, AJAX or flash to deliver these syndicated links. Using the previous technologies will not display these links in the rendered source code, and hence these links are not crawled by search engine bots.
- If you can develop this section to display the links into the rendered source code, this will add a slight SEO benefit to your site (Increasing the number of backlinks).
- These links, even if displayed in the source code, won’t contribute much to your link building efforts as they supposedly get updated frequently so they won’t be valued as high equity external links. When search engines evaluate external links, they value the age of links; the older the better.

3- Footer:
- Use it for branding; include your URL or your Site Brand in it and link it back to your home page.
- You can add couple of links below the brand, but don’t be excessive. 2 links are enough. These links should entice the user to click for more (More SEO Jobs or More Jobs in Los Angeles, CA)

* NOSCRIPT: use noscript tag to link back to your home page using the most generic relevant keyword. (Indeed uses Jobs for example)