Social Networking Optimization (SNO) for your blog posts and articles

In this post, we will explore some tips and tricks to improve the search relevancy and page ranking for your custom blog content, such as posts and articles in your series.  This is one article in an ever-growing series : Blogging 101 : Behind the Scenes at SlingAlibi.com. The goal of this series is to provide a step by step guide that you can use as a checklist to host your own website with a customized blog engine.

1. For Microsoft employees, if you have opted to create an indie blog, beyond MSDN, then it’s a good idea to post teasers on MSDN that link to your primary blog engine. That way you can take advantage of the traffice that MSDN attracts, while still maintaining the autonomy of a custom blog engine.
2. Set up an account on FriendFeed. Link your blog, twitter, Facebook together. The Facebook Add-In will automatically pull in any friends you have on Facebook. Keep in mind, FriendFeed will notify your friends that you added them.  I only realized they were notified when I got some thank you mails.
3. If you are a female blogger, you’ll want to sign up on Blogher.
4. Probably I am on my chicklet honeymoon phase, yet I like the idea of tending garden. So I have opted to be completely transparent on my subscriber base both on Twitter and RSS and plugged in these two chickies into my HTML Header.  This was screesnhot at 8/29/09 which means it’s exactly been a week since I bought the domain, and exactly 2 days since I got it working on 8/27/09. I am curious to see how readership grows and will be happy to share best practices as I learn them. Here is the code to create the chickies:

      1: <script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" 

      2: src="http://twittercounter.com/embed/?username=slingalibi&style=bird">

      3: </script>

      4: <p><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/SlingAlibi">

      5: <img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/SlingAlibi?bg=99CCFF&amp;fg=444444&amp;anim=0" 

      6: height="26" width="88" style="border:0" alt="" /></a></p>

      7:       

5. Using memes. I have heard mixed reactions on this one. I’m not sure if’s a good idea or not, but I am going to try a ReTweet button (or a ReTweet chicklet) on a trial basis.  Here is the code I used for the ReTweet button at the top of the page. Replace <URL> with your own blog post URL.

      1: <a href="http://api.tweetmeme.com/share?url=<url>">

      2: <img src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=<url>"

      3:  height="61" width="51" /></a>

6. One chicklet that I enjoy is the TweetMeme buttonwhich you see in green at the top of this post. You can use it in web pages, RSS feeds, and even emails. It allows people to quickly spread word of your content through Twitter by direct linking to their Twitter account directly from the content itself.