At WebmasterWorld Pubcon in Las Vegas last November, Lawrence Coborn who runs Sexy Widget as well as RateitAll.com, made quite a splash with his presentation on marketing with widgets. We interviewed Lawrence Coborn here on OMB late last year.
Since then, many marketers have been paying more attention to marketing blogs with widgets such as via the Flickr image tool, the Swicki search tool and the MyBlogLog widget in the right sidebar of this blog.
Here is a an example of a new blog widget for Online Marketing Blog, or blidget from Widgetbox that makes a widget out of the content of your blog.
Clever and useful widgets can get very viral as has been the case with MyBlogLog. However, most widgets are made with JavaScript, Flash and or Ajax and links embedded within that code are not crawled by search engine bots. As a result, there’s a viral benefit to the widget but not a direct SEO benefit.
Widget developers should consider enabling a crawlable text link within the widget so search engines can find and crawl the link to the author site. We’ve done this with the RSS Button maker as well as the Social Bookmarks creator, which have resulted in 100,000+ crawlable links to this blog.
What are some creative widgets that you’ve created or found for promoting your blog? Do you think 2007 is the year of the widget as some have proclaimed?
