Blogging tips, tricks and tools – make money blogging

One of the easiest ways to get additional backlinks for any website or blog is to include social bookmarking icons on the page. Doing this allows your visitors to directly bookmark your site if they are interested. Each time your site is bookmarked you are effectively given a free backlink to improve your position in search engines.

If you saw my Best wordpress plugins post, you will see that I recommend the use of the ‘Sociable’ social bookmarking plugin available from Yoast.com

The reason I particularly love this plugin is because it currently offers a staggering 95 social bookmarking sites to choose from. As you can see at the bottom of this post, I only use a small selection of these. It’s also extremely easy to use and allows you to use your own icons if you wish.

But there were a couple of things that I wanted to change after I first installed it. To see the plugin in it’s original form take a look at http://seo.sophisticated-woman.com. As you can see, the graphics are much smaller than the ones I have used here AND they are opaque until you hover over them. I wanted to make them stand out more so I made a couple of changes to templates.

The first template change removed the opacity of the icons. First of all I went to “Appearance>Editor” in the left hand panel of the wordpress dashboard and selected “Style.css” from the right hand panel. I then added the following code to the bottom of the style.css template before clicking the update file button underneath the editor field.

.sociable-hovers {
opacity: 1.0 !important;
-moz-opacity: 1.0 !important;
filter: alpha(opacity=100) !important;
}

Then, to increase the size of the graphics I went to the plugins page. In the list of installed plugins I located the sociable plugin and clicked the edit link beneath it. This takes you to the template pages for the plugin. In the right hand panel click ’sociable.css’ and search for the code below. The easiest way to find this code is to click your mouse inside the editor window then click ‘ctrl f’. This will cause a dialogue box to appear (in IE) or a search bar at the bottom (in Firefox). Simply type img in the search field and click find next to find instances of the text within the editor window.

.sociable img {
float: none;
width: 16px;
height: 16px;
border: 0;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

When you find this code replace the ‘16px’ in the width and height lines with whatever icon size you want to use. This blog uses 48px. Please note that if you increase the size without replacing the icons you will lose image quality on the icons and end up with grainy looking graphics.

The sociable plugin uses png files for icons. To change the icons used find the icons you want to use, make sure the icons are the same file type (png) and are named exactly the same as the existing ones in the wp-content/plugins/sociable/images/ folder. Upload those images to your hosting package then access the plugin settings in your wordpresdashboard. To do this click the settings link in the left hand panel then the sociable link from the submenu. On the settings page scroll down until you find the section on ‘image directory’ then enter the full URL to the directory where you placed the replacement images. Eg. http://www.mysite.com/images. Then save the settings. In future the plugin will use that directory for it’s icons.

Please note that the replacement icons shouldn’t be uploaded into the same directory that the plugin uses by default. If you do this then your changes will be erased the next time you update the plugin. This can be a real nuisance so it’s easier to keep the images in a separate folder.

Also, in the settings for the plugin I always check the ‘use target=blank’ box to make sure that the bookmark site is opened on a separate page so that visitors do not get taken away from my site.

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