How To Manually Add Social Bookmarking Links

Social bookmarking is a big a deal, and with good reason. If you can get to the front page of any of these sites, then you’re all but guaranteed to get a huge influx of traffic. However, to get one of your posts to the front you have to get readers to vote for it, and what better way to encourage voting than to provide a link right on your website or blog.

What Are My Options?

There are basically two ways you can add these links to your website, manually code them into your template or use a plugin. Two of the more popular social bookmarking plugins are Gregarious and AddThis. These are both great plugins and offer links to the most popular social bookmarking sites.

Generally, plugins are very easy to install and quick to set up, however they can also add significant time to your overall page load. This is one of the reasons I chose to manually add these links to my template instead of using a plugin.

Manually editing your template doesn’t have to be scary and usually, with some proper guidance, can be very easy. The most important thing to remember is to make a back up of the file your are editing, that way if you mess it up beyond repair you can just simply replace the file you messed up with your working backup and all is back to normal.

Choose Your Social Bookmarking Links

Alright, let’s get to it. The first step is to decide which social bookmarking site you want to provide submission links to. As a rule of thumb I would keep this list to under five. Any more than that and your site might start to look cluttered. I chose Digg, Stumble, Del.icio.us and Technorati because they’re popular and because of personal preference. You can use these or pick the ones that will give your readers the most benefit.

Choose Where To Put Them

The next step is to decide where you want to put these links. This is the part where you will want to make a backup of the files your editing. In my case, I chose to put the links at the bottom of my posts, right next to the links for comments and the permalink. To do this I will need to edit two files, the “Main Index” and “Single Page” templates (yours might have a slightly different name).

You can start with either file, as “The Loop” portion of these files should be virtually identical. Once you’ve got one working we’ll just copy the new code to the other file in the same location. I’m going to start with the “Main Index” template (because it’s first in the list).

The first thing you need to do is locate your Loop. Below is a simplified version of “The Loop”, yours may or may not have additional coding. I have marked the beginning, middle and end of “The Loop” as well as where to add your social bookmarking links so they appear at the bottom or each of your posts. You may have to experiment a little depending upon any additional code you have in your Loop.

<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?> <=Begin Loop

<?php the_content(''); ?> <=Your Posts

### Put Social Bookmark Links Here ###

<?php endwhile; else: ?> <=End Loop
<p><?php _e('Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.'); ?></p>
<?php endif; ?>

So What’s The Code

Now that we’ve picked the Social Bookmarking sites we want to link to and know where to put them, all we need is the code. Here are the links to the four social bookmarking sites I use.

Digg | <a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>" title="Submit to Digg">Digg It</a>

Stumble | <a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<?php the_permalink(); ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>">Stumble it!</a>

Del.icio.us | <a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<?php the_permalink() ?>&title=<?php the_title(); ?>">Del.icio.us</a>

Technorati | <a href="http://technorati.com/faves?add=<?php the_permalink() ?>" title="Add to Technorati Favorites">Technorati</a>

Just add that code your template (both files) and viola! If you want to provide additional links to what I have mentioned here you should check out 3spots list of over 100 social bookmarking links. It’s the most comprehensive list I’ve found.

Hopefully that wasn’t to difficult or scary, and remember if you messed something up, just replace your file with the backup you made and try again.