Get social with the Social Sidekick plugin!

Panda Update:

I’ll get straight to the point. Things have changed. Google now requires web pages to adhere to certain guidelines to be considered “worthy” of its attention. Three important guidelines (I think of these as the “Panda Trilogy”).

• Engaging content. This includes content that attracts visitors to your site, keeps them on your site for more than a couple of minutes, and makes them want to come back for more. It doesn’t have to be 100% unique content, but the more unique the content is, the better.
• Votes. This includes “real” back-links from sites Google trusts, and mentions on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Not all back-links are created equal, but there should be a variety of back-links from many different sites as possible so the links appear as “natural” as possible.
• Speed. This has become increasingly important in Google’s eyes. If your site, regardless of the platform, is slow; you will find your rankings drop.

(A new development, and the result of several focus groups, is that Google is starting to drop the rankings of sites with a large number of advertisements “above the fold”. This is very serious for many bloggers and site-owners. But, it will have to be addressed as a separate issue from Social Sidekick).

Enter: Social Sidekick

This new plugin is a socially oriented plugin from several different angles. There is a visual element, and a slew of stuff that goes on in the background. Let’s explore each component separately.

1) Social Sidekick Sharing Bar

Look in the sidebar of this site. You’ll see a floating sidebar with a variety of social network buttons. You’ve probably seen it on numerous sites like Mashable.com and other highly ranked sites. Why do they use it?

Because it Works!

Our version includes

• The most  popular share buttons for the major social services plus up to 5 of your own. Includes Facebook, Google +1, Twitter, Delicious, Linked In, Digg, Stumble, RSS, Email, Print, Add This.
• Easily adjustable height, width, margins, padding, and colors (the color wheel makes it easy!)
• Left or right sidebar positioning (or random), and whether to show it on posts, pages, etc.
• Planned future upgrades include different animations,  the ability to turn the social bar off and on for a given page/post (I’m not sure why, but that has been requested, and everyone has their own ideas), an alternate horizontal bar option that can float at the top or bottom of the browser window, rounded corners, localization, re-ordering buttons, and much more.

2) Tag & Ping

An important part of getting your blog ranked is properly tagging your posts, and getting the search engines to find those tags. We automatically generate some great tags for you and then make sure they are best positioned to get “noticed” by Google and other engines.

We then let PingOMatic know about all the available permalinks (post, tags, categories, feeds) associated with your post. This is in addition to the basic homepage pings WordPress sends to your ping list.

You may ask, “Is this safe? Won’t I be penalized for over-pinging?” Not to worry. The ping services only care if you ping the EXACT same URL over and over. These are all DIFFERENT links. I’ve been doing this for a couple years now, and never had a problem. Plus, we only ping them once when the post is published, just to get their attention.

Easy options include:

• Turn the pinging on or off and adjust the pinging “speed”
• Select how many tags to add, which ones to exclude. And don’t worry, we won’t bother your manually entered tags at all
• In the future other pinging services, like Pingler, will be considered as alternative.

3) MyPosterous auto-poster

Don’t rely solely on the whims of your visitors to promote your site to the social networks – you can do it yourself. Automatically.

You create a post, we submit it to your Posterous blog (or blogs) and Posterous handles the social network notifications for you. (No more time-consuming manual social network pings. How cool is that?)

Easy options include:

• Select and post to one or more Posterous Space; or post to Spaces randomly (very powerful)
• Post full posts, excerpts or links to each Posterous Space; or select what to post randomly (very powerful)
• Adds your post tags to your posterous “blog”
• Planned future options include posting image galleries, the capability to setup and control your Spaces and Posts directly from the WordPress options page, and some text spinning capabilities.

4) BacklinksIndexer.com auto-poster

BacklinksIndexer.com is a paid service, originally intended to get your site’s backlinks spidered and indexed. It is now being used by many bloggers to promote their posts and gain additional backlinks. We  seamlessly interface with the BacklinksIndexer API, and submit multiple links for indexing, including all categories, feeds, and tags in the post.

5) Logging

Many plugin authors forget about this important tool, or intentionally “forget” to include it. Social Sidekick logs everything that happens and allows you to see the results first hand so you’ll know exactly what goes on. It is also very important for reporting and/or  debugging potential problems that may arise (every host is different and some may not support everything we do. If they don’t, we’ll find a way to fix it. I promise).

Social Sidekick: The Flow

Let’s look at the flow for a typical post.

1. You create a post with engaging content in your normal fashion. You can immediately publish it, or you can schedule it for a later date/time.
2. Your post is published. Now, Social Sidekick does its thing.
3. Tags are generated. If desired, these are appended to your existing tags.
4. MyPosterous submits your post (full post or excerpt or just a link), along with your tags, to your Posterous Spaces (blogs).
5. All links associated with your post (permalink, short link, categories, tags, RSS feeds) are submitted to BacklinksIndexer.com for indexing
6. All links associated with your post (permalink, short link, categories, tags, RSS feeds) are submitted to PingOMatic for indexing
7. You’re done