It’s time to get your ‘widget’ on!

WHAT IS IT?: A widget. A widget is a small programs that can be placed on any web page. They are often used to keep users updated with information. Examples of widgets include weather guides, stock lists, flight trackers, calendars, and search boxes for various websites.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO MY BUSINESS: Widgets are quickly becoming a leading edge practice to keep your company and information in front of your audience to increase interaction with your company.

PROS: Once installed, widgets keep your company upfront and center in your users daily usage of the web.

CONS: Requires users to ‘install’.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Going back to the rule of being ‘remarkable’, if you have remarkable or valuable content then widgets are an excellent way to distribute that information and develop a dialog with your users. If you do not, then the barrier to entry required (that being the need for your user to ‘install’ the widget) is too high for widgets to be effective.

My friend, Esther Lim, sent me a good article on widgets today by David Berkowitz. In summary, here is what the article describes about widgets.

There are three key types of widgets:

• Desktop widgets: Users download the widget and may keep them running constantly in the background. Examples include WeatherBug, Southwest Airlines’ Ding! deal alert, and NBC’s “Heroes” countdown.
• Personal Web widgets: Users post the widgets to their personal homepages such as My Yahoo or iGoogle.
• Public Web widgets: A user posts a widget publicly to social network profiles, blogs, online communities, and other sites. For the best widgets (or the laziest users), they stay on those pages indefinitely.

Three ways to consider how to include Web widget optimization as part of your online marketing program:

• Develop links. Widgets offer promise of link development, but there are some inherent obstacles in how widgets are designed, with Flash being especially common.
• Increase search shelf space. For any query, the more links you have in the top ten natural search results, the more you own that term and gain a major competitive advantage.
• Support social media strategies. Reaching out to bloggers, community moderators, and other influential people online can pay dividends on a number of levels, including complementing search engine optimization programs.

Link that inspired this post:

• Web Widget Optimization by David Berkowitz