By now, we’re all pretty familiar with the "share" widgets around the web that enable viewers to easily create a bookmark, email and/or an ad of sorts back to your site. Chicklets, as they are sometimes called, can be the most effective plugin in your viral marketing bag of tricks. By making your article, video and even rich media files easier to share, you are greatly increasing your traffic potential and, indirectly, your SEO.

AddThis and ShareThis are two of the more popular providers of this handy JavaScript widget. I most often see these used in a pared-down fashion, so I thought it might be valuable to shed light on some of the other things you can do with them.

1. Customize. With a few simple tweaks, you can "season" your chicklets to taste. 

• Create your own branded button and pop-up.
  
• Choose to display sharing service icons and format the display however you like (with AddThis, there’s even a cool Lightbox option).
• Download custom service icons.
• Translate the widget UI into other languages for regional sites.
• Opt for menu offset and have the share pop-up open in a new browser window.

2. Install. With a little extra effort, you can embed the widget into Flash.

3. Define. Image, title and description that appear on your share ad. Otherwise, title and description will be automatically generated from metadata (assuming you have metadata). In cases where they haven’t been defined and there is no metadata, source code can appear instead (within your ad). So it’s better to define them up front. And unless you want Facebook, for example, to grab a random image for thumbnail use, specify that as well.

4. Analyze. It all comes down to analytics. Track and filter sharing trends by geography, date range, which sites your content is most frequently being posted to, etc.

5. Remember. A couple more tips to make it as easy as possible to share:

• Store all items you’ve shared in a single location, for your own (private) reference.
• Add a button to your browser toolbar, so that you can share pages that haven’t included a share widget.
  

 

Note: As with all trusted plugins, AddThis and ShareThis claim not to install adware or spyware and do not share personally identifiable information. 

Let’s say, for whatever reason, you don’t have access to funds for comprehensive, robust QA software. Maybe you are working for a non-profit, a small start-up, or (gasp) QA isn’t your top priority. There are free and effective alternatives. They may not all be the most efficient tools in the shed, but they will indeed help you produce a more refined product.

A couple of my favorites are the browser add-ons:

• IE Developer Toolbar. 
• Firefox’s Web Developer. 

Among many other things, you can use these tools do the basics such as validate links, run simplified load tests, view CSS data on specific page elements and resize your browser window on the fly. The downfall is that you have to do it one page at a time rather than crawling the entire site with a single click as with the paid software.

There are free link validators that will crawl an entire site but may require a little more ramp-up time, which will pay off in the end:

• Xenu.
• W3C Link Checker (and other free QA tools).

Whichever you choose, be aware that some tools out there do not validate links within Flash and/or JavaScript files.

Other handy tools:

• Jing (by techsmith). Capture screenshots of windows, panes or regions and mark them up via type, point and highlight features. Save and share via URL, image or file. Free image hosting on Screencast.com or upload to your flickr account. For a fee, they offer video capture as well, which can be easily uploaded to Screencast or YouTube or saved in your SWF directory or FTP site. You can even narrate with a mic. I *LOVE* this tool for dealing with those hard-to-explain QA scenarios. It’s especially handy if you or your cohorts are working remotely.
• Notepad ++ (not to be confused with Notepad, the basic text editor). Highlight syntax for nearly 50 markup, programming and scripting languages.
• Browsershots. Take a screenshot of your page in 4 different operating systems and about 80 different browser versions. It can be painfully slow, but it’s free — and it enables you to see your site in almost every environment.
• XML-Sitemaps.com. With a little creativity, you can use a tool for more than what it was originally intended. For example, I’ve found it helpful for viewing html site maps, checking browser title spelling/formatting consistency, seeing standalone pages, accessing comprehensive lists of resources and so on.
• Adobe Flash Player Settings Manager. I use this to clear my Flash cache, which is stored differently than typical browser cache. It’s a lot easier than trying to remember how to navigate to the folder on your machine.
• Spell check. I wish I could tell you there was a free, automated site-wide spell checker out there that worked in multiple languages, enabled the user to create profiles (for product names and such), etc. But, alas, I cannot.
  

Here’s where I teeter from free to thrifty. If you can muster up about $60 you’ll find Inspyder’s InSite to be worth your while. It validates links, checks spelling (including meta data), counts words and spits out detailed reports that you can finagle to gain other types of data, such as a breakdown of internal vs. external links, file types (png, gif, jpg, pdf, etc.). It’s really user friendly, too. Now, if someone can point me to a $60 tool that does ALL of these things (and a few more).…

* Plus 1 thrifty, not-so-free tool you'll want anyway.