How to choose and install social networking buttons on the site

Social networks are increasingly penetrating into our daily lives. Most recently, it was a great place for empty chatter and entertainment, and today it is a powerful tool for business development and promotion on the Internet.

Business is not a business if it does not have its own resource on the network. The creation of all kinds of websites, portals, online stores and other things is now assuming colossal proportions and not using social networks to promote your resource would simply be short-sightedness.

By adding buttons to the site, you thereby create a bridge between your resource and social network, this source of endless traffic.

You can install social networking buttons in three ways.

1. Using on-line constructors
2. Using plugins
3. By adding the button code to the site template yourself

Typically, most webmasters initially prefer a variety of on-line constructors , such as Addthis.com, Share42.com and others. Yes, it's convenient, the buttons are put in a few minutes and often they have a built-in click count that many people like so much.

But this method has two serious drawbacks:

1. Significant response time of the external service. Often it is more than one second, adding this time to the total page load time. In some cases, this plays an important role. Not all users will agree to wait until the requested page opens and they prefer to go to another resource.
2. Service is sometimes unavailable for various reasons and then the buttons hang on the site with useless pictures.

Use constructors or not, it's up to you. My advice, after installing the script on the site, is to check the page load time. I note, search engines, in particular, Google now consider this parameter when ranking pages in the SERP. Of course, it is not as important as relevance for example, but it is also taken into account.

In this respect, WebPageTest.org is convenient, it provides detailed statistics about each downloadable component of the page, and, if necessary, gives advice on how to optimize it.

The second option is plugins .

For many popular CMS (content management system) written a huge number of plug-ins and find the right one today is not difficult. They are also available for social network buttons.

In WordPress, for example, there are popular GetSocial, Share Buttons by AddThis, Social Share Buttons.

Unfortunately plugins have one big drawback - the feature of their installation in the system. Not infrequently they create a significant number of calls to the server, thereby increasing the load.

In my opinion, do not overload CMS with extra components, especially in this case there are easier ways to solve.

And the third and in my opinion the most optimal option is to manually assign the button code to the site template. At the same time, you do not need deep knowledge in programming languages, this is even possible for a person far from the technical foundations of site building.

The advantages of this method are obvious:

• The code is loaded very quickly and almost does not affect the download time
• Does not depend on external services
• Buttons can be made to your taste and placed anywhere on the site

You can see this in the examples at http://alexisakov.ru/stavim-knopki-socialnyx-setej-vruchnuyu-bez-plaginov/

In conclusion, I want to note that information from social networks is increasingly used by search engines. For example, clicking on the buttons, users implicitly vote for the interestingness of your resource, and as the Internet trends are such that the preference is increasingly given to the SOM sites, the day is near when the search engines will count the number of clicks, likes, tweets, etc. From your site and take them into account when ranking the results of issuance.

So do not delay using this useful tool and it's important to install social networking buttons now.