In case you haven’t heard, people love their RSS readers and social bookmarking sites. This tutorial discusses the buttons you want to have on your blog, why you want them, the html code for them, and offers the sexiest syndication button images you can find.

You want to have these “add to my” syndication buttons on your blogs because the more people press these buttons, the more likely you are to have repeat visitors.

These buttons should appear “above the fold” of your site – meaning that when surfers land on your site, they should not have to scroll to see the these buttons. I see sites all the time that have 5 different sized syndication buttons; this looks unprofessional. IMO, 91 X 17 pixels is the onle way go for any company logo button.

Sometimes you see sites with a gap between each of the buttons. This seems like a waste of real estate to me. Of course it’s a personal preference . . . but then again, so is bathing.

While you could probably add hundreds of these types of buttons to your site, these are the ones that seem to matter most:

1. Start with the basic XML button:

This will accommodate the people who are looking for your RDF.

2. The most important syndication button is arguably the “add to my yahoo” button:

Not only does Yahoo have a commanding lead in RSS market share, but putting this button on your site and adding your site to a my.yahoo account helps to summon the Inktomi spider to crawl and index your site. Your can sign up for a my.yahoo account here.

3. Next is Bloglines. Bloglines is a great service – I use it and know tons of others who swear by it. So the bloglines syndication button is a must:

Make sure to create a Bloglines account and add your own blogs (and seoblackhat.com of course).

4. MSN is a bit tricky. After you put the button on your site, you have to press it, wait and hope the MSN bot gets around to checking out your site. If it’s an adult site or one MSN deems spammy they may not add you to their RSS search. You’ll know by creating a MS passport account and trying to add your site’s feed.

If they don’t add your site to the search after about 5 days, you might consider not using this button.

5. Newsgator’s another service that has a loyal following. It therefore makes sense to have this button on your website:

Sign up for a newsgator account here and add your blogs.

6. The most recent of the RSS readers is some start-up company called Google and their Google-Reader. I’ve never heard of them, but their logo’s kind of catchy so I say ‘why not add this button?’:

If someone wants to sharpen or touch up that image a little, we would all appreciate it.

7. On the Social Bookmarking front the biggest one is still probably del.icio.us. While the strategy behind having a domain name that no one can remember how to type is questionable, they are still enjoying some early success. I made this del.icio.us syndication button and did a pretty damn nice job if I do say so myself:

You can register for a del.icio.us account here.

8. While this button doesn’t quite fit the theme of the buttons above, it’s the hottest one I could find for furl.net:

Again, you’ll want to make a furl account and add your own sites.

Obviously, you need to make sure you are pinging all the RSS reader services by using a great RSS ping list.

All these syndication button images are avaible in this directory along with a text file that has the html code to include the syndication buttons in your blogs’ sidebar .

If you want to pull a “single white female” on me and use my uber-sexy inverted buttons, it’s cool – but I’d appreciate a back link.