Travel Weekly Blog

The obvious thing is to put them on your site's destination pages, if you have any.

It's a triple-whammy: linking to good, relevant travel features gives your users a better experience, adds to your perceived authority on the spot in question, and boosts search engine ranking.

But to get the best value out of them, you want to keep your third-party links regularly updated. This question is how to do that without:

• Making the feature a chore to manage
• Exposing yourself to the risks of an unfiltered RSS feed (negative stories, coverage of competitors and so on)

'Social bookmarking' sites such as del.icio.us are a good solution, offering the automation of a feed with a degree of editorial control.

Here's what you do.

1. Get a free account.
2. Install the toolbar or the Firefox addon so you can save pages with one click.
3. Save some good pages and 'tag' them with the name of the destination.
4. Del.icio.us automatically starts an RSS feed for every one of your tags (example).
5. Add that RSS feed to your page, using a widget-builder like Widgetbox if you need to.
6. Now every time you see something worth sharing, you just save and tag it.

And this doesn't have to stop at traditional 1,000 word travel pieces. Found a useful discussion on Thorn Tree? Bookmark it and share it with your site visitors. Seen a great flickr photo or youtube video? Ditto.

Needless to say, you can apply the same technique on a more general level. If you just want a single feed of good travel articles rather than several destination-specific ones, use a generic 'travelwriting' tag or forget tags altogether and feed in everything you post to your account.

I save and tag destination-specific pages for some of TW's own destination pages. To boot, another del.icio.us feature posts all the new links I bookmark to our Postcards blog on a daily basis. Pretty handy.