Implementing calculator to attract embed links

[TomJangles]

Hi all, New to SEO Moz and this is my first question... I have a site that I am writing a 'widget' calculator for with the idea that the user can embed the results of the calculation on their website / blog.

I currently convert the calculation html to an image and save it on the server and then also display the code for them to embed the image (including a text link back to my site). In order to try and get as many people to embed the results on their site I am not asking them to login / register on the site before they get access to the embed code.

1. Is no login / registration the correct way to go? It means I won't be able to track if people have copied the image without including the text link.

2. Is saving the output as an image the best way to enable the user to embed the content on their site and provide me with a link? The only alternative I can think of is to give them the html in an IFRAME code to embed it but the IFRAME would have to rank to pass on on the link back to our site.

3. As well as giving an embed option I am also giving a 'link to these results' option in the format:
   http://mydomain.com/calculator/result.aspx?ID=20

I am doing this with the result ID in the querystring) so that instead of having (hopefully) hundreds of links each pointing to a page with one incoming link I would have one page with hundreds of links pointing at it and use a canonical tag to state that all these different results should be indexed as
/calculator/result.aspx

Does this sound like the best way to do it? Is it ok to use the canonical tag even though the results / page content will be different for each querystring variation?

cheers.

[matbennett]

I would stick with the image embed option and live with the fact that not everyone will link.  I'd rather have more people posting my advert.... sorry, widget on their site that included some without links than I would have less people using it.    The vast majority of people will take the easy way anyway.

I'm not sure that adding a registration would really help anyway.

What I would say is be careful not to "over optimise" your anchor text doing this.  It is surprisingly easy to skew your anchor text in a dangerous direction with a good widget campaign.  You could even consider mixing up the anchor text that you offer them as part of the widget generation, but generally I would err towards brand over keyword.