SEO Benefits of Consuming XML API’s
Several months ago I became very interested in consuming XML API’s slash Web Services. At the time I didn’t have much experience with them so I thought it might be fun to give it a whirl.
For the non-programmer an XML API is an interface that allows a person to request data in XML format from an entity, such as YouTube, Flickr, Digg, etc… The HTTP request is sent the same way your browser requests a web page. So if you wanted to retrieve the three most recent stories from the Apple topic on Digg.com you would send a request to then parse out the XML data in the response to my web page. You can click on the link above in your browser to view the XML that is returned.
I shopped around and found the YouTube API to be rather developer friendly. I became pretty obsessed when writing the code to parse the data. I spent several nights programming until 2 am to get it to where is is today. But after about 2 weeks of work, mostly during my lunch hour and after work, I was done.
Now, if you go to http://www.nbirkes.com/YouTube/ you can search for videos, browse video categories, view comments and user profiles. For the most part if you can find it on YouTube you can find it on my site courtesy of the YouTube API.
I designed the site as best I could so that googlebot would index as much as possible. Because of this Google has currently indexed about 165,000 pages of my site.
Since being indexed so heavily my traffic has gone from zero to around 600 unique visitors per day.
In the future I plan to do a mashup with Flickr and other API’s so that when you do a search on my site you will see not only videos but photos, news and articles.
If you are a developer I would strongly encourage you to look deeper into XML API’s
November 8th, 2007 at 1:56 am
Nathan, I’m going to play a little devils advocate with this. Nothing personal… Wrapping your site around such APIs abviously increasing your footprint in Googles index and looks to increase your traffic. However, is it the traffic you want? If your an ecommerce site and you have a product to sell is there a way to bring in just videos about your types of products? And can you bring in just informational videos and not competitors advertising video – I’m talking the You Tube API here. Its seems to that this is great! However, if your not driving qualified traffic your simply chewing up your bandwidth cost. On another note, for all those MFA sites out there, this seems to be an excellent profitable opportunity!
November 8th, 2007 at 10:45 am
No, it’s not the traffic I want. I get more traffic from Brazil than I do the US.
If you are an ecommerce site and were selling Transformers you could pull the top 10 videos with the keyword Trasformers.
As far as competitors go you would just have to block their videos by examining the XML with your own code.
Luckily I don’t have to pay for my bandwidth!
Anyway, I just did it for fun.
Cheers!
November 8th, 2007 at 1:00 pm
If you’re able to have that much control over what videos, etc.. show up on your site with focus, XML APIs could be used not only to generate traffic, but current a world of difference in your ecommerce.
Great post Nathan! I’ll have to put it to the test when I have time. Building a little logic into the feed querying would make a world of difference.
Cheers,
Troy
November 9th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
As of today Google has indexed 239,000 pages of my site.
November 9th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
What are your uniques up to now?
November 9th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Yesterday it was 839. A month ago it was about 25 per day.