Yesterday Yahoo! announced a new service called “Yahoo! Clues”. The service provides trending information on Yahoo! searches.
You can access the beta using clues.yahoo.com
Yahoo! goes further than Google by giving you statistics based around demographic, income and location.
You can either see current trending topics or enter your own search terms to see trend patterns.
Google have recently announced that they’re promoting a new open source image format known as “WebP”.
Google’s main drive for pushing this new format, is because it uses their open source VP8 encoding technology to shrink images to use hypothetically 40% less space than a JPEG.
Over the last year we’ve seen several moves by Google to convince webmasters to speed up the web, however this has to be their most ambitious yet. To gain traction, they’ll need support from all the latest browsers, and also from graphic design tools.
As well as the known SEO advantages of speed on the web, there is another small feature of WebP which could be aimed at improving Google’s Search Algorithm. The WebP format is designed to include meta-data about the image. This could mean that images using this format are easier for the Googlebot to interpret – giving it a greater understanding of the scope of the page. Instead of looking at HTML title tags, Googlebot could look inside the image to determine the context of the image.
APIs are a great way of developing custom SEO applications. By tying together these building blocks, you can quickly and easily develop tools such as our example free SEO site comparison tool.
Here’s our Top 10 list of SEO APIs:
SEOMoz – a leading SEO Software company with years of SEO consulting background have developed their own link graph of the web – known as Linkscape. They offer free access to this link graph via their API. Offering access to back links, page authority and page ranking statistics, SEOMoz is number one in our top ten list.
Alchemy provide an advanced API based around term/keyword extraction. Using advanced linguistic algorithms, the API is able to extract common phrases and is even able to infer the topic of the content.
As the #1 search engine, Google provide numerous APIs to most of their online tools. The AJAC Search API provides access to Web Search, Local Search and Multimedia Search.
Always popular in SEO, the Yahoo Site Explorer tool provides reliable backlink data on websites. You can access this data via the Yahoo API. The future of this tool could be limited due to the integration with the Microsoft Bing engine.
Microsoft’s search engine is growing in popularity and becoming increasingly advanced. Microsoft have realised the potential of APIs by providing access to Web, image, InstantAnswer, Phonebook, RelatedSearch, Spell and more.
Another link graph of the web is provided by Majestic SEO. Majestic have used their own crawling technology to provide an extensive data. Through the free API you can gain access to the number of referring domains and the number of external backlinks to a site.
Twitter, the popular Social Networking application provide extensive search access to their data and trends via free API calls.
Compete, a web analytics company, provide free API access to their site traffic and history statistics. Compete also provide their own trust data based on surveys and analytics tracking.
Backtype indexes comments from blogs, social networking and other social media. You can access the resulting data via their free API.
Alexa have been analysing site traffic for years via their free browser toolbar plug-in. They’ve teamed with Amazon to give API access to this data. Unfortunately, unlike the above APIs, access isn’t free however calls are very cheap.
