Think Facebook traffic is worthless? Think again!

I was checking out the hitwise blog, and came across an interesting post centered around the traffic growth of *shudders* Perezhilton.com… and no, i am not linking to it!

Anyway, the interesting thing about the post is that it states that according to hitwise numbers, Perezhilton.com now generates more traffic from Facebook than it does from Google searches.

Apparently…

Last week, 8.70% of visits to PerezHilton.com came from Facebook compared to 7.62% from Google. The switch happened the week ending December 27th, 2008.

then in the comments, someone else confirms that…

It’s a similar situation in the UK: 2.5x as many searches for Perez than Paris last week. 19.1% of Perez Hilton’s traffic from Facebook, just 12.0% from Google UK and 2.3% from Google.com

Now what else is interesting is that Facebook now accounts for about 3.3% of all traffic driven to video sites, Hitwise have provided the following handy dandy trend graph.

facebookvideotraffic

So to sum up the point of this post, whilst it may still be difficult to attract Facebook users to buy products from your site, it should certainly not be overlooked as a means to generate traffic to information based sites or blogs. I imagine that this trend will continue to rise, especially as Facebook look to launch its new real time homepage later today

Sphinn’s wacky redirects

I was just talking with Jane Copland about the beloved Sphinn blog and how it is always up to date :o) So i decided to type in http://sphinn.com/blog and found it rather amusing when it 301 redirected to http://blog.sphinn.com/blog and then returned me a 404 error.

I then decided to type http://www.sphinn.com/blog and got redirected to http://sphinn.com/php-fastcgi.fcgi/blog/index.php

sphinn

It made me smile that Sphinn, an SEO blog, haven’t got there redirects sorted correctly, although I do sympathise with them since they are using the rather useless Pligg platform.

Evil Green Donkey was unavailble for comment, when i leaned over the desk to ask him he put his fingers in his ears and started singing YMCA :o)

Facebook Connect – Comments widget

The Facebook Connect world just keeps on getting better and better, not only do we have the wonderus Facebook connect core, we now have widgets for nearly every blogging platform and on top of that FB have released a new comments widget that can plug directly into your site with little effort and code.

facebook-logo

With the Comments Box, Facebook users on your site can comment on your content, post those comments to their profiles, and share them with their friends on Facebook. The Comments Box allows non-Facebook users to make comments on your site as well. And via their APIs, you can access related comments made on Facebook as well to bring the conversation together.

The Comments Box comes with additional social features:

  • Fully customizable: Specify background color, text color, and other attributes by providing your own custom CSS to incorporate this best into your site.
  • Access to raw data: Query all comments via the comments.get API method or the comment FQL table.
  • Administration and moderation: Manage the privacy and permissions of your comment boxes on an individual or global basis.
  • Integrates seamlessly regardless of whether you do or don’t have Facebook Connect already on your site.

So as you can see it is pretty powerful, and you can get more info, plus the code from the Facebook Blog

I’m speaking at SES London

The blog has been a bit quiet over the last month since i have been a very busy little bee.

I just wanted to write a quick post to say that i am speaking at SES London tomorrow on the 19th February at 12:45 on the Successful Site Architecture panel.

We will pretty much be covering the following…

Learn how to successfully architect your site for search engines and how specific page elements and design technologies may impact your ability to gain good organic listings. Covers topics such as directory and file structure, server-side includes (SSIs), 404 error trapping, JavaScript, robots.txt use, frames, secure area usage, and much more. Toward the end of the session, volunteers from the audience will have their sites examined to see how changes could be made to their site architecture and design to increase search engine traffic, as time allows.

I am going to cover the more technical details, so if you around come and sit in my session and cheer me on 🙂

Dean chew SES

Wanna build social media apps without the code?

Well now you can with Zembly 🙂

Zembly

What the hell is Zembly may you be asking? Well according to their website…

Using just your browser and your creativity, and working collaboratively with others, you create and publish Facebook apps, Meebo apps, OpenSocial apps, iPhone apps, Google Gadgets, embeddable widgets, and other social applications.

At Zembly, you can easily and instantly…

  • author social applications using your browser
  • participate and collaborate with others around live, editable code
  • use the richness of popular web APIs to create your applications
  • publish your social applications to multiple social platforms with a single click

So as you can see Zembly gives you a way to generate applications for a number of platforms without having to learn the code for each of the said platform. So how do you go about actually creating them?

Basically you have an online editor which allows you to take sample code snippets from other projects that people have made and then insert them into your application. For example you may be trying to work out how you can build a voting system, you would search using the inbuilt search function for “voting” and then it would return you all the code snippets which you could then plug straight into your application.

Once you have your application built you can then save it onto the Zembly server so you don’t even have to sort out hosting or setting up your server to handle applications. Once done you can submit your app’s to say, Facebook and watch the millions of $$$ roll on in 🙂 You can already check out a Facebook application which has been made using Zembly called Capitol Punishment, as you can see it is pretty robust.

Zembly is currently in private beta so keep an eye on their site for when it comes available.