Social Media And APIs As SEO Tools

I've been reading a lot about social media networks eg facebook, Myspace, etc. as good tools for bring in traffic. There are also discussions about the integration of APIs into websites because they along with social media networks can boost traffic.

1.What are the pros and cons of using APIs on websites?

2. Has anyone experienced an impressive traffic increase from social media and APIs?

 

I think that you may be confused as to exactly what an API is. And I can't think off the top of my head of an example that would boost traffic.

An API is just a way for a website to make their data more available to bots, scrapers and scripts.

For instance take Yahoo's siteexplorer API.

You can use yahoo siteexplorer manually to find the info you want, but if you were programming an automated script to get lots of info you'd have to login, find the right box, get your bot to enter the details, wait for a response, filter out all the garbage and only grab what you want. This can get difficult, especially when Yahoo changes their site design or decides to block your server IP after noticing you making multiple requests.

So to help developers Yahoo have released an API that comes in the form of a dynamically generated xml document. The xml document can be gotten to just like the regular website by typing it into your address bar, but it looks a whole lot different. All the junk data you don't want is removed and everything is labled so it's easy for a bot to latch on and pull out what it needs. On top of that Yahoo won't change this version or block your server IP as they have given you explicit permission to use it.

So an API can't be directly associated with boosting traffic. An API is only when a web server provides an easier way to communicate with them through scripts you may build. Whether the use of the API will increase traffic is entirely dependant on whether the website providing the API is also providing a way to increase traffic through use of their API.

And pro's and con's are also entirely dependant on who's API you are using.