Facebook Blog, Applications and Developers Directory

While 10% of Facebook employees may have come from Google, the tide is now flowing in the opposite direction too. Ben Ling, who decided to leave Facebook this week, is headed back to Google to lead YouTube’s monetization efforts, Kara Swisher reports.

The move back to GOOG comes only 10 months after Ling left Google Checkout’s e-commerce platform group to run Platform product marketing for Facebook. YouTube’s former head of monetization, Saschi Shef, recently left Google to become chief revenue officer at KP-backed startup Cooliris.

Top Facebook application developer Slide has rebranded FunWall, the biggest application on the Facebook Platform by monthly reach, as “Slide FunSpace (formerly FunWall).” FunWall’s 21 million monthly active users should now notice the chance on their Facebook profile pages and bookmarks.

The move marks the first time Slide has included its company brand in the name of its Facebook applications. While all Slide applications are heavily branded within the canvas page, Slide’s other popular applications - Top Friends and SuperPoke - don’t include the company’s name in the app title.

The change in branding may be partially due to some of the changes in Facebook’s upcoming profile page redesign. The new “Wall” tab on the profile page allows for more types of rich media content in the Facebook Wall (a combination of Facebook’s old wall and feed concepts), which many have argued encroaches on third party “wall” applications.

The change also reflects how easy it is for application developers to rebrand their applications inside the Facebook world. One change to your developer settings page and voila! - your application’s name is updated to millions of users throughout Facebook instantly.

Facebook announced today that is has enabled two new Facebook Platform features that enable developers to restrict access to certain application content - or the entire application itself - from users fitting certain demographic profiles.

Demographic restrictions have been requested by two camps of developers:

1. Those who have licensed content or games only in certain geographic regions - like the US and Canada but not the rest of the world.
2. Those who want to limit access to certain application content or experiences to users of a certain age group - like under 18 or over 21.

Facebook’s new “Demographic Restrictions” APIs will enable developers to limit access to users according to any combination of age and location restrictions.

* The admin.setRestrictionInfo method allows developers to restrict access to the entire application.
* The fb:restricted-to FBML tag allows developers to restrict access to the included content.

So, how exactly is Facebook going about implementing these restrictions? Facebook says it will be using “a combination of what information a user has entered and verified on Facebook as well as IP targeting” for location. Furthermore, Facebook says that developers should not rely on Facebook to implement any restrictions developers are legally obligated to.

[Developers] must use this technology whenever Facebook policies require it… but you can and should consider implementing additional consent or confirmation in your application as appropriate. For example, if for legal reasons your application requires the user to affirm that they are of a certain age or are in a certain location, you should continue to solicit that explicit affirmation, and not regard the fact that the user passed through the Demographic Restrictions as equivalent.

Since the launch of the Facebook Platform, Facebook’s Platform Application Guidelines have expressly prohibited applications that promote the sale of alcohol:

I. Applications may not promote, or contain content (including any advertising content) referencing, facilitating, promoting or using, the following:

4. Sale of liquor, beer, wine, tobacco products, ammunition and/or firearms;

Today, Facebook announced that, with the launch of its Demographic Restrictions capability for application developers, that policy is changing.

Now, Facebook says it plans to allow application content that promotes the sale of alcohol, provided that developers “specifically use the Demographic Restrictions feature to restrict your application or content to users of appropriate legal age.”

Facebook is currently beta-testing the new Demographic Restrictions feature with a “very limited” set of companies, and the new policy should go into effect in September, barring any big hiccups in the beta test.

This is good news for applications like Booze Mail and Happy Hour, that allow users to send each other virtual drink gifts, as well as other application developers hoping to sell to beer, wine, and liquor brands.

Developers interested in talking with Facebook on any sensitive questions regarding alcohol policy can email developers-help@facebook.com.

Facebook launched a new kind of ad unit today that has the potential to drive much more engagement than any ad product on the site ever before has: embedded multimedia with comments visible to users’ entire friend list.

Facebook has created new home page advertising inventory with its upcoming redesign. However, this is the first time we’ve seen Facebook fill the sponsored home page slot with this kind of unit. The behavior:

1. Clicking on the ad image opens a video player in-line
2. Comments on the video are visible to your entire friend list.

The comments around the ad dramatically increase engagement with the unit, as the highly visible comments provide an opportunity for users to simultaneously draw attention to the ad by drawing attention to themselves. While this could backfire if comments degrading the advertiser are abundant (I saw a few “LAME!” comments about Tropic Thunder today), the ad comments powerfully take advantage of Facebook’s social dynamics to draw attention to an ad in a way that is impossible without the social graph. When is the last time you heard 9 friends talk about an online ad in the same day?

Ad comments are an interesting step forward in the evolution of “Social Ads.” While this kind of ad may not work as well outside of a few advertiser verticals, I expect that early advertisers will be pleased with its performance.

Last night Facebook rolled out a new feature to the newsfeed which enables users to filter the stories that are displayed. You can select to display only stories from specific applications or specific friend lists. This is an interesting feature but I’m not sure that it does all that is expected. Ultimately users want to be able to see more or less stories from specific applications and friend lists. This feature simply displays specific stories that you would like to see from one source.

Also, you are currently limited to the applications that you can filter from. For instance, I am only able to filter activities from within Events, Pages, Groups, FriendFeed and Google Reader. It would be awesome if users could select from any application or their bookmarked applications. Caroline McCarthy suggests that this is possibly a result of the applications that your friends have installed. Apparently my friends on Facebook are all geeks based on the applications showing in my feed!

Filtering feeds is going to become increasingly important as we begin seeing more news items. The model has yet to be perfected but Facebook is definitely taking the lead when it comes to trying various filtering models. Do you find these new filters to be useful?

I think I’m way behind on this but today when searching for Facebook’s advanced search feature, I ended up empty handed. The new search page only displays search by name, school and company. Previously Facebook enabled users to use the advanced search utility to find people by practically all areas of a user’s profile. Now there appears to be no more advanced search feature. I searched the web and couldn’t find any reference to the removal but this is significant.

First, this emphasizes Facebook’s commitment to making the site a social utility to browse among your own friends. There is also no longer a link to browse for users within the new design. While you can access browse by going to the following page, it doesn’t appear to be accessible via any other method. There’s another component of the missing advanced search story which is a little more sinister. It appears that someone has successfully attempted to capitalize on advanced search gone missing.

An application called “Advanced Search” claims to enable users to search through over 80 million users on Facebook. How do they let you do that? Well in the past month alone close to 50,000 people have accessed this application. When you visit the app, it automatically populates a bunch of form fields with you name, gender, birthday, schools you’ve attended, companies you’ve worked at and more. It looks just like Facebook’s standard advanced search which misleads users into submitting their information.

This application would be extremely useful for any of the ad networks that wish to use profile data to target users. The other funny thing about this application? It doesn’t appear to actually provide any advanced search functionality. Instead it simply collects data. When you view the “advanced search application” it states “Welcome to Advanced Search for Facebook - Before you start searching, please check, update and store your details so that other people can search for you.”

It then prompts users to enter there info. If you don’t enter anything, it doesn’t display the search. Yikes! I’ve tried searching for more information on this application which has been popular since last October and I couldn’t find anything. Have you been able to find Facebook’s advanced feature? Have you tried this misleading application? Do you think it should be shut down?

Two weeks after Facebook announced the winners of its first fbFund grants, Facebook kicked off a new $2 million fbFund competition today aimed at fueling the creation of high quality apps for the Facebook Platform.

The fbFund program awards grants to developers (not an investment for equity), with the stipulation that fbFund partners Accel and Founders Fund get a right of first refusal for any future investment rounds.

The new competition has 2 rounds: 25 round 1 winners will receive US $25,000 grants, and 5 round 2 winner will receive US $250,000 grants.

Facebook is looking for “applications that best embody our guiding principles for social applications and have the potential to become Great Apps.” Further criteria:

* Originality of Concept: Does the application introduce a great idea in a new and unexplored area?
* Market: Is this application targeted to key audiences or meet compelling market needs?
* Social/Useful: Does the application enable people to interact with each other? Does it deliver real value to users (including entertainment)?
* Expressive: Does the application allow people to share more information?
* Intuitive: Is the application compelling and easy to use? Does it have a well-thought-out user experience?
* Potential: Can it be a real business someday?
* Team: Do you believe this team can execute and is driven to succeed?

Applications are due August 29, 2008 - in less than a month!

Here’s a promo video for the new fbFund competition:

The Google Social Graph API lets you make interesting connections. Bringing those connections to the surface is quickly becoming increasingly important for business and social applications.
This is going to be a trend for the foreseeable future. Users want to see their social graph; it makes the applications more useful and engaging.
With the Google Social

I was at the Google campfire event tonight for the launch of Google Friend Connect. At first pass there is a LOT to like about this. Social media is going even more mainstream and will start to live outside of “traditional” social networking sites.
Now connections can be effectively “portable” to any site that

This is great news for Google’s Open Social. The Open Social movement continues to increase. AOL purchased social media site BEBO for $850 Million in March. This was a big move into social media by AOL and many developers were wondering if the site would join the growing party on Google’s Open Social standard.
Bebo

Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Digg, Flickr, Wikipedia and StumbleUpon have become household names and are visited by millions of Internet users, young and old each day. Is your brand being talked about on any of these networks? Is someone influencing your loyal customers to switch while you are missing in action? Are you losing out on the opportunity to interact with millions of new customers?

Our social network marketing service is designed to bring your business to where it matters - the latest news sharing site or the hot new mobile network favoured by all teenagers. (We know, keeping up can be a full-time job in itself… that’s what we’re here for!!)
You may want to try social networking if…

* People should be talking about your products & services
* Your brand could do with a bit of modernization
* Teenagers, young adults and middle aged professionals are your target market
* Your company’s so great you have to tell EVERYONE about it
* Someone’s dissin’ you on a public forum
* People need to know about your brand new baby (product)
* You’ve been naughty, but it’s really funny and you just gotta make others laugh about it

What happens when we help you socialise?

* We create yummy Facebook and MySpace profiles
* Our friends Digg you
o Their friends Digg you
+ Our friends’ friends’ friends Digg you
# … you get the drift??!
* Potential customers StumbleUpon your pages
* Your business becomes the subject of Wikis
* And traffic to your site goes like this:

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch first broke news about Facebook turning into an open source platform, and the possibility that this could be happening within the next few days. Facebook confirmed this soon after.

The modified Facebook platform is called ‘Facebook Connect’. Once the platform is launched, all social networks will become compatible with Facebook; that is to say, it will be possible to run Facebook applications on other social networks with Facebook acting as the central hub.

AOL-owned Bebo already has a tie-up with Facebook for accessing the site. If the open source project comes through as expected, other social networks will be able to run Facebook applications, without having to ink individual deals. They will be able to map the APIs from Facebook, using FBML (FaceBook Mark-up Language), FQL (the query language), FJS (their JavaScript Library), and the Facebook API.

Putting it simply, users of Facebook Connect will be able to interlink with any partnering website, at any stage. Users will be able to carry their real identity - name, profile picture and other basic information - to all websites. Users will also be able to take their friends from Facebook to any site they wish.

Facebook promises that user information will be protected and be kept up-to-date at all times. In their own words:

“As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up-to-date. For example, if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external website.“

Reporters on ZDNet as well as TechCrunch see the move by Facebook as direct competition to and an improvement on Google’s OpenSocial. If Facebook follows the same route as OpenSocial, it will be possible for other networks to modify Facebook applications and use them on their own platforms. However, getting these applications on the official Facebook platform, would require prior sanction by Facebook.

Google, MySpace and Yahoo! have all supported OpenSocial, thus cutting off Facebook to a large extent. This did not matter to Facebook while its user volumes were sky-rcoketing. However, now that their user numbers have already started declining in the USA, they will need to take some bold steps to maintain their position among other social networks.

Techcrunch has sniffed out details on Google’s new social network project, named OpenSocial (set to go live Thur US). OpenSocial is not a social network itself, rather it is a set of three common APIs that allow developers to access the following core functions and information at social networks:

* Profile Information (user data)
* Friends Information (social graph)
* Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

These are 3 fairly generic API calls - specialized data will remain the responsibility of the “hosts”, which currently include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle. Developers already signed up include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide - who you will recognize as being ‘power developers’ on Facebook.

Image via Techcrunch
What this means

Simply put, Google has created a distributed social network framework that will end up competing with Facebook and MySpace (and Bebo in markets like the UK). It is kind of a ‘third place’ of social networks - and it is a huge boost to the less populous or more specialized social networks such as Ning, Hi5 and our old friend Friendster.

For developers there are lots of benefits. They can build an app that easily works across all the OpenSocial partners. And they can use normal HTML, Javascript and Flash - instead of the proprietary languages Facebook forces developers to use.

It’s not entirely clear yet what the benefits will be to users. I assume there will be some interoperability - e.g. when a user joins up to a Ning social network, there may be hooks into their Friendster profile and data. Will this be the full ‘export’ functionality that industry people like Marc Canter have been crying out for? It remains to be seen. I think it’s fair to assume there won’t be an export function from OpenSocial to Facebook or MySpace, at this point anyway. I’d love to be proven wrong though.

With the limited details released so far, it seems that this is another example of Google creating a distributed system (think Adsense, search). It plays to their strengths and is certainly aimed at challenging Facebook and MySpace. For a start, they’ve already got on board all the main developers that Facebook has (iLike, Slide, et al). And while Google doesn’t ‘own’ the Third Place, powerful social networks like Hi5 and Friendster have signed up - and so Google has become the platform for those social networks.

It’s Facebook vs MySpace vs The Rest - and The Rest is now operating under a Google framework.

If you want to build your Ajax application around a JavaScript framework, you will need to use Direct Web Remoting code. This article shows you how. It is excerpted from Hack 43 from the book Ajax Hacks, written by Bruce W. Perry (O’Reilly; ISBN: 0596101694). Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission from the publisher. Available from booksellers or direct from O’Reilly Media.

Chances are that if you’ve worked with strings then you have also tried to locate a specific substring in the entire source string. In computer science this is called pattern matching or string matching. And to accomplish this task, there are a few classic algorithms. In this two-part series we’re going to discuss string searching algorithms. We will start with Knuth-Morris-Pratt

It is amazing how many ecommerce businesses are not offering something for free to attract new customers and increase their online sales. Sometimes it takes as little as using the word FREE as part of their call to action, such as “Call for a FREE quote”, or “Call for a FREE consultation”. Free offers can also include things such as PDF eBooks with information your potential customers would be interested in, such as a computer dealer offering a free PDF eBook addressing key features someone should look for when shopping for a lap top.

Financial Week recently published an excellent article about offering freebies as a cheap way to increase sales in a sluggish economy, which is well worth the read to get your free giveaway juices flowing. Keep in mind that more companies are actively working on developing great freebie incentives to bring in new customers. And often they will get the sale because of this perceived goodwill, or try it before you buy it stance. We have been offering a Free Ecommerce Website Analysis for years, and as simple as the offer is, it works at getting people to contact us who may have not done so otherwise.

As Tom Pirko, president of Bevmark said in the Financial Week article above. “When there’s less disposable income … you become more cautious. Since the great majority of purchases are on impulse, in times like this, you just don’t have the kind of enthusiasm to just grab something. You’re much more value conscious.” This applies even more so to ecommerce websites which are largely dependent upon organic search engine and PPC traffic to increase online sales.

What are you offering for FREE to your website visitors to forge new relationships and close more sales?

OK, so someone did a search on Google, and they’ve landed on your web site. Now what? Will they read what they’ve found, click to another page of your site, or simply hit the back button on their browser and say bye-bye?

Regardless of how fantastic your site is, you will always have a percentage of folks that leave immediately. There are numerous reasons for this exit rate, and you can’t resolve them all. However, there are proven steps you can take to improve the overall stickiness of your site.

Tip #1: Reduce Clutter
You may really like all of that stuff you’ve put on your web site, but too much stuff will do more to distract and confuse your visitors than to help them. Bells and whistles are great on a train, but not on your web site.

Tip #2: Make Your Navigation Intuitive
A lot of designers like coming up with creative site navigation structures. It’s tempting to offer a cute flash navigation, with dancing arrows or Christmas tree ornaments. Don’t.
As creative as you are, no one wants to spend time figuring out how to navigate your web site. As a rule, the more you make them think about navigation, the quicker they’ll navigate to someone else’s site.

Tip #3: Make Sure Your Site Content is Relevant
If you sell leather sofas, make sure your content is strictly related to “leather sofas”. A visitor who comes to your site and finds pages upon pages of pictures of your dog will think your dog is adorable, but they probably won’t buy a leather sofa from you. Therefore, don’t distract your visitors with content that isn’t directly related to what they’re looking for.

Tip #4: Make Sure Your Content is Up-to-Date
Content that isn’t up-to-date is a serious waste of your visitor’s time and your selling opportunities. Therefore, if product information or store hours change, make sure you update them immediately. No one likes outdated or incorrect information.

Tip #5: Make the First Move
Every time someone visits your web site, you have a chance to interact with them. Don’t waste this opportunity. If they’re not ready to buy, make sure you’re offering value such as a free trial, product samples or something they can download such as a white paper. As a rule, the more they interact with you, the more likely they will buy from you.

Tip #6: Be Supportive
Don’t be shy. Make sure you’re there for support when your visitors want help. Always have your toll free number prominently displayed on every page of your site, and an easy contact link for your email address, physical address, etc. It’s a fact that clearly displayed and readily available contact information builds trust among potential customers.

Tip #7: Make it Easy to Share
Make sure you’re actively taking advantage of social marketing opportunities wherever possible. Add Web 2.0 widgets or links to your web site that encourage visitors to share your content with others via social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit and Stumble Upon. People are more likely to visit a web site based upon a suggestion from another reader than from a paid ad.

Your web site will only be as effective as you make it. Therefore, you must work at making positive improvements all the time. Otherwise your site will never reach its full potential.

So fire up the printer and place this post front and center on your desk (or make it your start page) so you can start putting these sticky site tips into action. Once you’ve gone through and applied these tips to every page of your site, you’ll find that your site will perform better, enjoy increased conversions, and attract more word of mouth (or word of web) business.

Sometimes it’s hard to look at your website’s home page with a fresh set of eyes, especially if you’ve been looking at it for years. However, it has to be done. The home page is the most important page of your site, and it has the biggest influence on whether your visitors stick around and buy or say good bye. It is vital that you see it the way they do.

So, what should you do to improve your home page? Start with following the steps below, and you’ll be on your way to increased sales and higher visitor retention before you know it.

1. Take a hard and honest look at your home page. Actually step back from the computer, close your eyes, and open them with a fresh point of view. Does the page clearly show products or services you sell? Does it have a clear call to action to get your visitors deeper into your site? Is the call to action above the fold? If not, make this your first fix.
2. Is your home page clearly presenting your business as trustworthy? Are you making it clear that your products are for sale online? If not, you’re losing sales right now!
3. Does your home page feature any animation that doesn’t directly connect with selling your product or service? If so, get rid of it. It’s a distraction to your visitors and it’s costing you money.
4. Are your images fuzzy, or hard to see? Optimize your images so they are sharp and clear, but keep the file size small enough that they load quickly. No one wants to look at poor quality photos, and no one is willing to sit and wait for your home page to load.
5. Is your contact info big and bold at the top of your home page? Can your visitors immediately see your toll free number to call you on impulse and buy? If not, you’re losing more sales…

Your home page’s effectiveness is limited only by your creativity and marketing skills. Regardless of your ecommerce skill level, applying the above basics will definitely move you in the right direction.

After implementing the above guidelines into your home page, come back and leave a comment to share your results. We’re sure you’ll be pleased!

Yes, we are starting to sound like we only know two words, “increase sales”. However, you have to admit these are pretty important words for any business. Especially for an ecommerce website where your next competitor is just a click away waiting to take your customer if your game isn’t better than theirs.

Now there’s another word: Game. How well are you playing the ecommerce game? Are you playing to win?

If you’re not sure, here are some thoughts to ponder. Put these thoughts into action and fire up your sales.

* Are you thinking like your customer?
Think like you just landed on the site for the first time. Can you find what you’re looking for? Place products in more than one category when applicable, or wherever relevant. Place links to information wherever it’s needed. The easier it is for your customers to find what they want, when they want it, the more likely they’ll buy.
* Are your prices, offers, and terms easy to understand?
Keep it simple. Make sure your toll free phone number, pricing, shipping, add to cart button, etc. are all clear and easy for anyone to find with as little thought as possible. It’s a fact that the more you make people think, the more likely they’re moving on to another site. A confused customer is a lost customer.
* Are your pictures your best salespeople, or are they duds?
A picture is really worth a thousand words. Therefore, add additional product pictures to close the sale wherever applicable. Keep in mind that most people don’t actually read ecommerce sites, they scan. Make sure you’re getting their attention with the right information to convert them into buyers.
* Have you marketed your website today?
Market your website once it’s live and continue doing “something” to market it every day thereafter. A website that isn’t actively working to market itself on a continuous basis, isn’t going to grow and thrive. As with any endeavor there’s no free lunch.
* Is your site easy to navigate? Is it easy to buy your products online?
Make your products easy to buy. It seems obvious, but it’s a mistake often made by online retailers. Make sure your website functions well across all areas such as navigation and shopping cart checkout. A site that’s hard to navigate or complete a purchase on will quickly be abandoned by your visitors.

Now it’s time to ask yourself the big question. Is your site meeting these guidelines? If you can’t answer a resounding yes to each of these questions, you’ve got some work to do. In fact, it would be wise to bookmark this page and refer back to these points periodically to ensure that your site is getting the results you deserve.

Tired of searching Google for info related to eCommerce, SEO, Web 2.0, and other online business info? Try our new EPORIA Facebook page! It’s a good place to start connecting with others like you in the world of ecommerce!

EPORIA’s Facebook page is open to all readers of our blog, customers, and friends. Our Facebook page will allow members to interact, comment, and share ideas.

To join and contribute to our group on Facebook, you will need to have your own Facebook account and request to friend us. Facebook accounts are free and can be easily set up at www.facebook.com.

It is our hope that our space on Facebook will give some of the best ecommerce and online marketing minds in the country a place to network with each other on a more focused level than traditional webmaster forums.

To get started, visit EPORIA’s Facebook page today!

we wrote about Twitter, a microblogging platform that allows you to have a real-time conversation with your online audience. Since we covered some of the benefits of using Twitter to promote your business, it’s time to discuss the best way to leverage those benefits.

Using Twitter for marketing is a delicate balance, just like using any blogging tool for business purposes. And just like any other social media tool, Twitter has its own unwritten rules of etiquette. These 4 rules will serve as a guideline to help you jump into tweeting without breaking a wing.

Rule 1: If you use Twitter as strictly a sales tool, you will lose followers quickly.

It is in your best interest to seek out others you find interesting and follow them. As with other social media applications, Twitter is about creating conversations and sharing news. It’s not about aggressive selling.

Rule 2: Tweets are limited to 140 characters in total length.

This is a large appeal of Twitter, since followers can quickly get their updates (via their cell phone, Blackberry, iPhone, etc.) and continue about their business. Messages are short and to-the-point, more like a text from a friend than a conventional blog post.

Rule 3: Twitter does not allow you to embed HTML, with the exception of hyperlinks.

So, no formatting. The links allowed all have the nofollow attribute, so there isn’t any SEO link juice benefit. (The SEO benefit comes from all the keywords in content. This is what puts your tweet or your Twitter profile at the top of the search engine results, and then your profile will link to your website.)

Rule 4: Don’t get carried away. If you tweet once a day it’s an event to look forward to. If you tweet every hour, you may be viewed as irritating and lose followers in the process.

So, how often should you tweet? There isn’t a set number of times a day recommended, since it largely varies according to your audience. However, if you intend to use Twitter to promote your website, we recommend tweeting once or twice a day.

Remember, your Twitter profile shows your tweet history, so a new visitor who comes along and sees that you don’t have many tweets may decide that you are not worthy of following. Conversely, too many tweets will get you blocked faster than a Nigerian prince with a business proposal.

Businesses all over the world are using Twitter already. Big name companies using promotional tweeting to market their website and brand include Amazon, Woot, H & R Block, and Zappos.

Making Twitter work as a promotional marketing tool for your website may take some trial and error, and it’s a good idea to check out what others are tweeting about to get a feel for style. But don’t spend too much time being a lurker - get in there, get a feel, and start tweeting!

It’s a known fact that search engines (read: Google) place a weighty importance on one-way inbound links when determining your placement in search results. Unfortunately, successfully link building takes a lot of time and energy, so it’s often put on the back burner. This isn’t only costly - it’s plain foolish.

Inbound links are one of the ways the search engine determines the quality and relevancy of your site. Every link that points to your website is a vote for your relevance. The more votes your site has, the higher it will rank in the search engines.

The web is ultimately nothing but links, pathways for navigation for both humans and search engine spiders (also known as robots, crawlers, and bots). Search engines crawl through links they find on one website to visit other websites, adding them to their index of sites and reviewing them for search relevance. Even within your site, spiders follow links from one page to another.

Some links have more value than others. To be successful at link building, you must learn to recognize each of these links. In the world of link building, there are four general types of links:

* URL Link - This is simply a website’s URL, written in such a way that clicking on it will take you to the site.
* Text Links (or static links) - This is the most common type of link, where you click on a word to follow the link.
* Image Links - Click on the image to follow the link.
* Dynamic Links - These links are in JavaScript. They work like any other link, except they have extra code behind the scenes. The code performs special functions, such as affiliate commission tracking or automatic feeds. Search engines cannot follow dynamic links.

You must also consider the nofollow attribute.

The nofollow attribute (or just ‘nofollow’) is HTML code used to instruct search engines to not count a link as a vote for relevance. This is very common on websites that allow comments, especially blogs, and is intended to reduce the effectiveness of search engine spam.

It’s important to keep in mind that search engines do not follow links that have the nofollow attribute applied. (Hence the name…)

To determine whether or not a page uses nofollow links, look at the site’s code. Right click on the web site and choose ‘View Source’ (From Internet Explorer, choose Page > View Source. From Firefox choose View > Page Source). If the nofollow attribute is applied it will be clearly visible within the page code as ‘nofollow’. You will find it either in the Meta tag section or within the code surrounding the actual link.

Some hardball SEO folks avoid nofollow links like the plague. The mentality behind this is that a link is useless if a search engine spider can’t follow it. Remember, human visitors can still use the links to find you. Don’t shun a web page using the nofollow attribute if the audience is a good fit with your site.

When you are ready to build links to your site, your links can go two ways:

1. One way links - A link from another website to yours with no returning link to theirs.
2. Reciprocal links - Another website links to your site, and you link back to theirs.

One way links have always been more valuable in the eyes of the search engines, much like a politician who gets a vote without giving a favor. However, each link has its own value based upon how relevant it is to your site, the text in and around the link, and how much authority the linking website has with the search engines.

In order for your inbound links to have any significant value, you need to focus on getting high quality links. As a rule, the more websites that link to your site the better. However, there is no question that 20 quality links can be much more valuable from an SEO perspective than thousands of low quality links.

So what makes up a high quality link? Imagine if Google had a link to your website on their home page. That would obviously be a quality link - A highly relevant, highly trafficked, highly linked page with tons of authority with the search engines.

Of course this analogy is a bit extreme, but the point is that value is usually pretty easy to spot. For a more realistic example, let’s say you’re a photographer specializing in wedding photos. If this were the case, links from informational sites or blogs related to weddings and photography would be quality links.

Now that you understand the basics of quality link building, the next step is keyword research, finding the key words and phrases to build into the text in and around your link. Next week, we’ll talk about keyword research that gets your link juice flowing.

The largest online shoe store, Zappos.com has launched a Facebook application. Feel free to skip this one though because it’s pretty crappy. To be honest I’m a little shocked that a such a large organization would release an application that feels like it is halfway complete. While I wasn’t able to test the full functionality since I don’t have an existing favorites listing on their store, there was no presence of design in the application. I hate to rail a company but if you are going to release such a featureless and poorly designed application, I have to be honest. If you want a great example of how not to release an application on Facebook, go test the Zappos application.

At first glance I thought “Oh, how nice? An application that lets you send real flowers.” Then I realized this is the ideal application of a stalker! Social Flowers allows you to send real flowers to any Facebook user even if you don’t know them. If you had a lot of money you could probably go around sending flowers to people randomly but then again that is a pretty weird practical joke. While I think that this application is pretty cool from the perspective that it’s an easy way to send flowers, it definitely could be added to the professional stalker’s arsenal of weapons. If you want a great way for making someone’s day or alternatively scaring them with a strange message in their flowers, go grab the Social Flowers Application.