SeoUnique’s StumbleUpon guide

Welcome to my unofficial Stumbleupon guide from an SEO point of view. I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to write this for those of you that want it. Feel free to use any of the material and screen grabs I have created for your own use but please remember to give me a little mention.

What is StumbleUpon?

First I will show you the extract taken from the StumbleUpon homepage:

“Channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great sites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better recommendations.”

Now what exactly is StumbleUpon? Well for a start I’m going to tell you that an abbreviation for StumbleUpon is “SU” you will see this being used a lot in the SEO industry so don’t be confused by it.

Essentially what SU lets you do is bookmark your favourite sites on the web, write reviews about them and share these with your online friends. Its that simple. SU is different from older sites like www.digg.com or www.reddit.com as SU first thought up the idea of a “thumbs up” and a “thumbs down” idea. This is the method that lets your online friends know whether you liked or disliked a webpage.

Every page that you like or dislike is displayed on your very own profile page, which contains other contact and personal information.

How do I create a useful profile?

There are a few sections that should be considered when creating a profile, doing this well will gain you more or fewer overall page visits and its very simple.

1. Profile Picture – It depends what you want to get out of SU, if you want to be part of the overall community and build up a list of personal sites – put your own photo up and let people know its you – its good to put a photo to a name. If you are looking to be included in an industry community i.e. “Cars” – put a nice image of a kick ass car up there, something that will attract like minded people to your profile.

2. Profile Layout – If you click on “preferences” on your profile this will bring up a preferences page that includes sub pages; Personal information, My interests, Public profile. Click on “Public Profile” this will allow you to enter any websites you may have and let you change your background colour – white is a big no no.

3. Profile Information – Part of the whole learning process with SU is that you have to realise it is mainly reputation and community based and the people on SU respect the laws. It’s not like digg and the attitude of its users are certainly more mature. So take this opportunity to tell as much as possible about yourself, your goals and your business ideas, this is vital!

How do I create Targeted Traffic?

A lot of people have told me that the only way SU produces traffic is through the small “Stumble” button on the downloaded toolbar. For those of you that don’t know what I mean, download the toolbar and press the “Stumble!” button, see what happens, I dare you! Anyway, there are different methods to ensure the traffic you receive on sites you SU are target for that industry.

It’s really quite simple, if you start stumbling pages about cars, paint jobs, Top Gear etc you will attract like minded people to your page, connections are then made through friends or fans. I would not say just stumble one category or industry, if you are generally interested in a few topics, like myself I always look for people that have stumbled the same pages as myself.

Make sure when you submit your stories that you assign appropriate tags to the stories, this way when other stumblers look for certain topics your stumble will be listed, the more you assign, the better the results. Doing this will also categorise your stumbles and put them in your tag cloud on the right side of your profile, this lets you identify like minded people quickly, bigger the word, the more topics in that category they stumble.

What do Friends and Fans Really do?

I see a lot of people sometimes with only 50 pages stumbled and 500+ fans – to me this is an obvious attempt to try and cheat the system, well sorry boss it aint gunna work! I know for a fact a lot of people either setup up multiple accounts or add random people in the hope that they accept to be friends – it won’t work because people have to be genuinely interested in what you stumble!

You can become anyone’s fan by clicking on the “Add him/her as fan” by doing this you are stating that you like what this person stumbles. From now on, every time that person stumbles a page and reviews it, the story will appear on your “What’s new page”. If they accept you as a friend back it means that they are a like minded person because of the stories you stumble. So people who do it themselves will not benefit anything from this, certainly not in the long run of things.

What and where are Buzz pages?

If you look at the top of any stumble page and click on the tab “Websites” it will bring up this page: http://buzz.stumbleupon.com from this page you can see the most popular stumbles of the day. This can be broken down into categories on the right in the “tag cloud”. Having a story linked on this page often opens up opportunities on websites that feed from the results. So this creates natural backlinks and additional traffic to the original page.

Donate to Stumbleupon why exactly?

Many of you are probably not any wiser that this option even exists but I does here: http://www.stumbleupon.com/sponsors.php.

The point and reason people do this, which is completely voluntary by the way – is because of the community vibe of SU. You can donate anything from $1 to $$$ and this gives you a few little extras that normal SU members don’t get.

· Pages We Both Like feature to see what you have in common with other stumblers
· Unlimited stumbling within favorites of your friends
· See People We Both Like when visiting other stumblers
· Ability to Create New Groups (see the Group Directory)
· Have copies of all your messages emailed to you (both sent & received messages)
· Longer message history on your inbox and contact tabs
· Ability to Turn off Sponsored Stumbles

You also get a nifty little icon next to your name which is personally my favorite, when I did this I got an extra 10 fans in a day because you get your profile avatar posted on the donate page.

Where does the stumble traffic come from?

If you have a page you want to promote on SU then it’s a good idea to understand exactly where the traffic is coming from. I have seen a lot of posts and discussions (mainly from Digg lovers) remarking on the fact SU traffic is not targeted and people leave as soon as they visit the page. This is not the case.

1. You will get traffic from the “Stumble!” button on the toolbar that you download, this is the least desirable of all the traffic, its random as far as I can tell so people that come across your page will not be looking for anything in particular, if it’s a good subject you may receive a few additional “thumbs up” but that’s it.

2. The good traffic comes from your friends and fans. When you stumble a new page and review it and you have a good reputation and a genuine fan base you will get targeted traffic from your friends and fans and almost certainly get the page reviewed and thumbed up – this will in turn make your fans fans see the same story and so on. You can see on the diagram below how the traffic works. This was also posted on a previous post.

3. The SU buzz pages list the most popular stumbles per day, other websites, as mentioned before link to these and use them as content, traffic can be high from this if you’re lucky!

Is StumbleUpon traffic maintainable?

The simple answer is yes! The majority of my traffic originates from SU and is maintained. This is because of the following reasons:

1. My friends are all genuine stumblers and share the same principles of StumbleUpon that I do, this means everyone who looks at pages I submit will be interested in the topic to a degree.
2. If you get a good reception when you initially submit a page you know your content is of good quality, therefore next time a like minded person gives you a thumbs up, the process will start again. I often get peaks in stories 2-3 weeks after I Stumble them.
3. You get lucky and a “Stumble Whale” - before you ask a “SW” is a person who has been on SU for a long time and played by the rules every day. They keep their friends a respected crowd, many of them other whales. One “thumbs up” from them and you’re laughing!
4. If you want to keep the traffic constant over the months it’s important that you keep people interested in your profile, if you have one of your websites pages stumbled and then not another for a few months you may not see the kind of traffic you would get if you received new stumbles every week. The traffic from the new stumbles give people the opportunity to look at your profile and look at related stumbles.

What about the sites which charge me for stumbles?

It’s money down the drain I’m afraid. As mentioned before you will only succeed in SU if you are genuine and make the effort. Paying $5 for 200 stumbles will get you 200 page views and nothing else, don’t do it please!

I’ve had a lot of people ask me - Why is SU so good? - Where does the traffic come from? Will the traffic be targeted? Plus another 101 questions, so I decided to do a bit of explaining (with diagrams woohoo!!).

Why is SU so good?

SU is different from the other players in the online social industry. People as a whole can customize what news they can see on their profile page each day. By becoming a fan of another stumbler you will in effect receive updates each time they stumble a page. I obviously like to know about SE’s and SEO so most of my friends or people I call a fan are in that industry. So you can see that in all other social bookmarking scenarios you are not targeting a themed audience but “the whole world” - In SU you make your audience whatever you need them to be - very unique indeed.

Where does the traffic come from?

Like I mentioned I have created a simple flow chart thingy (excuse the technicalities) - First is a simple explanation of how you actually get visits to your website from SU:

Don’t be fooled into thinking however you can sign up to SU and add 10,000 friends and you will start getting more traffic than God himself - it ain’t gunna happen! You need to create a reputation online, review fans stumbles if you genuinely are impressed, PM people, generate a tue fan base, this way you know everytime you stumble a page your fans will click on it!

For a more detailed look on how you get big volumes of SU traffic:

I hope this helps people understand a bit more what SU is really about and how it works.

This time last year there was no doubt on every good seo work person that providing high quality content on a website would add great value to a website. Is this still true today?

I believe that providing good quality content on a website should be standard regardless of your seo strategy. A website should have information and content that people want to read and will enjoy reading, no question. Doing this 12 months ago would by all accounts have been a key component in any seo strategy, providing new content would keep the search engines hungry for more, open up new opportunities for long tailed keywords and generally help with your overall SERP positions.

It seems to me that the value of updated content has been reduced as of late. Maybe this has been introduced because of the sheer volume of bloggers out there that update their sites with very low quality updates in the hope to get on the good side of Google? Or perhaps bloggers are re-posting existing articles with very little changed from the original therefore reducing the importance of the content?

So if content is no longer key, what is its value?

As mentioned before you should have good quality content no matter what, this should be for the benefit of your readers or customers, not for Google or other search engines. You will still see an increase of traffic but not as high as once realised, plus your primary keywords will move very little (if any) up the SERPS.

What is key then?

Unfortunately in Google I believe that the websites visibility through backlinks still plays a big part of your overall positions for keywords. Even more so now the majority of people have been slapped on the wrist for “buying links” or paying for blog posts. Developing new and effective ways of generating natural links and maintaining and increase of these links should now be a major part of any seo strategy, this is unfortunately easier said than done.

I think it goes without saying that SERPS today move more regularly than ever at this point of time. If, like me you manage a large number of clients seo campaigns then you have to be on top of your keyword positions.

A recent blog post by Rand over at Seomoz has inspired me to share my metrics and layouts of performing such a task.

Identify your keywords

No doubt that if you have an original tender or you will involved with the initial seo start up of a new website that you will somewhere have a list of keywords. I identify the keywords and rank them based on priority. For example if I was to identify keywords for a “Classic Cars” website words such as “Classic Cars” would be a top priority, words such as “Car restoration” might be a third priority.

Now the keywords listed should be made up of targeted products or services so you attract the “paying” visitors. Of course if you are not out to make money you still want the most relevant traffic swinging in your direction. These keywords can either be identified through a company tender or information pack or using Overtures keyword search tool (based on search volumes).

Which search engines to look at?

With a list of keywords at the ready and implemented through the usual channels you should choose the correct search engines to keep an eye on. As we are based in the UK and primarily target UK based consumers we use: Google UK, Yahoo! Uk, Msn UK and sometimes Ask UK. Obviously if you service or product is available at a global level then a .COM route is more appropriate, although harder to rank.

Look closer than you originally think.

Don’t use automated tools, I find their results to be inaccurate at the best of times, do it all manually. This should involve typing in your keywords and searching through the pages looking for the specified domain. Please remember to look for pages other than your “homepage” sometimes these can rank higher for long tailed keywords. Personally I will look on the first 10-15 pages, anything after that is in my opinion “not ranked”.

Frequency

Obviously it depends on the amount you are getting paid as to your resource management. I check the majority of clients once a week for their primary keywords and every 2 weeks for the others. I did originally start at once a month but found there is a lot to be learned if you look at the SERPS more often.

What is the point?

Doing this will give you a better understanding as to what works on your seo campaigns, especially with link building. You will at times see great increases and reductions on your SERPS positions. Personally I learn a lot, plus can even work out at what time of the month a website will achieve its best SERP positions (there does seem to be an emerging pattern – more tba) which is important to use when developing an SEM campaign. Knowing your positions will keep you up-to-date with your industry competitors, their positions are just as important as you.

So by this point everyone knows that Google has indeed penalized sites that sell links on their site. If you didn’t know that – “welcome to earth” (as in Independence Day the film – for you film buff’s). So you would assume that if you sell links directly from your site under a “advertise here” and you display your advertising rates online this should have gone against you? Well for most people they don’t have the time or resources to fiddle around with creating all the necessary HTML/PHP whatever to cater for this service so they use Text Link Ads.

I’ve used them on some of my early creations and to be frank, have made a little money from them (they take half your much needed money for their troubles). So after the update you would think that a site that “Sells Links” should in fact be punished like the rest? Well this is where it all gets a bit strange – and un-Google like.

If you do a search on Google for “Buy Text Links” or “Text Link Ads” by Google’s own standards they “should” provide the most relevant content to the user who makes the search. Text Link Ads is their name so by all accounts they should be positioned number one for that term. They are not, in fact they don’t appear in the index at all…strange? Very! What’s even stranger to me is that if you log on to the site it remains, or possibly they have increased their PR to PR7.

Search Results for “Text Link Ads“:

Notice the Page Rank:

Getting confused?

So Google have removed Text Link Ads from their Index but have ranked the website a PR 7. I have to be honest but it seems a bit strange, if Google are going to punish websites that sell links surely a site devoted to selling other website’s link positions should also have its Page Rank reduced? I would have thought so, obviously being removed from the index is worse but this should be explained. This could support some theories that PR is being phased out all together? Perhaps, but this is certainly a strange situation, watch this space I say.