This is something that has been on my mind for quite some time now and I wasn’t sure 100% if it was true or not, until now.

For those of you that know me I love StumbleUpon, it provides great on going traffic if you setup and maintain your profile correctly – see my post “Unofficial StumbleUpon guide”. Occasionally my blog posts would get stumbled by someone else for whatever reason but I considered SU a means of letting people know when I have a new post out, in case people have not subscribed via RSS.

Last month, one morning I typically wrote a post and used my usual means of promotion, or so I thought. Later that day I checked to see if any reviews had been made on the submission and to my surprise there was no listing visible. I thought perhaps there had been a mistake when I submitted, so I tried a different technique and looked on my profile again, still no submission – so what am I dong wrong? – Nothing at all is the answer here.

When I now try and submit my own blog content the process appears to work, when you later check it returns this result:

So why has this happened?

I suppose it’s to stop people gaming the system, which I don’t really consider it doing as the content is different each time. I have had friends get URL’s band in Digg before simply because they submitted the same domain too many times so I’m quite glad that the domains don’t get banned entirely.

If anyone else has started to have this problem too please use the poll below, it will be interesting to see the results:

I have been looking closely at the relation between new blog posts along side my primary targeted keywords, even if they are not directly related. It’s safe to say that if you right about a subject i.e. “Page Rank” then for a week or two you might see some temporary search engine position increase for that keyword.

What I have seen over the last few weeks is that if you write a popular blog piece then non direct related keyword phrases can also achieve a boost. On the 4th of February I wrote a successful piece of link bait – 25 websites all SEO’s should know. I received plenty of additional backlinks and got around 8k unique visitors as a result.

The week that followed I naturally saw an increase of organic traffic as a result of the post, but surprisingly I found myself at position 6 on Google for the phrase “SEM blog”. Since that discovery the position has since moved down a bit (to the second or third page). In that time frame I received around 600 unique visitors for that term alone. That phrase is not mentioned at all in the original post and the backlinks I received did not use the phrase as an anchor – so why an increase in a keyword phrase that has not been targeted?

As well as an increase in backlinks and blog posts the post was heavily visible on social networks, bookmarking sites, which lead to an overall increase in my blog traffic. By writing a post on a related (although not directly associated) topic can lead to your blog/website achieving an overall increase in search positions. My total organic traffic increased by around 30% for a period of 2 weeks.

To me this just adds to my argument that websites in 2008 should use the blog platform more than ever to help with organic listings.