Search Advisory

Yesterday I covered Delicious, which is a true social bookmarking site.  While I’ve lumped StumbleUpon into the same category, it really works quite differently.  Users download the StumbleUpon Firefox add-on and tell StumbleUpon what types of sites they’re interested in – there are business-like categories (technology, news) and fun categories (music, arts).  Clicking on the “Stumble” button on the toolbar will serve up websites that tie in to your interests.  This can be an interesting and easy way to discover new sites on the web (and potentially waste time!).

The toolbar also has “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” buttons.  Hitting them will tell StumbleUpon to serve up more sites like the one you’re on, or fewer.  Sites with lots of thumbs ups get served up more often (there’s that “social media popularity” thing again!).

The key to leveraging StumbleUpon for SEO purposes is to submit your site by navigating to it and then being the first person to hit the thumbs up button on the toolbar.  After doing that, you’ll be able to add a title (which becomes a link – and you can put search terms in the anchor text), reviews, and tags (more places for search terms).  You want to be the first person to “stumble” your site so you can control the title and tags!

Important benefit:  When a StumbleUpon user runs a search on Google, sites that have been stumbled will have a small, colorful StumbleUpon logo to the right of the listing.  If they have received any/many thumbs ups, they’ll also get one to five gold stars listed.  This is huge — among the drab text listings, the colorful logo and stars really draw your eye to these listings, increasing the chance that a searcher will click on them.  This alone is reason enough to submit your site to StumbleUpon, especially as the number of other users grows.

Note that StumbleUpon is mostly used by people for entertainment – at this point, business-oriented sites are not likely to receive a huge number of “stumbles”.  StumbleUpon does use “nofollow” tags, so supposedly it doesn’t pass along link juice.  I have my doubts – like Delicious, StumbleUpon is fast, easy and free to use, so it certainly can’t hurt, as long as it’s used appropriately.

Hint:  “Thumbs up” web pages that link to your site as well!  This may give them a boost, which may trickle down and help your site too.