IT Milk: entry

I recently became an avid fan of StumbleUpon, after having thought since its launch that it is merely a prog that helps bored people burn time. For those of you who don’t know what StumbleUpon is, it’s a plugin for your browser that allows you to randomly discover new websites. Through StumbleUpon, I find amusing and useful websites that I would have never found through a search engine.

To improve the user experience, you can vote for and against websites to push them down in the the stumble rankings. People who are either really bored or really dedicated also write reviews for the websites. Also, StumbleUpon has dozens of niche categories, so you can specify what type of websites you want to stumble upon.

So going forward to the main topic of this post, how can StumbleUpon help your SEO? I believe that StumbleUpon is the best and most entertaining way to find potential link partners for your websites. After a certain amount of googling for relevant websites from whom to ask links, you start hitting a limit where every other website afterward is a shitty website that died along with the dot com boom. So, instead, you get on StumbleUpon and choose some topics that seem to be relevant to your website and start flipping from page to page as you keep record of nice potential link requests.

Here are some things to keep in mind while using StumbleUpon for SEO:

• Narrow your stumbling by choosing topics that are somewhat relevant to your website.
• Go to your Profile Preference on the StumbleUpon website, go to the section called Stumbling and change your Filtering Options and unclick Audio, Flash, Images, PDF’s, and Videos. Those things may provide entertainment value on your own time, but they’re not going to help you find links.
• In the StumbleUpon toolbar, enable the search bar and you can narrow your stumbles even further with particular keywords.
• Do the StumbleUpon community a favor and use the voting and reporting (404/spam) features while you’re stumbling. This will improve your own stumbling experience in the long run.

On a side note, another off-shoot of StumbleUpon that is useful for internet marketing is a website called StumbleXchange, where you can trade positive stumbles with other users to boost stumble traffic to your own website. Awesome concept, but the database on that website is really sluggish…

Now go stumble like a madman and find some links!