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Health & Fitness

Using Stumble Upon for SEO and Inbound Traffic

StumbleUpon is often described as a discovery search engine that finds the best on the web and then delivers this to the user based on their personal browsing preferences. This is a free service also available on popular web browsers, and for download as an app on mobile devices.

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StumbleUpon doesn’t crawl the web in the same manner as most popular search engines. Instead it relies on users submitting sites and providing ratings. In a similar fashion to the Facebook ‘Like’ or Google ‘+1′ buttons, you can add a StumbleUpon button to your website to make it easier for people to ‘thumbs up’ a site.

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When submitting a ‘thumbs up’ you are able to provide title, category, tag and language information – which helps the site to be optimized within StumbleUpon.

As a user of StumbleUpon I find it incredibly useful when looking to discover fresh new content. Google results can sometimes be limited on certain topics and StumbleUpon provides a rich source of new sites.

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So how can StumbleUpon drive traffic to your site?

Note that these ratings have little effect on rankings as there are no backlinks generated. However this could be a method to improve visibility of your company and brand, so that users will now recognise you when they are searching for a related product or service on Google.

The first step I would suggest is to add a StumbleUpon button to your site – this way you give yourself the best chance to get a ‘thumbs up’.

Following this, for SMEs my advice is to build content around popular topics on the internet, add StumbleUpon buttons and see if this tool helps drive more traffic. Monitoring is vital to understand the full effect of this traffic and I would recommend installing Google Analytics.

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