StumbleUpon is often described as a discovery search engine that finds the best on the web and delivers 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.
Unlike popular search engines like Google and Bing, StumbleUpon doesn’t crawl the web with a spider/bot adding pages to it’s index. Instead it relies on users submitting sites and providing ratings as a means to index. Similar, to the Like or +1 buttons you can add a StumbleUpon button to a website to make it easier for people to ‘thumbs up’ a site or rely on the user to have the relevant tool bar installed on their browser.
When submitting a ‘thumbs up’ you are able to provide title, category, tag and language information helping the site to be optimised within StumbleUpon. Much cheaper than deploying a spider I think!!
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. It’s kind of like walking through a library full of books on specific subjects where you can randomly pick a book off the shelf and take a peek inside.
So what is the potential use when looking to drive traffic to your site?
Note that these ratings have little effect on rankings as there an no backlinks generated, all links are NOFOLLOW. However, this could be a method to improve visibility of your brand/message so that when users are finally searching on Google they recognise you, almost like a radio/tv campaign.
The first thing I would suggest you do is add a StumbleUpon button to your site, this way you give yourself the best chance to get a ‘thumbs up’.
For SME’s, 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.
There is even a way to sponsor your site on StumbleUpon and may be something I will cover in future.
If you have any questions do not hesitate to ask below in the comments box.
