Not sure what that did to any link popularity that was gained by adding stories to Netscape.com, but hey, everybody makes changes from time to time, so I continued to participate at Propeller.com.

Everything was just great. It was simple to add stories or blog posts and share them with all of the friends you made there.

Then someone at AOL must of read a book like; “How to Ruin a Social Networking Website for Dummies.”

For those of you for whom this book is not available to you at your favorite bookstore, here are the 3 steps.

Step 1. Put in nofollow tags so none of the people who join your website gets any link love.

Step 2. Get really, really strict and ban some a lot of the people who join your website for no apparent reason and make sure you do not give them a reason for doing so.

Step 3. Take everything that was simple and complicate it beyond all recognition. Add extra steps to submitting stories and add even more steps for sharing it with others.

That is the AOL method of killing a social bookmarking website.

Want an easy way to bookmark and share your blog posts and stories where we do not use nofollow tags? Visit Blogs.pn!

First of all, you can read my post about the number of people who actually use search engines here, then you can read my post about google optimization and social bookmarking here.

Then you can read more about the debate and two more sides to the story about social media vs search engines here.

I think that social bookmarking and social networking are in the baby stages with much more to come. There will be niche social networking websites that cater to specific industries and those will be much more relevant to both searchers and advertisers than search engines are today.

Social networking is the google killer everyone was asking about. it is not another search engine that will beat google. it’s social networking.

Check out our Social Bookmarking Service. If you do not have the time to do social networking, we do it for you.

If you own an online store and you do not add informative articles or operate a blog, you are not really a content publisher. Adding articles or a blog or both makes you one. I’ll explain the advantages of being a content publisher in a moment.

Link popularity is important. If you are not publishing content then you have to go out and buy links or use link building strategies like web directory submissions. Paid links can be expensive and have ongoing costs. Not all web directories give you really good links.

When you add articles to your website, you are publishing content. When you add a blog to your website, you are publishing content daily. With either of these, you can use social bookmarking to go out and promote your content. This brings in direct traffic and will increase your link popularity.

With paid links and web directory submissions, you may benefit for awhile then have google discount those links at some point and then you are back at square one.

Promoting your content is a much more legitimate way of building links that will never be discounted. It’s all relevant to your topic. You are promoting actual content you are creating. You are following the best practices promoted by the search engines.

There are other ways to promote your content. Creating videos and posting teasers on youtube that prompt the viewer to visit your site for the rest of the video or for more videos is another way to get links by promoting your content.

Content is king. When links gained importance with google, many SEOs began posting that link building was more important than content. But building links BECAUSE of your content trumps paid links and url submissions to directories hands down, meaning that content is still king, even when it comes to link building.

To discuss how to build real links to your website through generating and promoting great original content, call us at 786-317-8774.

There is SEO or search engine optimization and there is Google Optimization. There is a big difference between the two. Matt Cutts is a really smart guy and a lot of people read his blog. When interviewed the stories have titles like “Matt Cutts on SEO”. But in reality, he works for Google and the story should read “Matt Cutts on Google Optimization”.

We all know that more searches are performed at Google than any other search engine or portal. But a good SEO Professional will tell you that putting all of your eggs into just one basket is a bad idea, even if the basket is really big.

SEO is more than just optimizing your website for the Google Search Engine. You want traffic from multiple sources, not just one. Can you survive on just Google traffic alone? Yes. You can survive on bread and water for awhile too, but do you want to?

MSN Traffic converts higher for some websites than Google Traffic does and vice versa. Yahoo traffic converts higher than either one of those for some products and services. Then there is Ask, AOL, Dogpile, Alta Vista, and many others out there. Some are just compilations of results from other search engines and some have their own way of rankling sites. You want traffic coming in from all of them, not just Google.

You can also get quality traffic from email marketing, advertising on websites that target the same audience as you, press releases, article marketing, web directory submissions, and more. All of these sources can bring you more traffic and sales.

Number of Searches VS Number of People

On SEO Blogs and Forums you see people arguing that Google has 60% or 70% or 80% of the traffic and the numbers they use change with each post they make. There is a huge problem with their numbers.

More experienced Internet users generally use Google, while newer users tend to use MSN, Yahoo, or AOL. How do I know? When you bought your last new computer, what was the default home page? More than likely it was MSN. Yahoo seems to become many people’s home page as well because of their advertising and marketing strategies combined with Yahoo Chat and Yahoo Mail. If the user chose AOL as their internet service provide as millions of people have, then AOL becomes their home page.

Newer users do not tend to change their home page as much as you might think. Many don’t even know they can or know how to do it. So they use the search feature found on their home page.

Now add to that, more experienced users search more times per day than less experienced users. SEO Persons, Web Designers, Marketers, and other Techies do as many as 20-30 searches or more per day. Researchers, Writers, Teachers, Professors, and others may even search more times than that per day.

Newbies or part time Internet users would consider 10 searches in one day a lot. Many of them likely search way less times than that per day.

So Google has, well let’s say, 70% of all searches done in search engines. But each person who uses Google searches an average of 10 times per day to use a low figure.

Yahoo has about 15% of the searches made each day. Let’s say their users search an average of 5 times per day.

Now let’s take a sampling of 100,000 searches. Many more than that are done each day, it’s just a round figure to work with. 70,000 of those made at Google and 15,000 of those made at yahoo. That would mean the 70,000 searches at Google were performed by 7,000 people. The 15,000 searches at yahoo would represent 3,000 people. So Google would have 2 1/3 more people searching than yahoo.

But when you say 70% of the searches vs. 15% of the searches, it makes it sound like Google represents 4 2/3 more people than yahoo. The Number of searches vs. the number of actual people searching tells two completely different stories.

Traffic from other websites, web directories, article marketing, press releases, smaller search engines and directories, and more are not counted when people talk about these percentages either. This means if you factor in all of the other traffic sources, Google becomes even smaller in terms of actual number of people.

What About Social Bookmarking?

Now if you want to really talk about percentages, the growth of social bookmarking and social networking has really changed the numbers. Many people today find what they are looking for at social bookmarking websites and for many these sites are now their home page.

Millions of people are using Technorati, Digg, Delicious, Mixx, Sphinn, Facebook, UAN.ME, Blog Catalog, Bloglines, and other Social Networking and Blog Search Websites

So why is it when people compare searches done at Google, msn, and yahoo, don’t they include the number of searches done at social bookmarking sites in the equation?

The Internet is evolving. Social Bookmarking is becoming the primary source for information for millions of users.

I’ll close this by saying once again; do not gamble all of your resources on just one source of traffic. Do not ignore Google because more searches are done there than any other search portal, but diversify your SEO Strategy to combine all of the different sources of traffic if you want to guarantee the stability of your online business.

Need social bookmarking done for you? Click here.

The reason I wanted to discuss this is that many companies expect all seo people to be like other vendors. A lot of seo companies cater to this by providing pretty charts and graphs and testimonials of nominal value and even suspect sources.

A lot of really good seo experts do not have the time to show you a lot of graphs and charts. They don’t really have time to do “case studies” and record them for you to look at. And if an seo company is providing all of those things, how much of what they charge you goes into that instead of actual seo work.

We get so much business, much of it repeat business because of the results we get for people, that we sometimes cannot provide you with a pretty chart. We do update you on things like link popularity, search engine saturation, search engine ranklings for your keywords and phrases, and on conversions.

Conversions. Sales. That is where our focus is. We don’t cost our clients money. We make them money.

Here are the questions Marty Weintraub says you should ask an seo company before hiring them;

Dear [Prospective SEM Vendor],

Thank you for entering into a dialog with us as we vet potential SEM vendors for [Name of Company]. In order to keep the process as streamlined as possible, please take a few minutes to respond to this questionnaire. Our goal is to make sure we are a right fit for each other before getting too far along in the process, and to make sure we do not waste your time.

The answers can be as detailed or short as you deem appropriate. We look forward to the process of getting to know your company better. We’re happy to read articles on-topic originating from your agency, if you provide the URL in any question’s answer. Thank you in advance for your efforts.

A very nice way to phrase the letter, even noting that the seo person’s time is valuable as well as your own.

Pay Per Click

Is anyone in your firm AdWords Qualified or a Yahoo Ambassador?

Taking the time to become adwords qualified means they do care about their business, but passing the test is not exactly rocket science. You can even use google’s help files to answer the questions. So the value of this question might be that you want to see if they took the time to do it, but it does not mean they really know more than anyone else. It does prove they at least read the help files though.

Does your agency have a designated Google or Yahoo representative?

You mean that someone who knows how to do seo or ppc for google does not also know how to do it for yahoo? This is like saying I need to hire someone that knows how to do metatags and someone else to write alt tags.

What is your agency’s billing model for PPC: percentage of spend, percentage of revenue, monthly fee, hybrid?

Do you have a monthly PPC minimum spend or fee?

What method does your firm use to manage PPC: by hand, by automation (what tool), hybrid?

Do you use our credit card, your agency’s or another method? How will you invoice us?

What reports do you typically send clients, and at what interval?

What PPC channels are you experienced with (Google, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.)?

How does your agency measure PPC conversion and ROI?

Is it in your vocabulary to do multivariate landing page or ad message testing?

Those are all great questions to ask a ppc company before hiring them.

How much PPC spend-cash do you handle annually?

None of your business. I would not answer that way, but in reality this is not a question that is likely to get you a straight answer or an honest one. You may not get a straight answer because of the reason I gave and how will you check to see if the company you are thinking of hiring really does as much business as they tell you they do?

Please submit 2 short PPC case studies highlighting success.

Please submit 1 short PPC case study highlighting failure.

I would show a clients the results we get for clients that have approved their information being shared. Otherwise I have no time to do case studies. My case studies are done as I provide services for clients. Every job is unique. I can show you 100 case studies that were successful but none of them would have anything to do with the performance we get for you.

Those case studies sound more like something a company that uses the same plan for everyone would provide for you. If they have a one-size-fits-all approach to ppc, you aren’t likely to become a case study they will show future potential clients unless it’s under the failure category.

Please submit 2 PPC client-references.

I’d ask for more than 2.

Organic Optimization

What link-building tactics and methods will be employed?

Does your agency have a content creation practice, or will you guide us in building out our content?

Since content is the real SEO, any seo company should be providing the content or be outsourcing it to a reliable content provider. We create our own content for our clients and provide content to several seo companies because they know they can count on us for good, original, optimized content that helps convert sales.

How do you measure organic prominence in light of Personalized Search?

What keyword research tools do you use?

How does your agency measure organic conversion and ROI?

What methods will be used to mine competitive intelligence about our competitors?

What is the billing model for organic-related services? (retainer, hourly, flat monthly fee, etc.)

Those are all good questions.

Do you test organic landing page performance with PPC?

And that one is an excellent question. Any seo company should be testing landing pages with ppc and then tweaking them for performance.

What steps do you take to insulate clients from becoming too dependent on Google?

Doing proper organic seo means you target all of the search engines, not just google. Google may not even have the best conversion rate for a particular client’s products or services. Never put all your eggs in one basket is an old phrase because it has value.

Please submit 2 short organic case studies highlighting success.
Please submit 1 short organic optimization case study highlighting failure.

Anybody who writes an article about how to choose an seo company will always tell you to look for things that they provide to make themselves seem like the better choice. So, again with the case studies. I suppose the writer does them so he is telling you everyone should.

Please submit 2 organic optimization client-references.

Again, more than 2 would be better. And I have questions to add to this list that most seo companies do not want you to ask.

Can your company show me websites they own that sell something besides web services that make a profit? If they have never sold products and services other than what they are trying to sell you, or if they have never built websites that make money from affiliates if that is what they are to build for you, how can they know how best to sell your products?

How much actual offline and online sales experience does the person who will be doing my SEO have? Can you provide proof? If they do not have a lot of sales experience to go with their technical seo skills it won’t matter whether or not they get you a good search engine ranking. Being able to sell is more important than being able to get you a top listing in google.

Being able to do both is optimal. I personally have 33 years of sales experience, 12 of those years online. I have driven tons of traffic to affiliate programs and converted sales. I have websites that sell products and services other than seo that make a good profit. My very first business online was in 1995, buying, selling, and appraising domain names and sold more than 600 of my own domain names for a profit and sold more than that for my clients.

Use someone that has experience making money online. Many people have started an seo business based on the fact that the seo business is profitable. And it is the only business they were ever in on the web. No matter how many ebooks they read and how many matt cutts blog posts they read, nothing replaces actual experience.

Social Media

What social media channels are you currently active in for clients? (StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook, etc.)

Give examples of how those channels might be used to bolster the overall SEM effort.

Both good questions.

What reputation monitoring tools will be used?
What is the frequency and substance of your reputation reporting?

Those two questions should be in their own category unless the writer believes that all reputation management is done through social media. Reputation management is a whole different animal and there are a lot of tools used for it, social media being only one of them.

What is your experience with open source blogging software like WordPress

What are your typical non-blogging uses of blog-style software?

Both good questions. Marty undestands the value of blogging and wordpress to seo so I definitely respect the fact that he is up-to-date on tools that you need to do proper seo and reputation management.

I would add to the questions about blogging if your seo company intends to use blogging as an seo tool.

Does your company provide hosting that is optimized for blogs? Can you make sure my blog is on a seperate C Class IP Address if it is to be an offsite blog?

Does your company handle the installation of wordpress for me? Even if I have a windows server?

Does your company handle all of the admin area setup such as proper permalink structure, the right plugins for my specific needs, and inserting a comprehensive ping list?

Does your company install the wordpress template and have a seo expert with knowledge about php go over the code in my wordpress template to make sure it is optimized and has no unnecessary or bloated code in it?

Does your company provide the daily original and optimized content my blog will need in order to be successful?

We do all of the above. Blogging for seo purposes is a lot more than just putting up a wordpress blog and doing a little social bookmarking. Read more about Business Blogging

Please submit 2 short social media case studies highlighting success.
Please submit 1 short social media case study highlighting failure.

Again with the case studies. Show me some verifiable client websites that rank well in more than just one search engine for their main key phrases.

General Vendor Qualifications

How many full-time employees are in the agency? What are their roles?

What if they have a virtual team that does piecework? What if they have all part-timers and all of them are excellent at what they do. This question seems pointless and doesn’t necessarily qualify or disqualify anyone as a good seo company. I could branch off another company tomorrow and hire 20 full-time employees. It wouldn’t prove I can make you money. It would raise the prices I have to charge you though.

What SEM conferences did you attend in the past year, and which do you plan to attend this year? (SES, PubCon, SMX, etc.)

And I really love this question. My answer: 0 and I don’t plan to attend any this year or next year either. Going to conferences doesn’t make anyone an seo guru. Watching videos and reading ebooks doesn’t qualify anyone to play around with a company’s income by managing their seo.

It does mean that the seo gurus who attend the conferences can all tell us who they lunched with at the latest seo conference in their blogs though. It means they can name-drop better than the rest of us.

I’m not saying attending one of these conferences is wrong. But let’s call it what it is. A trade show. Attending or even buying a booth at a trade show does not mean that person is more qualified than anyone else. It means they have more time on their hands or have enough of their client’s money that they can send someone to attend or have someone else working while they go meet and greet.

What SEM conferences have members of your staff spoken at, and which ones will your staff speak at this year?

What trade publications (online or paper) do members of your staff write for, and on what topics?

Again, if you have the time to do these things, that’s great. But it is not a question that will really help you know that you are hiring someone that can help you make more sales with your website.

Obviously, those that do have the time to attend conferences and write to trade publications will disagree. Most of the time I am so busy working on my client’s projects that I don’t even have time to finish my own websites, so I certainly don’t have time to run around marketing myself as the next Internet Guru.

Please submit 3 links to articles you or your employees have written.

I do try to take the time to write articles and my blogs, but sometimes that doesn’t even get done because my clients need me on their projects.

In which forums is your agency “known”? (SEW, Sphinn, Cre8asite, High Rankings, etc.)
Please provide links to your social media and forum profile pages.

Wow, having the time not only to attend seo conferences and trade shows, but also to write to trade publications, participate in forums a lot, and hang around on social networking sites qualifies someone to be an seo expert?

There are real seo experts that do have the time to do these things. So I’m not saying by doing them they are not an seo expert. What I am saying is that doing these things does not necessarily mean that they are an seo expert. So the questions about these things will not help you qualify someone as an seo expert.

What traditional business affiliations (BBB, Chambers of Commerce, etc.) does your firm have?

Not a requirement for an online business. A simple google search for the company will provide more ionformation than the fact they joined the BBB.

Are you a SEMPO member?

Not required and membership in sempo does not autmatically qualify someone to handle my seo needs. It’s a great place to network with all those guys you met at the last seo trade show though.

Does your agency have in-house programmers and designers, or do you outsource?

Good question.

If outsourcing, what are your partner-vendors’ URLs?

None of your business. I have seo companies that use our services as a content provider and other things, but that agreement is between us and them and it comes with nondisclosure agreements. So they are not going to give you my url nor should they.

What analytics applications, other than Google Analytics, are used?

Is there an in-house method to measure offline conversions (phone, etc.)?

What experience does your agency have in local/mobile?

All three of those are great questions.

The point is that if 10 seo company owners wrote the questions they thought you should ask an seo company before hiring them, you would not get the same questions recommended by any of them. There would be a few all agree on, but there would be major differences between them.

Marty Weintraub is owner and principal of AimClear, a search engine optimization (SEO) Internet marketing firm in Duluth and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Marty has been providing PPC (pay per click) and organic optimization to businesses in Minnesota since 2001.

Everyone learned seo in different ways. There are a lot of seo “experts” that are followers and not leaders though, as with any field of expertise. These people tend to read whatever their seo mentor writes and then they do that for all of their clients. They do not innovate or get creative. They follow a specific school of thought led by one well-known search engine marketing expert.

It does not mean they are bad seo companies to hire. They are following some standard practices that have a track record of success. So they can get you some decent results. They will help you keep up with your competitors.

The problem is that the web is constantly changing. You need a leader who innovates and knows when to be a little creative in their approach to seo to be ahead of the pack rather than to simply keep up.

SEO, Content, and Link Building Strategies that help you improve your bottom line

1. Stop Stabbing in the Dark – Keyword Intelligence

Start 2008 with some intelligent keyword analysis. Find out what your potential customers are searching for and create your keyword hit list. Don’t under estimate the value of long tail too – searchers are getting smarter and relying on longer keyword phrases to filter out irrelevant results.

I really like this tip and it can’t be repeated too often. Searchers are getting smarter and longer phrases are getting great results. You may have a list of keywords you have been targeting for a long time now, but it’s time to do new research and update your list so you can be ready to rock in 2008.

3. Search Engine Webmaster center Sign-ups

Since the search engines have been kind enough to provide site owners with free webmaster tools (i.e. Google Webmaster Center, Yahoo! Site Explorer, Live Search Webmaster portal), do yourself a favor and sign up. Verification is simple, and the indexing diagnostics and analysis should be a part of your regular monthly (or even weekly) reviews.

If you do not have time to monitor all of the stats or do not know how to analyze them, hire someone who does. We can do a monthly report for you for just $50 per month that includes all of the data you need to make smart decisions about your website and your marketing plan. >Click here to contact us regarding your monthly reporting service.

4. Liven up Your Link Building

Yes, confusion and controversy has reigned supreme in the link discussion over 2007, but one thing still remains – your links still drive your ranking. So in 2008, seek some serious link love.

Some social bookmarking can help your link love so get started if you haven’t already! This next one is my favorite tip of all time.

5. Commit to Creating Content

Top ranking is driven by fresh quality content.

Change that to fresh quality ORIGINAL content. PLR content will not help you. Software generated content will not help you. RSS feed content will not help you. Only quality original content will help.

Whether you choose to create the content on your site, or elsewhere with a link back – regularly created relevant content keeps the search engine spiders crawling your website.

A company blog in your website will help you do this. Want it done professionally? Hire a >Professional Blog Writer or Management Team.

To start with, take your keyword hit list and give all your existing content the once over. If you’ve got low keyword density (i.e. not many of your hit list keywords are in your web page text), it’s time to do some fresh copy writing.

Again, this needs to be high quality original website content. Hire a >professional website content writer to do this.

Once you’ve covered off the web page copy essentials, commit the rest of the year to creating new content on your website. Even a couple of keyword rich new pages per month will make a significant difference to smaller websites – and there’s no easier way to do this than with a blog (see: Embrace social SEO below)

I agree wholeheartedly. Social Media can no longer be ignored and adding daily content rather than twice per month will put you ahead of most of your competitors.

8. Get Social with Web 2.0 SEO

The last item on the SEO checklist for 2008 is the social web. It’s one of the greatest tools for SEO and as it generally costs no more than a bit of your time on regular basis – it is a must if you’re serious about your rankings. There’s a lot of social media to get lost in, so to focus your initial strategies, get started with the following:

1. Set-up your own blog: It’s a simple way to create new keyword rich and relevant content for your website and relatively simple to integrate.

2. Social bookmark all your content: many social bookmark services (i.e. del.icio.us) get crawled by the search engines and will provide some useful links back to your site.

3. Engage in the Industry Conversations: Make it a weekly ritual to visit your favorite industry blogs. Then on a regular basis actually contribute to the conversations by adding relevant useful comments. Engaging commenting not only builds your profile, but can also provide valuable links back to your website.

It’s called getting involved and embracing the web. In an offline business people attend tradeshows, attend meetings with their local chamber of commerce, and do other things that get them well-known in their community.

The web is no different. Get involved. Make friends. Attend Webinars. Join Forums. Join Social Networking Sites. Get involved in conversations on blogs. Be part of the Internet if you want to do well there.

Propeller.com is my drug of chopise when it comes to social bookmarking and networking. I’ll list my reasons here.

1. For the most part, except where religion and politics is concerned, people are not there to put down everyone else as I have seen at some social networking sites.

2. People actually communicate via the private messaging and other avenues. They don’t seem to be there just to bookmark their websites and blogs.

3. If you write a story that is inaccurate, people generally just correct you and let you know giving you a chance to respond. Of course there are always a few people in any community that look for opportunities to put other people down for their stories, but I don’t find that to be too common on propeller.

4. The administrators actually read what is on the site. They actually participate in the conversations and look at the comments made on stories.

5. The weekly wrapup is great! It’s like a newsletter and you can tell the person who writes it actually looked at the stories they include in it. It’s not just about statistics and votes. They even include so0me comments made by users.

I like blog catalog too and will post about it in the future, but I wanted to recap what i think of propeller.com and ask everyone which social bookmarking and social networking communities you are a member of and which ones you like and why.

It’s like the standard web business plan. No one should ever be surprised when this happens.

During the 90′s there were a lot of free email services. You signed up, gave everyone your cool new email address and the service was great! And better yet all free!

Then the day comes where you get an email saying that they are going to have to start charging for the service. Only $5 per month to help them with their expenses.

They know that if they have 10,000 email users, that at least 15% would rather pay than change their email address, find a way to store all those saved emails, etc. So 1500 x $5 equals $7500 per month and now they only need bandwidth for 1500 users rather than 10,000.

Facebook isn’t charging it’s users, but it does have a business plan you can accept or find another place to hang out on;

New Facebook ad program draws complaints
Feature publicizing their purchases is an invasion of privacy, users say

Picture from Craig Ruttle / AP file
Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg speaks to press and advertising partners in New York on Nov. 6. Two weeks after announcing a new marketing program, Facebook is facing complaints from some users who were surprised to find information about their online purchases added to their personal news feeds.

NEW YORK – Some users of the online hangout Facebook are complaining that its two-week-old marketing program is publicizing their purchases for friends to see.

Those users say they never noticed a small box that appears on a corner of their Web browsers following transactions at Fandango, Overstock and other online retailers. The box alerts users that information is about to be shared with Facebook unless they click on “No Thanks.” It disappears after about 20 seconds, after which consent is assumed.

Users are given a second notice the next time they log on to Facebook, but they can easily miss it if they quickly click away to visit a friend’s page or check e-mail.

StumbleUpon has many useful features. For starters, whenever one of your friends stumbles a new page, you’ll get a notice on the toolbar. A little red one will appear in the top left Stumble button, notifying you of the Stumble. All you have to do is click on the button and you’ll be taken to the Stumble to Stumble yourself.

Stumbling becomes much easier because you can one-click your Stumbles right from the toolbar. Thumbs up? Click the Thumbs Up button. Thumbs Down? Just click the Thumbs Down button. It’s that easy.

All these features are real cool, but they’re not the best thing about the Stumble toolbar. The best thing about the StumbleUpon toolbar is actually Google. Yep, the search engine Google.

If you have the StumbleUpon toolbar installed, every time you make a Google search you’ll see little icons beside the Title link on your SERPs telling you how many StumbleUpon reviews that website has. If any of your friends have Stumbled any of the results then you’ll see that too. All you have to do is click the little icons and you’ll be taken to StumbleUpon to see the reviews of the website. Then you can visit the site if it has good reviews.

So how can you use this to improve your own search positioning? Easy. Learn what Stumblers like and provide it. Savvy Stumblers will Stumble your website and every time someone searchers for your keywords they’ll see the little Stumble icons next to your website on the Google SERP – if they have the SU toolbar installed. Once a website has been Stumbled one time, it gets easier to Stumble for future Stumblers. The first Stumble adds a website to the StumbleUpon queue and anyone Stumbling at that point will have a chance to discover your website. For every new Stumble your website gets, the more likely you’ll get other Stumbles. By having SU icons next to your website on any Google SERP, you’re more likely to get additional Stumbles. And that’s when you know that you have an SUOd – StumbleUpon Optimized – website.