in SEO, Web

Increasing Content Visibility With Stumbleupon

Since the inception of the internet, “surfing” has been the preferred verb for discovering new “stuff” online. And while search has dominated the way that most people use the internet to, well, search, Stumbleupon has become the go to place for surfing. Never heard of Stumbleupon? Here’s some excerpts from how they describe themselves:

StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites.

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StumbleUpon uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages that friends and like-minded stumblers have recommended.

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Using search engines to locate relevant content typically means hunting through pages of results. Rather than searching for quality web sites, StumbleUpon members are taken directly to web sites matching their personal interests and preferences.

And internet users seem to really like this system of discovery:

Stumbleupon: The Life Cycle of a Web Page
Infographic by Visual News

To me, Stumbleupon represents the closest thing we have to more true democrat web discovery. While other social plaforms (facebook likes, google +1’s) influence visibility on those networks, out of network social sharing on those platforms isn’t as foundational as it is to Stumbleupon. In other words, social sharing and voting on content is the very nature of Stubmbleupon.

Stumbleupon is also a very good barometer for testing content strategies. Basically, if your content isn’t very good, you will know about it rather quickly.