I was just checking out my stats and was amazed to see that they included quite a few visits from StumbleUpon. I had heard before that the traffic that comes from sites like Digg and Stumbleupon is not high quality traffic.

Well yesterday, a comment was left by Debra Hammel, who has quite a few projects going on and is an example of the quality traffic that comes from Stumbleupon, which is how she came to be on Pixelheadonline.com. We actually spent the better part of the morning communicating via twitter, mybloglog.com, email, and two blogs; this one and her blog TheDeblog.com. I will be reviewing a couple of her projects in upcoming posts, but in the meantime, stop on by her blog or her mybloglog profile to check out her projects that have received quite a bit of notice from the Press.

Anyway, I recently started stumbling not only sites that I come across while surfing, but I also stumble posts after I publish them. On my last Top commentors post, I stumbled all the individually highlighted posts as well. I took this from David of Pureblogging.com who does a weekly post of all the top commentors on his blog.

I really am just starting to use sites like Stumbleupon and Digg, so if you have any suggestions for their use or disuse, please let me know.

Updates and other Stumbleupon Resources:

• I just came across Meg of Dipping into the Blog Pond’s post entitled Beginners Guide to StumbleUpon when doing research for my post about the new Social Networking SEO Site Sphinn. Be sure to read Aaron’s Comments below as well.
• Have You Checked Out StumbleUpon?
• Just came upon 17 POWER Tips for StumbleUpon Beginners and
• How To Get MORE StumbleUpon Traffic – A Guide For Beginners… And Experts

I have not had much time of late to surf the blogs of Mybloglog, but I have had some invites and messages from a few interesting sites. Here are two of which peeked my interest.

A really groovy site The SuperCool School will be a Web2.0 Education site that has a super cool educational Dream to “give the Power of Education to the People” Want to learn about programing take a class. Have an area of expertise, why not teach a class. As a former educator, I joined and will be very interested and eager to be part of this educational community.

Mybloglog member “Mother” had visited my site and as I often do, I wanted to see what Mother’s site was about. Loved reading her Chitlin’s and Chopsticks blog, but was really interested in the other site she has on her Mybloglog profile Color-Ons for Kids, which is the blog for Color-ons.org, an organization that sells a product that allows kids to make tshirst with crayon colors pictures. Groups such as schools or churchs that want to do a fundraiser can use these for fund raiser all while letting kids create something that they will get to wear. I know my daughter would love to make one of these. If your looking for a potential fund raiser for children, check it out.

If you know of an interesting blog that I should check out please let me know by leaving a comment either here or on Mybloglog page.

Also if you would like to receive emails of future post, please sign up below. Using Feedburner to subscribe and more importantly unsubscribe to a site is very easy.

Mybloglog Favorites for the Week. I visited quite a few sites, but only two stick out in my memory. (I am getting quite old and Alzheimer’s does run in my family)

The first Pixelopera is a really groovy picture blog by Tamar Weinberg. I found my self browsing through the site for quite a while. Her photos are stunning. With her assistance, I am sure I will be making a new camera purchase in the near future. Oh, thanks for telling me what the EXIF file is and how to locate it.

One Million Love Messages is a blog that has a goal to post as it name indicates, one million love messages. Visitors to the site, email a love message that they would like to post. I myself helped them out a little. Lizzie was very delighted. Stop by and read some messages of love, and if you are so inclined, email them a message for the one you love. Here is the link to one of my love notes about or to Lizzy.

I know that there were more sites that I visited, but these were two great sites that I really thought had promise not only for myself, but also for others. I owe you one next week.

Link building is an integral part of my job as an SEO Technician(one of my many jobs), and the ability to do it correctly is a skill that is can be easily learned, but does take quite a lot of time to do correctly. There are many resources readily available on the Internet about this very topic. So any knowledge that I may have is already out there. So in a series of posts, I shall, with the help of Lizzie Bean, give instructions on the proper way to conduct manual link building, as opposed to using an automated link building program that submits your site to numerous other sites, such as directories, blogs, FFA pages, and link farms automatically.

Manual Link building does take time, but it is well worth the effort. Web masters or site owners should be weary of Link building deals which promise 100′s of links for a package deal. Often times these link packages will submit your site to numerous directories, using one or two variations of the link text or anchor text(the words that when clicked on take you to another site, page, or location on the same page)as well as limited site descriptions. Anyway the worst thing that can happen is your site is it gets banned or dropped to oblivion in the SERP’s, so enough with the warnings here is….

Link Building Part 1

by Lizzie Bean,PixelHead

Link building instructions

The purpose of link building (obtaining links that point to a website) is to increase search engine rankings for specific keyword phrases. You should get links in directories that link to yours or your client’s sites using a variety of keyword phrases that the client wants to rank for in Google as the anchor text of the link.

Definitions:

Directories – websites that are organized by categories. Each category has links to websites that are relevant to the subject of the category.

Anchor text – this is the text that is linked. When submitting sites to directories the Title that is submitted is usually the anchor text for the link.

Submitting a site -the process of filling out the form on a directory that allows the editors of the directory to review the site being submitted to the directory. To submit a site you will need to find a “Submit Site”, “Add URL” or a similar link/button.

Page Rank (PR) – this is a rating system that Google uses to determine the link popularity of a website. PR ranges from 1  10. The higher the PR on a site – the better. To see the PR – you must install the Google toolbar. PixelHead recommends downloading Firefox with the Google toolbar, which can be done by clicking on the icon in the left side bar. PixelHead gets 1 dollar for every sign up. If you have never used Firefox, give it a try, many unique features make it a great resource, all while being much less prone to viruses than Explorer.

SERP- search engine results page.

SEO- Search Engine Optimization deals with making a site so that it will rank well in the SERP’s. Broken down into two basic parts- on page optimization and off page optimization(link building)

SEM-Search Engine Marketing deals with a variety of methods to get your site out there using the search engines via natural search and paid search.

Stop Words-Words that the Search Engines(Google) ignores. Read this Search Engine Watch post about Stop Words for more info about them, and here is a nice list of Stop words.

What you will need to get started:

1. a list of keyword phrases that you want your site to rank for(future post)
2. a list of description text that will correspond to each keyword phrase
3. a list of sub-pages of the site that each keyword phrase can link to WHEN sub-pages are allowed for submissions.
4. a list of directories to submit your site(Google “directory list”) or visit these two resources below.

• A great directory resource, DirectoryCritic has an ever growing list of directories. Voting on directories by those who submit allows for the better directories to place higher on the list, which kind of makes it a web 2.0 site for directory owners/submitters.
• Another great site for link building resources is Info Vilesilencer, which to quote the DirectoryCritic, is “The original SEO friendly directory list. Dan has played a key role in the SEO directory revolution and the development of the “search engine friendly” directory standards that we all use today”. And according to the Info.Vilesilencer blog, the biggest update to the sites directory list was just made.

Read Link Building Part 2

MyBlogLog 3 favorites from the past week.

	Love the purple guy, visit the site by clicking the dancing purple guy. Then when you are on RandyRandom’s site, click the purple dot and visit cool random sites. Love animated avatars, and this one is one of my favorites. Kind of reminds me of the Blue Man Group, except he is purple.
	One of my favorite Avatars to watch…spent more than several minutes. The Luz De Luma website is not in English, but the photo’s need not be in English. Quite remarkable. Apparently the site has won many awards.
	An awesomely exotic blog with some very vivid pictures. Makes me want to take a trip to Spain…hmmm. Visit the Mediterranean Garden Spain Blog and also check out their other two blogs as well, which all tell the story of this couple who relocated to Spain. I am not exactly sure where they relocated from, but I believe by the looks of the Mediterranean Garden blog and their other two blogs, that they made the right decision.