Lately, I've noticed StumbleUpon come up more often in my Google Analytics referrer stats and, since I haven't really used it as much as I should, I decided to play with it more often to increase the amount of StumbleUpon traffic to my blog. Well, during  my research, I found a very resourceful site called Nick’s Traffic Tips (check him out as he all types of free goodies for getting more traffic to your web properties!) and he has a Free Stumbles page. I thought it was a very cool idea and am doing it here on my blog as well to share the love! What Is StumbleUpon? For those who are unfamiliar with it, StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking and networking site, enabling people to interact with each other and build profiles. Because of these two unique aspects, StumbleUpon is a fantastic tool to ...

Building backlinks to your pages is an essential part of SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization) for two reasons. The first reason is that it helps your pages get indexed faster, which is very important because you want the search engines to find them as soon as possible and crawl them regularly. The second reason is that it helps your pages get higher search engine rankings for the keywords of your choice. The more backlinks you have, the better. Period. However, building backlinks can be a time-consuming, boring process. You can outsource the process to an agency and pay a lot of money OR you can do it yourself with SocialMonkee! SocialMonkee is an instant backlink builder allowing you to build 25 unique backlinks, every day, FREE! All links are on unique C-Class IP addresses ...

Need some new blog posts ideas or titles? Looking to tap into a new niche? Or maybe you're just not sure what you really want to search for but have a broad, general term to start with? Try Google's Wonder Wheel! It can at least help you think about some ideas very quickly. So What Is Google Wonder Wheel? Google Wonder Wheel (GWW) is a wheel of wonder so to speak (LOL) which shows related search terms in a visual wheel like display where you can narrow down into other search terms which in turn become more wheels! Really, it's a fancy way to view search results but is has great potential. See It In Action! Your turn... Have you used the Google Wonder Wheel? Tell us how! Please share UPDATE: A Google spokesperson has informed Search Engine Land that the Google Wonder Wheel feature has been taken offline. Read more about it here: The ...

People ask me all the time where I find images for my blog posts and I've been meaning to create a post describing how to do so. Well, look no further! I've found two video resources that explain extremely well what I do to find free killer blog images. As an aside, I'm one of those people who look at imagery (along with the blog title of course) to help me decide if I'm going to read a post or not becasue we all know that pictures are worth a thousand words. So check out the resources below and have fun finding those great images for your next blog posts! Resources

• Search Creative Commons
• Finding Images on Google
• Update: Marty has so graciously suggested a plugin called Photo Dropper, which searches for Creative Commons licensed photos and

So in the first and second parts of this series, you learned the basics of online reputation management and how to respond to bad publicity. This last part of the series directs you to some of the top monitoring tools you need to listen, learn, and interact with others about your brand. Even if you are one of the tiniest companies around, online reputation management (ORM) is one of the most important tasks you need to definitely add to your planner/calendar on a consistent basis. Monitoring Your Blog

• Technorati – Technorati is the leading blog search engine indexing more than a million blogs. It goes one step further and keeps track of influence, authority, and popularity of blogs.
• Google Blog Search – Google search engine for blogs.
• BlogPulse – BlogPulse is a search engine for blogs and an automated trend discovery system.