If you're a search marketer and you dabble at all in social media, there is one program you're probably already taking advantage of: StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon gives some great returns with a relatively small time investment. I've discussed StumbleUpon before, in the context of an interview with social media guru Neil Patel, but let's take a closer look at how it works...

With the StumbleUpon browser extension installed, with the click of a button you get sent to a random page. Once there, you can give the page a thumbs up or thumbs down and then move on to "stumble upon" the next random page. Think of it as channel surfing, but on the Web. You can select your categories of interest so that the random pages are more targeted to your tastes. You can leave a comment about what you like/dislike about any page.

It doesn't take very many thumbs-up votes to send hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site - even if your site is brand new. It sounds easy, just start voting for your content.

But there's more to it than that... there are some important social media "tricks of the trade" that will help maximize the opportunity.

The most important thing is to have mutual friends. As you follow people on StumbleUpon, you will see more pages that they like. The idea is to follow people with similar interests.

The trick comes in when you begin to use the "Send To" option within the browser extension / toolbar. This option sends a site, along with a personalized message to your friend. The friend is forced to view this site before they can continue with their random stumbling. Do you see where I'm going with this? In the message you can ask them to thumbs up your page -- the more thumbs up a page has, the more traffic it will get from StumbleUpon. Your friends will probably ask for you to do the same for their sites in return. One hand washes the other...

What are your favorite tactics for maximizing your StumbleUpon traffic?

My favorite keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo last week was from one of my favorite bloggers -- the Forbes columnist Daniel Lyons, aka "Fake Steve Jobs." It's an amazing story, how a joke turned into an Internet sensation and then a book deal. And the way Lyons tells it, it's uproariously funny. The 25-minute video is embedded below:

As I mentioned above, FSJ started out as a joke. "It came out of two things," Lyons said. "Really it was a stupid prank. I can't believe I'm here giving speeches about this stuff. I really thought I would do it for a couple weeks and then shut it down. But the first factor was boredom. I had this job at Forbes covering enterprise tech -- IBM, Sun, EMC -- I know that sounds like a scintillating, exciting job to deal with those guys all the time, but believe it or not it sometimes gets dull, and I had a lot of free time on my hands and not much to do with it. The other big thing was fear. Basically I saw my business getting disrupted. The funny thing about being a tech writer is we cover all this disruption and we're really fast to tell companies like Sun, "You've got to embrace the destruction of Linux," but suddenly when the cannons are turned at our own business -- at the media business -- we freak out. What will happen to us? I realized that I had to learn about the Internet, I couldn't be in print the rest of my life, and I was too young to retire."

Fake Steve wasn't always in favor of blogs -- in fact, he laments his much-maligned 2005 "attack of the blogs" piece on Forbes.com, but admits that blowback from the article caused him to see the power of blogs and bloggers.

If you're short on time, you can zip ahead to the 7:30 mark in the video, where it starts getting really funny. Lyons covers three primary points about the Fake Steve Jobs blog: why he got into blogging (fear and boredom), why he chose Steve Jobs (he's narcissistic, Apple has bad PR, and Apple fans tend to be so, well, fanatic), and why it works (it's the audience!).

"I think what's happening in media is profound and interesting. This thing [Fake Steve Jobs] is all very wrong, obviously very stupid and primitive, right? But it's a great way to learn about how new media might work. I think the biggest change we're going to have is the involvement of the audience. Where Internet media is going to get interesting is when we start really exploiting the uniqueness in it rather than paving a cowpath. First generation Forbes.com was: take the print magazine and put it online. Hulu was: take TV shows and put them online. But when we start involving the audience, and having people form a group to entertain themselves, I think that's going to get really interesting."

Best-selling author Tim Ferriss is one of my heroes. His book, The 4-Hour Workweek, was an inspiration to me. In my podcast interview of him, he dispensed some life-changing advice.

So when I saw that Tim had laid out a plan on his blog for outsourcing one's inbox and never checking email again, I was psyched. I spend waaay too many hours each week on email and I'm desperate to free up some of that time.

I was hopeful that India-based virtual assistant firm Get Friday (one of the firms Tim recommended in the interview and on his blog) would be up to the task. Unfortunately, no such luck.

I was assigned "Nitin" as my VA. His English fluent not so much.

To illustrate, one of Nitin's emails I nearly deleted by mistake, thinking it was spam:

Methinks Nitin must also serve as virtual assistant to some offshore spammers!

Here's the rest of the email...

I shudder to think of this guy acting on my behalf, replying to my business-critical emails in Borat-speak. So I fired him, and his firm.

I realize now I could have avoided this whole debacle. Hindsight's 20/20, as they say. Rather than blindly trusting in GetFriday and their VA assignment process, I could have instead followed Tim's procedure for selecting a virtual assistant:

I found another VA, this one based out of Canada. She's a lot more money, but you get what you pay for. And no, I'm not going to tell you who it is -- she's mine, I tell you, all mine!!

The most important on-page factor for SEO is the title tag -- that bit of text between the <title></title> tags. There are already some outstanding articles out there on how to craft successful title tags -- specifically, Netconcepts' own Brian Brown has a two-part guide on successful title tag strategies (part 1 and part 2) which just came out recently, and I posted some quick title tag tips a while back.

You may have your title-building strategy down, but have you given serious consideration to title length restrictions? Titles look different to spiders than they do to humans. SERPs only display a maximum of 65 title characters, so that's all visitors will see, but search spiders record up to 120 characters or more. Some initial tests on lengthy Amazon.com titles reveals that some engines count keywords long past the 120 character mark, opening up an unfortunate opportunity for exploitation by spammers.

The people who find you on any SERP (search engine result page) will make their click decision based heavily on the first 65 characters of your title. Though the rest of the snippet (often times taken from your meta description tag) will also play a significant role, the title is the most influential piece of your search listing. Oddly, the title is ephemeral from the visitor's perspective; once on your page, most visitors will quickly forget about the title, which is relegated to the top border of the browser. Search spiders, on the other hand, have traditionally listed 120 as the maximum number of characters they will index.

If spammers are not yet taking advantage of these differing limitations by putting a normal, user-oriented title into the first 65 characters and tons of keyword spamglish into the remaining 55, then I'm sure they will be.

This assumes that search engines give any credence to those last 55 characters (and that they are truly limited to 120 characters maximum, which at least Google no longer seems to be), knowing that searchers will not be able to see them in SERPs, and that the title is only important to visitors before they click a link.

Or perhaps this "hidden" portion is completely discounted?

If not, I anticipate that search engines will adjust their algorithms to count only the characters viewable to searchers. At least we can hope that search engines will address the issue before it becomes common practice to keyword stuff the "hidden" segment of page titles.

As I mentioned over on Searchlight, Yahoo Suggest is a quick-n-dirty, free keyword research tool that can serve as a nice alternative to Google Suggest. Google Suggest has Yahoo Suggest beat for convenience if you have the Google Toolbar installed, since you just start typing keystrokes into the toolbar's search field and it displays a dropdown list of suggestions (think: auto-complete). The suggestions are listed in order of popularity. This was how my daughter Chloe identified her top search term, "neopets cheats" for naming her site ("The Ultimate Neopets Cheats Site") - Google Suggest showed that "neopets cheats" was the second most popular search term after "neopets". But with Google Suggest, you can only compare search terms that start with the same keystrokes. You can't compare, say, "new cars" with "used cars". In that regard, Yahoo Suggest has a leg up on Google Suggest, since it returns search terms where your keystrokes may be in the middle or end. Try it out: go to Yahoo's home page or the Yahoo Search page and start typing in the search box.

I demoed this tool at my presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday, but the demo didn't quite work as expected. I typed in "cars", and as you can see below in the screenshot, the results were pretty bad. In particular, it was with suggestion #3 - "toyota car malaysia new car cars" - that I lost faith in this tool's data for keyword research.

I'm in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Expo. Tomorrow morning I present a 3 hour workshop on SEO/SMO along with co-presenter Muhammad Saleem. Then on Wednesday afternoon I present a breakout session titled "Best-kept Secrets to SEO Success: the Art and the Science."

This year I've come to the Web 2.0 Expo armed with Twitter. Last year at this time when I spoke at Web 2.0 Expo, I had barely given Twitter any notice. I'm looking forward to tuning in to the "back channel" and getting the additional perspective on the happenings of the show. (I just hope the Web 2.0 Expo wiki isn't an indication of what's in store for Twitterers at the Web 2.0 Expo: the Twitteroll only lists a dozen people.)

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos is into Twitter. (He's on @zappos if you want to follow him). Tony blogged an idea that I quite liked:

His idea of displaying a live Twitter stream while presenting is a good one, and it reminded me of the IgniteWeb2Expo that I attended last year at the Web 2.0 Expo. It was a series of 5-minute lightning rounds, where each presenter had 20 slides, a hard stop at 5 minutes, and each slide advanced automatically after 15 seconds. It was based on the Ignite events in Seattle.

At IgniteWeb2Expo, they used Mozes, rather than Twitter, for audience commenting and voting on the speakers. The voting worked out great - the top four speakers were "promoted" to speaking slots at the keynote later in the week. One of those winning speeches was from my favorite authors, Tim Ferriss, in fact.

The attendees used Mozes for heckling too, to great effect. One snide remark in particular was really memorable.. One of the speakers was a guy in a bad suit that looked like he just walked out of a Miami Vice episode. When the message "don johnson called. he needs his suit back" appeared on the screen, the audience started cracking up. The poor guy didn't have a clue he was being mocked, he just kept on presenting!

When I spoke at SMX West in February on the "Unraveling URLs and Demystifying Domains" panel, I got pretty geeky with the regular expressions, rewrite rules, conditional redirects, and so on. I won't geek out so much here in the post, so no I won't be going into pattern matching gotchas that can make your regular expressions too "greedy" in your rewrite rules. If you want that, go download my PowerPoint.

But here are some SEO tips relating to domains and URLs that don't require you to wear (or own) a propeller hat:

Let me know if you'd like a geekier post on rewrite rules and the pattern matching / regular expression stuff.

As I have said before, Twitter is great! But with great things there are always downsides. With Twitter, these downsides come in a couple forms.

The first and most obvious is that it can be a time drain. I don't know how Robert Scoble has the time to follow 20,000 people on Twitter. According to one of his tweets today, he gets a tweet a second:

If Twitter alone was your full time job, you still wouldn't be able to keep up with such a barrage of tweets!

With a thousand things to get done every day, Twitter is the 1001st thing to keeps you from getting anything accomplished. This can be managed though, just don’t Twitter – get your work done instead. That's why you won't see me on Twitter sometime for days at a time. So that downside is pretty manageable.

However, there is a much more heinous downside: spam.

I happen to have a Twitter account that I do not even use and it still continues to gain followers – regardless of the fact that it never updates and has a total of 2 tweets ever. The growing trend in the Twitter world is following tens of thousands of people and hoping thousands follow you back – so you can just un-follow, rinse repeat.

To avoid being suckered by these spammers, some good advice is to thank them for following you and say hi. If there is no reply you can either choose to just not follow them or block. Another way to find these spammers, that may have replied to you but unfollowed you later. Twitter doesn’t have a “who unfollowed me” notification, although there is a cool little program called Twitter Karma that shows you who is just following you, who you just follow, and who is a mutual follower. Using this program is a great way to help manage your Twitter feeds and not get suckered by the spammers!

Howie Jacobson, author of AdWords for Dummies, asked me about the SEO implications of aliasing multiple domain names to one IP address as a workaround for Google's new AdWords rule change. As of April 1st, Google no longer allows a display URL in your Google ad if it redirects to a different domain name.

This rule change is unfortunate, as it restricts search marketers' ability to A/B test different domain names in their Google ads. So if you wanted to test www.widgetshelp.com versus your main URL of www.widgetsllc.com, you'd need to remove the redirect from www.widgetshelp.com. Thus you'd have a CNAME or A record in your DNS server for widgetshelp.com, and you'd have a "ServerAlias www.widgetshelp.com widgetshelp.com" line in your Apache config.

But without a redirect, search engine spiders won't know which URL is the canonical one. Widgetshelp.com and widgetsllc.com would look like duplicates of each other, and the link juice to each URL would be split up rather than aggregated together. This becomes an issue when there are links to the alternate domain, as the spiders will find that duplicate site. By the way, don't worry about spiders following the link in the Google ad, as that is not a spiderable link.

Unfortunately the "Preferred Domain" tool in Google Webmaster Central is not going to be a help here, because it only lets you select between www vs. non-www. You can't specify multiple domain names -- at least not yet. Back in 2006 I recommended to Google that they Extend their canonicalization feature in Webmaster Central. Even though they haven't heeded my request, I'm still hopeful that they someday will.

In the meantime, there's a gray hat solution you could implement -- a conditional redirect that only spiders see. It's not without risks, however. You have been warned.

Alternatively, you could contact the site owners who have linked to your alternate domains and ask them to update the link to your main URL. That can only really work if you only have just a few links pointing to your alternate domain. And obviously, don't link to your alternate domain yourself!

I'm helping Danny Sullivan with coordinating the "Buying Sites for SEO" panel session at SMX Advanced, taking place June 3-4 in Seattle. And I'm looking for panelist recommendations.

The session will cover how to find the gems out there, criteria to consider, ways to negotiate, how to best leverage your new purchase etc. and will include tips, tricks, success stories, and painful lessons learned.

What would make for an ideal speaker:

Got someone to recommend? Email me at sspencer@netconcepts.com.

Want to suggest yourself? Fill out the speaker pitch form.