Our interview with Dr. Andrew Starkey of Brand Aura

As you may have noticed, at Smart Insights we're keen followers of the latest tools that marketers can use to improve their online marketing. One of the most popular categories of technologies in are social media analysis tools. We had great interest in our review of social media analysis tools, so  when I got the opportunity to talk to Andrew Starkey of Brand Aura I was keen to pose some questions to help marketers to select the best system for their needs. Andrew is an expert in data mining and developed the Brand Aura system. You can get an idea of how Brand Aura works from this analysis of the recent X-Factor final.

Where should you start when selecting a social media analysis tool

Q1. There are a bewildering…

The somewhat surprising Number 1 is eBay - really!? Well, according to the guys at Yomego (who run social media monitoring software from Alterian SM2) that's the case. Certainly not the first brand to jump to mind, and not one of the company's that we hear much off on the social sites like Mashable. [caption id="attachment_4248" align="alignright" width="399" caption="Snakes & ladders: The social top 50"][/caption] The SMR Index gauges brands' social effectiveness using reach (social noise surrounding the brand) and satisfaction (popularity). Also factoring in the "recency" of social interactions, the index then ranks companies…

Using internal links help your SEO rankings

For SEOs, internal links are great since they will directly affect your rankings for these reasons: They control the flow of link equity flow (based on Google's PageRank) around a site - pages within your site structure which have a higher PageRank tend to rank better The anchor text within the hyperlink tells the search engine what the destination page is about. If a link contains "click here" or "more" this won't work as well as if a specific product or service name is included. Images which are linked to other pages use the "Alt text" help determine which keyphrases the page ranks for You control these links unlike backlinks from other sites so you can feature different terms in the anchor terms based on the phrases you are targeting

What types of internal links are there?

Not all links are created equally. When Google was launched they were treated…

"Are you wasting money with Google through its default options"

What is Google's Display (aka content) Network?

The Display network is a collection of third party sites like online publishers and bloggers who have agreed to display Google "Adsense" ads. So here your ads are displayed entirely separate from Google - so it is, in my view, the biggest hidden secret to newcomers to paid search marketing. Google gets around 30% of its revenue, not from searches on its own site, but displaying contextual ads on other sites or searches linked from other sites. These ads are displayed as part…

Form conversion optimisation tips and recommendations

Unless you sell online, chances are one of the main objectives of your website is to generate online enquiries or new business leads. Dependant on your products and services, you may want visitors to pick up the phone and make an enquiry, or alternatively you may prefer visitors fill out your enquiry form and send their details to you. This post will focus on providing tips and recommendations for those of you who would like to increase online enquiries.

What makes a good enquiry form? Not always the usual best-practice

Some of the best practice techniques we hear again and again about enquiry forms are: Keep them simple Don’t ask for too much information Don’t ask lots of questions This generally translates in to asking your visitor for their name, email address, phone number and then a text field for them to submit their enquiry. But it's always good to test conventional…

Tools and frameworks to answer the questions: "How do we compare?" "What does good look like?" and "What should we be delivering online?" This is a presentation I gave to the Linked In Web Managers Group. I recommend joining this group since it covers a diverse range of topics from web strategy, content management and E-communications Best Practice. They also have regular London meetups and I think there is a US group too. If you're not aware of it, I've also recently setup a group on Linked for Smart Insights which I naturally also recommend for our discussions of best practice in digital marketing: http://www.linkd.in/smartinsights. View more presentations…

Mobile growth predictions to support your mobile marketing strategy

Research value: [rating=5] Our commentary: I'm sure you noticed the tremendous growth in 2010 of use of smartphones, tablets and the popularity of mobile apps. If you're creating a business case for investment in mobile phones we hope this alert about future predictions of mobile usage will be useful to highlight some data to suppport your arguments. What's most interesting to us is how the trend to smartphone and tablet usage results in a lot more use of mobile networks. This is highlighted by this graphic. Another point is that we don't seem to be near saturation. These statistics on mobile growth by region show sustained growth across all markets:

Don't…

Facebook has begun rolling out the new Facebook pages design since last Friday, so these are the Pages for brands and organisations, since the Facebook profile pages were updated a few months ago. The up-shot is all good - Facebook are empowering brands to be more interactive, responsive and visible, we've summarised the key changes below - hope it helps. A word of caution first! It appears to be in beta since the comments on Facebooks official update indicates a lot of problems, mostly around Wall post updates no longer being in chronological order thus making interactions between page owners and Fans very difficult to manage. Expect this will be 'fixed' before the forced roll-out early March. Here's an example from Heather Chastain "please help, this is the second day in a row i've been unable to respond to posts made…

Fascinating infographic from Pixable - more mind boggling numbers from Facebook... …

Our review of a new free guide to link-building

In January 2011 a guide oddly named  "Becoming a Clockwork Pirate" was launched. While finding the title slightly weird I then read the subtitle which reads: "A Field Guide To Creating Links For Search & Social Success". Now this is something that caught my attention. Written by Kelvin Newman this guide is a lengthy, very detailed ebook, with over 60 pages, but if you are willing to give it the time you will get an unbelievable amount of value & inspiration from it. The guide covers ideas & tactics on generating traffic, inbound links & developing brand awareness and while 60 pages sounds like a lot believe me the ideas will start to flow the more read. Its not that the guide is full of amazing things you will have never heard of, its much more that a lot of tactics are in…