Although pageviews, visits and unique visitors on a site may be instantly gratifying, the real treasure lies behind the numbers. Take, for example, a recent analytical exercise I performed to examine my company's newly-introduced online news service. Currently our site is not well known outside of our membership and we had not marketed the service in any way (we had simply been testing the service before the...

With the announcement of Apple's new social network, Ping, this week I started to wonder why they chose that particular name. They could have called it anything - in fact, I was surprised that it wasn't called "iTalk" or "iFollow" or something. Given its similarity to both Ning and Bing, is this an indication of the start of a trend of using 'ing' words in social branding? If it is, here are some suggestions...

SEO is full of theory. Even though it is still a relatively new part of the digital marketeer's arsenal there are plenty of frameworks and rules out there - however, how many of these actually work in the real world? Take, for example, the theory behind localising your keyphrases. There is a school of thought that adding a geographical location to your keyphrase will increase the exposure of your site as people...