This infographic reveals some rather surprising stats about how much we Brits love our cars and what we like to call them. Who knew the most popular name for a car would be Betty?

We also discovered that 60% of women are emotionally attached to their cars and that 25 % of Brits (male and female) cried when they had to give up their wheels. Check out the infographic below:

We also discovered that here in the office Steve was one of the 24% of British males that preferred their car to their pet. Let’s hope Steve’s dog doesn’t need an operation the same time his car needs a new exhaust!

To find out more of these surprising and fun facts about our beloved automobiles check out the full blog post here.

African Revival is a wonderful charity that believes in the power of quality education in order to change lives. By building schools, training teachers, providing resources that schools need, African Revival helps break the cycle of poverty and offer inspiration and opportunity to Africa’s future generations. They currently work with over 25 schools in Uganda, Zambia and South Sudan.

To raise money for our chosen charity, we have put Kevin, Craig and Matt R to the challenge. They will be doing a 100km bike ride around London at night time, alongside 3,000 other cyclists! On the 9th June 2012 at midnight, they will be starting off at Crystal Palace and will cycle past London’s iconic landmarks including the National Maritime Museum, Tower Bridge, St Paul’s Cathedral, City of London, Canary Wharf, Mile End Stadium, Emirates Stadium and finish their journey at Alexandra Palace.

They have been training hard for the event, through wind and rain, and would love to get some sponsors on board to get them motivated.

Please help support the guys on their gruelling 100km cycle around London by sponsoring them on Gravytrain’s Just Giving Page.

Alex and I got the venue and while we drip dried we listened to Markus Fehr from e-Spirit. He talked about integrating CMS and online shopping to an already substantial business that is offline. It was interesting to hear how many businesses are still wary about having an online presence as they feel it may discourage shoppers from their local stores. However, as the world is now largely on the internet, the amounts of visits to local shops are declining and those businesses that don’t have an online presence are realising this.

The next was a talk on email testing. Sean Duffy from Email Center showed us that by using a multivariate testing technique we could see a 45% increase from email marketing. Here we learned that an email testing plan was something to avoid as you need to be dynamic and that each test is a trial and therefore not to worry if the results are negative.

The last talk Alex and I attended, I thought, was the best out of the three. It was hosted by Luca Benini from Europe, Buddy Media. Here he spoke about “The elusive ROI of social media: Tracking connections through sales.” Luca spoke about how actually, the ROI is not elusive. He said that by interacting with consumers, many are drawn away from the customer service phone line and are more inclined to tweet or post, which is a lot cheaper to reply to and therefore, is an instant return on investment from social media. This was one of the points Luca said was a way to measure ROI from social media. The others included: Brand equity, shareholder value, “talkability” for a TV show, Web traffic referrals and sales. He gave an interesting statistic about web traffic referrals that showed more traffic was generated from Facebook to YouTube than from Google to YouTube.

This shows the complete shift in the way people access information and highlights the importance of having a presence on social media sites.

This week the Gravytrain team has been attending Internet World across all three days of the exhibition at Earls Court. On Tuesday, myself and Matthew Read represented Gravytrain as we soaked up the informative seminars and browsed through the masses of exhibitors at the event.

Upon arriving at the event we knew exactly which seminars we wanted to attend so we wasted no time in making our way to the Advertising, Affiliate and Search theatre for a talk regarding the optimisation of video ads. One particular take-away from the opening session was the fact that Google will soon be launching a new interface for managing your video ads. Currently this technology is in the beta stage however.

After this we perused the multitude of exhibitors in order to engage in the friendly, relaxed atmosphere of the event and in order to, of course, look for new ideas and new contacts within the Digital-sphere.

After a bite of lunch we headed to the Content Management Theatre to take in a very informative talk regarding the on-site customer experience and the engagement of information. Sonja Keerly, of SDL, spoke about the importance of engaging content and understanding your audience so that you can target them effectively with relevant and remarkable on-site experiences.

The next talk we attended was to do with the future of organic search and how there is an apparent ‘untapped goldmine’ within organic search. What astounded me was the sheer volume of new search queries made each and every day. It’s been recorded that there are around 200 million new queries being made every day. With a means to tap into these new and increasing search queries, many businesses have been making additional revenue. The talk was thus an example as to how any website can be optimised for the additional search queries that pop up on a daily basis.

The final talk of the day was made by Branded3, a Digital Marketing Agency in Leeds. They discussed the relationship between Twitter and Google Rankings. Using a mass of data they correlated that Twitter certainly does have an impact on Google Rankings – something, to be fair, we already knew, however they wanted to measure precisely (or as precisely as possible) just how much, or indeed how little, of an impact Twitter can have. The conclusion they drew was that if you are able to get a link tweeted 0-50 times, then Google’s algorithm will take note and your rankings should improve.

All in all, Internet World proved to be a great event to enhance your knowledge and generate new, creative ideas in what is a constantly evolving industry. I’d certainly recommend next year’s event!

With the up and down month we all experienced with the weather in March, we thought it would be a good idea to show you the hottest places in England and who will need air conditioning the most.

With April showers well under way this month, it also gives us something to look forward too as we can see from this infographic temperatures could be soaring in the coming months.

We can see that all the record temperatures have been located in the South. The infographic shows that for at least ¼ of the year we need to have the air conditioning on in the office (well only if you still want your staff to come to work in the summer!).

Take a closer look at the blog post for more information and let us know what you think below.

Ask the Engines

BrightonSEO kicked off with an “Ask the Engines” panel discussion, which included Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, Dave Coplin, Director of Search for Microsoft, Martin McDonald, SEO Strategy Director at Expedia EAN, Rishi Lakhani, Online Marketing Consultant and Tony Goldstone, Head of Search for Fresh Egg. It was a chance for us SEOs to ask questions (and grill) representatives from Google and Bing.
After reassurance that SEOs will always have a job (as long as search engines are around), Google were asked what SEOs should do if they are penalised by bad links and Pierre’s answer was that they need to show Google that they are making an effort to remove bad links and to not pay for links as they are against their guidelines. However, it was then pointed out that most people buy links to stay competitive (although everyone denied buying them, of course!).

Social and Search

Glenn talked us through schema mark up for rich snippets, using his Yorkshire pudding recipe as an example (which made my tummy rumble) and explained that it was reported that click through rates had an increase of up to 30% from rich snippets! As expected, it was also said that rich snippets can be messed around with by spammers/fake reviews, which if reported would be removed by Google. It was also mentioned that in the future, fake snippets may lead to loss of site rankings. It’s definitely something I want to learn, although I’m sure it will be a challenge as I’m not a techy person. Also, was I right in hearing that Google said keep it cool and if you see spam report it?!

Roland Dunn – Searchbots: Lost Children or Hungry Psychopaths?

Another interesting presentation was from Roland Dunn. We all know that searchbots crawl our websites, which is why we make our sites accessible for them, but we don’t actually know which sites they land on.
Roland accessed his server logs for one of his websites to see which content the searchbots landed on and found that in over 2 months, 40% of Google searchbots only requested 2 URLS, on a website with approximately 40,000 URLs in Google’s index! Roland concluded that searchbots do not request all content, can use their time inefficiently and can become distracted. Therefore we need to treasure the time they crawl our sites and may need to help them focus. Roland suggests that we should embrace the logfiles as they are full of useful information, check searchbot behaviour and if we find that they are distracted, alter the website’s internal linking and navigation, robots.txt out or take an expensive approach and alter the URL construction.

I also found his thoughts of how Google and Bing’s searchbots would sound quite entertaining!

Dom Hodgson – I appear to have started a sweetshop (and advertising company)

Ok this presentation may have been quite off topic compared to the other presentations but it was a good end to the day and certainly caught my attention. Dom Hodgson talked through his online sweetshop business and the ups and downs that he had. Here’s what I learnt from his presentation:

• Everybody loves pick n mix, but people like to have a choice of different sweets and will complain if they don’t.
• Giant snakes are expensive.
• Fried Eggs are the most popular.
• If you put a squirrel on a website, make it wink.
• Don’t put a squirrel on your website, it confuses people.
• If you have a brilliant business idea, just go for it (while your other half is away of course)!

Dom also officially launched his new advertising company at BrightonSEO and got people on the stage celebrating the launch with him with party poppers. He certainly knows how to entertain the crowd!

We finished the day with drinks on the pier. BrightonSEO was awesome this spring and we are very much looking forward to the next conference!

The possible problem for Google if they were to place too much weight on the author tag is its ability to be manipulated by search marketers. They can try to create authoritative social profiles to accompany their content or exploit current powerful authors. Now Google could place barriers to prevent this abuse but it will be a significant challenge. Despite this issue Matthew identifies the benefit of diversifying algorithms, if search engines were to integrate this metric alongside others.

After considering the points made, Matthew concludes that the rel=author tag might be a useful addition for websites, but probably not game changing.

To read the full article, visit the Fourth Source website.

Kevin stresses the importance of investing a lot of time in optimising your website and social media presence in order to be near the top of the first page. Improvements need to be an ongoing process, in order to reap the most benefits. Because the worrying fact is that most websites which do not make it onto the first page risk being considered irrelevant. This notion is then backed up by research from Chitika.

He then talks about the research Gravytrain conducted between 1/11/2011 and 1/02/2012, determining who were the winners and losers of the insurance sector, vying for a top rank on the first page. Money Supermarket was the big winner, topping search results in car, home and travel insurance searches. Meanwhile, Go Compare and Compare the Market, 2 aggregators that invest heavily in marketing and advertising, struggled to hold onto high positions, sitting in sixth and eighth place.

Following on from this research, Kevin concludes by mentioning the things required to drive success in search rankings, which includes staying alert to clues Google gives whenever they announce improvements to their search process.

To read the full article, visit the POSTonline.co.uk, and remember to stay up to date with our quarterly blogs.

The infographic looks at the behaviour of expats moving away from the UK and the most popular overseas destinations to move to. What it shows is that us Brits love moving to places such as Australia, France and even the UAE, but that the place we are happiest abroad is in Spain.

It also shows that although a lot of people love to move abroad, there are some things we Brits miss a lot! Top of the list is the countryside, our sense of humour and good old fashioned pubs!

So what do you think? Would you like to move abroad? And if so what do you think you would miss the most?

If you are interested in having an infographic made for your company, please contact our Business Development Executive, Alex Moran, on 020 8941 2364.

It begins by explaining there are specific skills that must be demonstrated such as a high degree of numeracy, organisational skills and the need to be articulate and empathetic with customers.

For digital marketing roles specifically, there is a requirement for individuals to understand the technologies available to communicate with clients and colleagues. Kevin’s input during a Q&A session on Careers in Digital Marketing is then shared. He said Gravytrain tends to hire, “people who have immersed themselves in digital marketing in their spare time”. He then urges digital marketing job seekers to get involved in blogs, showing off their own ideas and opinions – particularly on new technologies.

Following on from this are useful examples of what a good CV should include.

To read the entire article, visit the Careers section of the Guardian website.