More commentary and links taken from our Twitter – excuse the lack of blog posts, we’re experiencing a large client workload at the moment. Knee deep in SEO audits and PPC campaigns. But it’s all good!

Check out Alex’s blog or browse the new Travolution site and blog for recent online travel insights.

• Good tips and advice on internal site searches http://tinyurl.com/44oxt8
• Neat categorisation of five Social Media spheres http://tinyurl.com/49j9cx
• ‘Adding social links to emails: what and where?’ http://tinyurl.com/6q5rz3
• I was aware of a significant difference in PPC vs SEO spend but didn’t realise the gulf was so great http://tinyurl.com/56udo7
• Joy! Big Google Analytics upgrade – get the lowdown at TechCrunch http://tinyurl.com/5v8vu4
• It’s time for travel content 2.0 http://tinyurl.com/6xhedr
• Great tips from Kevin ‘Travel SEO – How to Target Searchers at the Right Stage of the Buying Cycle’ http://tinyurl.com/6frzoj

Thought I’d share a few links on some brand monitoring services.

These are tools to help monitor who is saying what about your brand.

And opportunities to monitor product/destination keywords and then provide information/feedback to those networks and online communities.

For some background, read this article for an introduction to online reputation management.

And the three tools:

• Google Alerts – free and will help you gain an idea on what level of paid tool suits you.
• Online Reputation Monitor – three pricing levels starting from £5/month. Free trial.
• trackur – One of the more feature full programs. Free trial available.

I’ve not tried these yet but here are two tools specifically aimed at hotels.

• Review Analyst
• Hotel Protect

10 Reputations All Hotels, Resorts & Inns Should Monitor Online

Any others you’d recommend?

Oban Multilingual dropped me a line this morning about a short video they made.

They interviewed a number of overseas travellers in London to learn about their search habits. I’ve embedded the movie below.

The video focuses on the need to provide multilingual sites for international travellers.

Oban (who specialise in multilingual SEO and international SEM) are working with EyeforTravel researching online travel habits. Take part at www.faceofglobalsearch.com and win £250 of travel vouchers.

I’m going to be a tad critical on the quiz.

Oban has previewed in a blog post some of the results and indicated that so far, the three most popular sites for travel research are Google, TripAdvisor and Alibabuy. The question only presents these three sites to select from. Although there is a text field where the user can enter any site I’m not sure how often that would be used.

Perhaps a longer list or drop down of popular travel sites may lead to a more accurate cross section of preferred sites.

For the game itself I only got as far as Anchorage!

• Google Analytics – set up goals to measure conversion rates or use the Site Overlay tool to see a visual breakdown of visitor paths.
• Woopra – new tool on the block and still in beta. Offers real time visitor analysis and built in chat tool, both of which are not present in Google Analytics.
• Clicktale – more of a recording tool that allows you to record and playback what your site visitors do. Free version allows 100 recordings per week.
• Crazyegg – allows you to see exactly where people click in the form of heatmaps and other visual indicators. A more advanced version of the Site Overlay tool in Google Analytics. Free version allows 4 pages to be tracked with 5,000 visitors per month.
• Enquisite – Focuses on search traffic analysis and provides reports detailing both organic and paid search traffic. Includes in depth LongTail reports.