A Collection Of Super Cool 404 Pages
Like many people i am guilty of creating some pretty standard looking 404 pages. Luckily there are some people out there with some creative magic who have created some super cool 404 pages. There examples have inspired me and i thought i would share them with you. I’m sure you will agree that they are pretty dam awesome.
Blue Daniel
Probably one of the best examples i have come across. The moving train and sliding elements add real depth to it.
Its a tool set i have been looking at for a while now and came across it during a presentation by Dave Naylor. A great presentation as always and i was completely captivated by the possibilities of the tool set. It could be summed up as an analytics tool kit for search engine marketer but it is so much more than this. It goes well beyond anything else that is out there. Whats even more exciting is that they have just joined forces with Majestic SEO, who of course have some great tools of their own.
Ok so like most decent tools in the market place Raven SEO Tools is a paid service, with prices starting from $79 a month for a pro package. Agency packages are also available and include a 6 user license. The agency account will set you back $199 a month with an additional $14 required for each extra user. Before committing to the service you can sign up for a 30 day trail which gives you full access. This is very much recommended.
The Tool Set
The Raven SEO Tool set is split into five main section and includes research, links, content manager, analytics, reports and admin. I will go on to explain each section in a minute but i wanted to quickly highlight the great Firefox plugin that they have made available. This plugin lets you access various parts of the tool set quick and easily. Anyway so on to the tools themselves.
Ann Smarty, an influential search and social media specialist has released, in my mind one of this years most exciting tools. Its called My Blog Guest and is a community where link builders, content creators, bloggers and entrepreneurs can come together to help achieve their goals. This is usually in the form of guest blogging.
I find the concept particularly exciting because it enables SEO’s and webmasters to not only save a great deal of time but also build new networks and target new audiences. When we look at guest blogging we often have to invest a serious amount of time looking for potential targets and then making the approach. The difficulty sometimes is that you find the perfect target blog but they are unwilling to accept guest posts. My Blog Guest gets rid of all this as members of it are either looking for guest posts or looking to make them.
I think Ann sums up the tool perfectly in her guest post over at sem-group.net:
Every so often i like to re-assess how i setup my Google Analytics dashboard and what information i should be concentrating on. After all analytics can be a mind-grenade at times!!
It should be noted i setup and track differently depending on the client and sector but in almost all cases there are levels or types of common information i want to know. For example every campaign has a focus on achieving an ROI or conversions for clients but what do we know about those conversions. Surely there would be a great deal of value in having a deeper understanding of your clients conversions and having quick access to it.
The dashboard in analytics is great because it allows you to add reports that you use regularly to it. Adding the right reports at the right detail can save you a great deal of energy and time. This is why i recently went back and looked at what i had on my dashboards and looked again at how i segmented conversions. I came up with some ideas but some of the more basic conversion segmentation approaches are well highlighted in the Art of SEO. Thats a book by the way and well worth the read. You can get it from my affiliate link below, wink wink. In there book they looked at segmenting conversions in the following ways:
Conversion By Keyword:
Pretty logical. This is something that i look at regularly and is crucial to every seo campaign. This is because you want to see whether the terms you are targeting are bringing any value (conversions).
The complexity and sheer level of data presented by analytics packages can often cause confusion and lead to mistakes. These mistakes are usually the result of misinterpretations and a lack clear goals. Before beginning any SEO campaigns it is important to set out some clear goals or KPI’s and have a defined plan of action. You need to know what you are measuring and what you are trying to achieve. Without this knowledge you will often get little from your analytics data.
Of course there are a couple of packages out there to track your websites performance, with Google analytics being the most popular. Yahoo’s offering has also started to get some attention while some higher end packages such as Omniture exist.
Some of the most common analytics mistakes can be found below:
Twitter was undoubtedly one of last years biggest talking points and is used by millions of people around the world. The explosion in popularity of Twitter has lead to some weird and wonderful apps being developed and i thought i would share a few with you.
Foamee
This one is pure genius. It lets you track who owes you a drink. When you owe someone a beer, send a message to Foamee in the format “@ioubeer @twitterscreenname “reason beer is owed”. Your IOU will then show up on the Foamee homepage for all to see. Novel idea but im personally not particularly fussed about asking for drinks back.
About Mark Mayne
Manchester based SEO consultant who specialises in online marketing and PPC. Mark currently works for PushON ltd, one of the north west's top online marketing companies and has helped numerous companies boost their online profiles.
