Google recently released a new way to implement and manage 404 error pages. 

Below is a screenshot of the widget.

404 error pages are those pages that are displayed when you try to access a page that no longer exists on a website. Marketers often try to optimize these pages to ensure that if a visitor lands on one of these pages they do not leave the site altogether. Another common trick is to try to cross promote products and services via 404 error pages.

This domain has been several things over the last few years so I have a number of pages indexed in google that are no longer active. So I am trying out this widget on my site in hopes that it may communicate with Google technology and help remove outdated indexes sooner. (I have no proof of this, just hoping)

You can se the widget in action here: http://www.mckyton.com/doesnotexist

I am using the default widget setting but you can customize the look to your liking.

In the spirit of continuous improvement, below is a list of services that you can use to analyze and improve your website.

Website Grader (www.websitegrader.com)
This is a great for revealing the basic SEO improvement opportunities of your website.It analyzes your meta tags, domain name setting, contact forms, blogs rss feds and more. Try to get your score above a 95%.

Quarkbase (www.Quarkbase.com)
Similar to Website Grader, Quarkbase automatically reviews your site and aims to give your all the “details” of your site. This grab your META information Social popularity in social networks, traffic data from Alexa, company info from zoominfo, technical details and more. The difference between Quarkbase and WebsitGrader.com is that Quarkbase does not offer suggestion for improvement.

Browsershots (www.browsershots.org)
BrowserShots is a tool you can use to ensure cross browser safe design and functionality. This is importortant as more and more people use safari and firefox for web browsing.

spellr.us (www.spellr.us)
This services reveiws your website on a regular schedule and sends you a report of all of the misspellings. It allows you to keep custom dictionaries per site to reduce false positives. I am in the beta of this services and it has already proven very useful. I’m just hoping the prices on this are not too high once it is officially released.

As Search Engine Marketing matures into a globally accepted business discipline Marketing and IT teams are working together in new ways to accomplish company objectives. This is a partnership not without conflict. While Marketing teams are exploring exactly how their IT counterparts can help or hinder them, IT Teams find themselves in tough situations answering the demands of marketing and sticking to established company policies.

It is a new phenomenon for marketing folk to demand specific server configurations from IT teams to inprove search engine marketing. This is a step outside of the comfort zone for technical staff, after all, they are the experts and what does marketing know about a web server or administering a MS SQL database. And yes, they are the experts, however their responsibilities are bleeding into the marketing arena and they need to be prepared to take on these challenges. This is inevitable and every company is depending on their IT staff to step up.

Marketing teams are not immune to these growing pains either. As the internet becomes more and more the medium of choice, marketers have to learn their limits and their potential. Marketers need to learn about gigabytes, image resolution (other than 300 dpi), video size, web browsers and operating systems, website reporting, the difference between a page view and a unique visit. Markets must learn that they can not add twenty 150mb videos to their website without expecting it to effect the websites performance.

Large companies have already or are currently in the midst of this collision but smaller companies are just beginning to experience the challenges of these two core business teams stepping into new areas simultaneously.

Here are a few tips that can help ease the strains of this partnership.

For marketers:

• Be sensitive to IT staff, they are outside of their comfort zones and are likely to be resistant to your initial requests, plan on this
• Follow appropriate channels in making request
• Follow technical documentation procedures, ask for these up front and learn them, this may require some training but it is an excellent show  of good faith, may also be worth your time to learn technical process maps
• This is a no brainer: Explain the purpose and benefits of your requests to  I.T.  and be open to their recommendations, this will help foster team building and shared ownership
• Share the results: Make sure that technical teams are aware of the positive returns that their efforts are gaining whether it is increasing traffic, sales  or PR mentions

For technical staff:

• Be patient! and realize that the marketing team and your are after the same goal
• Understand that marketers are outside of their comfort zone and they need your technical expertise to ensure that requests are being implemented correctly.
• Realize that they cannot accomplish their goals without your help
• Do not try to tell marketing how to modify their campaign, make recommendations, but that is it. The marketing department has likely put plenty of thought into how and why and has access to research and business intelligence that IT does not.

Last month Google, Yahoo and Adobe announced a cooperation to make Flash search engine indexable. Or at least, somewhat search engine friendly. Google made a similar claim around 2004. Google announced at that time their ability to index selectable text content in flash .swf files. For awhile swf files receieved placement in serps but I cant remember the last time I saw one.

This latest announcement states that Google and Yahoo will be able to index ONLY the root swf file. If the swf file loads external files, such as other swf files, text documents, videos, search will be unable to access and index them. Why does this matter? Well, most large flash sites load external files only as needed to reduce overall flash load times and create a better experice for the visitor. So most large flash sites or online services are made up of many different flash files.

So, the next question is why can’t these search engines index all the files?
I always figured that the real issue is a question of code ownership. You see, the only way google can make real sense of what is contained in a flash file is if it decompiles the entire Flash file. Now suppose you have some proprietary code in a flash file that is core to your business or protects user data, I know I wouldn’t want anyone, search engine or not, peeking through this code.

So what does all of this mean? I think it means we are one step closer to seeing an SEO friendly flash, but I do not think this will change the nature of SEO.

Heres hoping the prove me wrong.

The Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose started yesterday and unfortunately I am not attending. I have attended this conference several times over the last few years but always in Chicago. This is an excellent event that can get anyone, regardless of their experience in SEO, up to speed in no time.

Over the last five years there have some big announcments made by search engines at these conferences including algorithm changes that drastically changed search engine result positions for many many companies. So far I have not heard any big breaking news, but I am following along to see what comes out.

There are a number of people live blogging So I will be following along. Hopefully I will make it to the Chicago event this year.

http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/

Have you tried using StumbleUpon yet? If you are anything like me you are probably growing a little weary of the myriad of gimmicky social networks and novelty widgets. Well perhaps the fact that the social space is so saturated is exactly the reason I get excited when I find one I really like and even find useful.

Stumble upon is a social bookmarking services that allows members to create a list of favorite websites via a browser tool bar. It is these favorites that you can easily share with friends on the stumble upon network. However it’s not this that I like so much. I mean, already have a ton places where I can save favorites. No, what makes this service so great is the magical stumble button on the toolbar. When you click the stumble button a page will be presented to you that matches your list of interests (you setup your areas of interests when you register). Nine times out of ten I am thrilled by the hidden gem of a website retrieved upon clicking the stuble button. This is why I like Stumble Upon.

Now the reason I find it useful is because I have seen the true viral power of this service. About 2 weeks ago a client noticed a drastic spike in traffic and was trying to determine the source. After spending a few minutes digging through the log files I saw that the traffic was coming from stumbleupon, a service I had heard of but never tried.

Further inspection revealed that this spike turned into a 600% increase in visitor traffic for the week. By far this was the busiest week this company had seen in traffic and sales reflected this increase.

So not only is stumbleupon downright entertaining there is some real, easily implemented marketing value as well.

Give it a try yourself. www.stumbleupon.com

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