So many times when I’m surfing the internet, perhaps via a Google search, I come across an ugly looking error page because the page used to exist that was indexed by the search engine. Immediately I push the back button and check out the other search results.

Surely it would have been better if they had created a prettier error page within their web-site

template to increase the chances of me staying at their website.

Websites evolve and get re-designed, URL’s change and search engines still keep the older websites URL’s indexed for a while. If a permanent redirect (301) has not been created for an older URL that is indexed in a search engine, you bound to get visitors landing upon an error page. So the choice is yours - Would it not be better create a customised 404 page which includes your branding as a safety net?

… Surely then you would not lose all your visitors trust as if you were sending them to the default ugly version that web servers generate.

I’m sure the web is full of resources on creating prettier customised 404 Error Pages.

Ah, copywriting. Who could imagine a better occupation than writing about some of the loveliest hotels in the world? Imagine yourself languishing in elegantly furnished hotel rooms of Victorian Grande Dames set in the lush forests of exotic islands. When I work, I picture endless white beaches that stretch out to eternity, framed by magnificent sheer cliffs and sparkling azure waters and palm trees. What could be easier than writing about luxurious international hotels whose names roll off the tongue like champagne and caviar?

Now imagine being asked to write about one hundred of these gems without using the words “elegant”, “lush”, “exotic”, “white”, magnificent”, “azure”, and “luxurious”. Not so easy anymore is it?

Thesaurus.com is a wonderful website but at the same time being a completely useless one. Take the word “beautiful” as an example. Type in the word “beautiful” and it gives you fifty synonyms of the word in the context that I need it and twenty of them are unusable. I can hardly describe a five-star hotel in New York as “nice” or “pulchritudinous” now can I? Yet I go back, time after time, with the vain hope that this time, I will find that elusive synonym that has evaded capture for my last forty attempts.
If you scroll down you find more interesting synonyms of the word, in their various contexts. In one case, the word “stacked” is an actual synonym for “beautiful”, as is “piece” and “hopped up”. None of this helps me in the least except to shorten my ever-looming deadline after my curiosity has yet again spurred my navigation ever onward.

Copywriting is a great job even when it does seem like the synonyms are winning. After all, I get to take a holiday to wherever I want to go every time that I sit down to work.

I cannot recall the first time I ever heard the word “Facebook” yet the website has a curious drawing to it hoarding millions of users a day. I like to call it “intrigue”. As an overprotected schoolgirl I would throw myself into chat rooms on sites like Yahoo and correspond with random individuals across the globe. Fond memories include a janitor of a school in India trying to be my “friend” and having two cyber boyfriends, one of whom from the USA wrote all the words to the Titanic theme on pink, frilly paper and posted them to me.

Waiting for emails to arrive from across the seas became my reason for getting out of my bed in the morning. It gave me a sense that I was maybe special because “Wade” in Arizona thought I was beautiful. Consequently, reality struck (and my father’s phone bills) and I lay low on the “social networking” side of the web. Until I met www.facebook.com. I often had people asking me “Are you on Facebook?” My disgusted response: “(Snort) NO!!!”

I found it sad that people would spend hours in front of a computer, waiting for someone to slap them around the face with a trout. Yet on a cold, rainy day in miserable July, I uploaded my picture on my profile and told people how I was feeling. And that was me and life as I know it… gone. Life as I knew it was all about to change.
So I am now what you could call “a Facebook user”. I have made friends with people who pulled my pigtails at age 11, fellow school mates and ex boyfriends who cheated on me. Yet with over a couple of hundred friends on Facebook, it is quite hard to keep in contact with each one.

This is where the “intrigue” part I spoke about earlier comes in. A select few friends who offer some excitement and meaning to one’s life are regularly corresponded with. Forget picking up the phone or getting in your car to take them out for dinner. You give them flowers for their virtual garden and wink at them using an application which mimics “bodily movements”. But what happened to the old fashioned “I’ll pick you up at six, dinner’s on me” line. Chivalry is dead it would seem because nobody needs to be chivalrous anymore. Social recognition is at one’s fingertips, literally as all you need is to move the mouse and type to be a complete social butterfly.

And with Facebook, stalking seems to be an inevitable problem.
More disturbing is the false sense of security one gains from Facebook. A girl who I fell out with at 14 is now my friend on Facebook. Having not spoken for over 10 years we now post funny pictures to each other. It would seem that a mutual understanding has been (falsely) created.

Out of the many friends that people collect into their “friends” stash, how many do they converse with regularly? Maybe 10%? The other 90% smile happily and are ignored. I myself have been victim to the “hey! I borrowed that girl’s lighter when I was in the queue for the loo at such and such a club! Lets be Facebook friends!” trend. This is followed by a description of how we were in the CIA until 1969 when we left to join a commune of hippies in our “how we know each other” column. It alarms me that when I meet up with my circle of friends, the one topic which always rises to the front of the conversation is Facebook. We are on the site all the time when we are apart and now we are spending time together in reality, we can only talk about a representation of reality.
Facebook may be an incredible social networking tool, but it is keeping us from the fundamental part of being sociable: spending time with people.

Communication may be occurring through Facebook but does facial expression count for nothing anymore? The world seems to be getting smaller and smaller. I poked a relative in the UK yesterday and I didn’t get on an aeroplane and fly 2000 miles to do it. I did it in my office! Distance, time, and mutual hatred seem unimportant and irrelevant when it comes to the Facebook race.

One hopes that this will not progress to a stage where communication in the present and physical is not needed. Upon starting Facebook, a friend of mine at work waved her finger at me and said “watch out for that site, you’ll lose your entire life to it”.

Maybe I should have listened.

I was browsing the net today, as you do, and I came across an online marketing company that has link building listed as part of the formula to improve site conversions. This reminded me of the 298537634 (slight exaggeration) articles I have read that say link building is dead.

So who is right? Is the company I found online seriously outdated or are they making extra money by offering this additional feature to their unwitting clients? If it is the latter, well, kudos to them (If they can pull it off successfully – long term).

*This view is by no means shared by anyone else at Clicks2Customers and is solely the opinion of me.*

If they are just seriously outdated, well then some market researchers need a new job. But there is also the fact that they may have found a magic solution to make link building work properly. I mean, I started out at this company as a link builder, unless it is a one way link (they put your link on their site only) it’s pretty pointless.

I can see it working from an SEO perspective because it would improve the page rank (hopefully)…but I’m not sure why it would improve conversions. Unless of course by conversions they mean clicks to the site…but the company advertising link building is all about ROI so I assume it’s about making money and not just about the clicks. Then again we go back to the SEO point; their natural search listing could improve, so the site could indeed get more conversions. Sigh.

I was tempted to give them a call and find out what they had to say…but I did some more research into the link building matter instead. It seems link building is a big “yes”. Maybe I was thinking of reciprocal linking.

Either way, I found a really nice site. I specifically liked this post, they had some very good pointers. You could actually apply some of those principles to a lot of marketing practices. Or even everyday life. But that’s another story, and I think this post is finished.

Isn’t it great when you find funny little things like that that you could apply to so many different parts of life? I love this industry.

One of the recurring tasks of the ongoing work of running a website is managing your 404 Errors. And a rather important task this is too, because it does tell the search engines how well looked after a site is.

On Google, you can use the “site:” operator to find all your site URLs in their index -

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.africanpridehotels.com

however, it does not show you which URLs are broken. Yahoo! have taken this one step further by allowing you to do the following, using the same operator:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.africanpridehotels.com

What Yahoo! provides you with here is a TSV list of your pages in their index and more importantly, they list the pages that are not found at the bottom of that list - therefore your latest list of 404 URLs that need your attention!

This list of URLs can be added to your .htaccess file with rules for 301 (Permanent), 302 (Temporary) Redirection and that way you ensure the that your site audience, including crawlers, spiders and bots are able to find ALL of your content!

Thanks to Yahoo! for providing a full list in a standardized & downloadable format.