SEO Customised 404 Error Pages – Minimal Effort, Great Returns
July 17th, 2008 by Nick
A 404 error page is an error page offered by a web server when a page is unavailable on a domain, or when there was an error in opening a particular page. Dead links that point to deleted or moved pages are a common cause and the result is a very basic page that imparts no information. Worse still, when a search engine spider hits that page, it essentially runs up against a brick wall.
The Problem With Standard 404 Error Pages
Standard 404 error pages contain little or no information pertaining to your website. A spider will be provided with no more links to follow and no content to index. This can, in extreme circumstances, prevent the spider from crawling the remainder of your site. However, by optimising this page, you can give your visitors a means to navigate to other pages and provide spiders with navigational links to follow.
Templates And Navigation
If your website uses a template, which most do, then you should use this template as the basis for a custom 404 error page. Hopefully, it will include all the necessary navigational links including a link to your sitemap. This ensures that spiders can continue to effectively crawl all of your pages without having to miss chunks out because pages are inaccessible or have been moved.
Give Your Visitors An Alternative
You might also include extra information for the benefit of visitors. Give a little insight into your service, provide links to the most important pages, and don’t forget to politely inform them that they are viewing an error page. If you don’t offer visitors an alternative method of escaping a 404 error page, then the only option is the exit button and you’ll lose a potential customer.
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404 is a very common error, whenever a visitor enters a wrong inter page URL of your site or click on a dead link it occurs, normally in this kind of situation visitor clicks on close and try to find different pages. By optimizing 404 pages you can motivate them to stay on your site.
Whenever someone clicks on a link that leads them to an error page, they get a very generic looking error page which leaves an impression of unprofessionalism with your website.
By making 404 error page look like the template on your site, you can allow visitor know that the page they are looking for is not available, and do it in a classy manner.
They are already at your site; why not attempt to make them special. You can even position this as a special offer to compensate for not having the information they were looking for.
When you create your custom 404 error page, you want to give a page the flavor of your site. Just by adding a bunch of links might not be effective because people don’t want to see a bunch of links.