Daniel Coburn

In recent weeks I’ve been doing a lot of talking at the office about SEO lately, and how important it is to the organization as a whole.  I hear many people talk about what I like to call SEO 303, which is “advanced” methods that involve link building, external content, on site content and keyword density.  It’s all good, but as I’ve mentioned before you have to build the foundation of your site, in order to support SEO strategies.

In my previous post, I spoke about sitemaps, and those are imperative for you website, if you page isn’t index, it will never be found.  But also if your page isn’t found, what does the search engines see?

Another foundation is to solidify your page not found (404) page and use it for good vs. evil.  Evil is when you simply put a basic screen that says simply ‘page not found’, even worse is to forward it to our homepage.  Where I am currently at we do both! If you type in site.com/blah you go to the homepage, but if you add an extension (site.com/blah.as) you got to a basic page not found error.  These are is bad for a couple of reasons:

1. If a link into your site is mistyped a person can have a bad experience
2. If you have bad links internally you give the wrong information.

So what should a 404 contain?

1. An apology
2. Something that lets the customer know they are on the right page.
3. A search box
4. A link to a sitemap, to help customers and bots find their way.
5. The proper 404 header
6. A link to your homepage

An Apology – I someone got to a 404 page it’s your fault, either you changed a page, typed a link wrong, or have something pointing to your site that is incorrect.  It’s important to let the visitor know it was a mistake and you are sorry for the inconvenience.

Something letting them know they are in the right place – A person that gets a 404 needs to know they are in the right place, either a logo, sites name, or whatever, simple is good, or simply make a 404 page out of your site skin for continuity.

A Search Box – The customer is obviously lost, either by their own fault, your fault, or a third party link fault, but regardless of blame they are their to find somethings, so give them the opportunity to search and get more detailed information on things on your site.  This could be an ideal way to save a sale and get a person back into the funnel.

Link to a sitemap – Giving customers the ability to browse your site vs. search can also work to your advantage, not everyone wants to search, they might just want to browse.  Never a bad idea to give someone a second option on how to find what they want.

Proper 404 header – This is not that important for humans, but it is very important to search engines and analytics software.  Your server needs to send the complete 404 error header when it is delivered to a user.  If it is not configured correctly, it will send a status of 200 which tells the browser and search engine that everything is OK.

Put a link to your homepage -The homepage is one of the most visited pages on your site, and there is a good chance that a customer is looking for that page.  If you have your logo on the page make sure you make it clickable to your homepage, and also give them a link that states something along the lines of “Visit our Homepage”…