On a recent examination of my traffic statistics, I noticed a significant percentage of people going to the domain takanomi.com were getting a ‘404 Document Not Found’ error. That means that they were typing in the URL for a document that did not exist, or they were clicking on an invalid link.
The same statistics indicated that people simply left the domain once they got the 404 error page, and many of these would simply never return. That’s effectively a large number of potential customers who were lost forever, and hence a huge loss to the business.
So, what could I do to ‘rescue’ these visitors, and thereby boost my business? This article shows you how you can turn all this lost traffic to your distinct advantage.
The first step was obviously to test out all the links on the site – rather than painstakingly go through them one by one, I chose to use the free tool at http://validator.w3.org/checklink, but this did not yield any further clues as none of the links appeared to be broken.
I’d advise you to do the same thing on a regular basis, along with your other regular Web site maintenance tasks – if you want to try to automate this maintenance process, you can access a full range of powerful tools from NetMechanic, that not only identifies dead links on your site but also fixes HTML code errors that could again drive visitors away.
So, rather than losing all these visitors completely, I decided to edit the existing 404 error document on my server to redirect these people to the main page on my site – it works regardless of whether the visitor has JavaScript enabled. In fact, it worked so well, I installed it on my pop-ups site at PopUpMaster as well.
Want to see how this works? Try going to a non-existent document like http://takanomi.com/hg.html – this will open in a new window so you don’t lose your place here. Or, as another example, try it on PopUpMaster with a document like http://popupmaster.com/jf.html.
Want to install this yourself? – I’ll now show you exactly how, just by following a few easy steps.
Firstly, you may need to consult your host to check whether your 404 page is customizable and if so, where it is located in your directory structure.
The code for the 404 page on takanomi.com is as follows:
-==-
Let’s look at this code in some more detail. There are two methods used here to redirect the page: JavaScript, and the
-==-
redirection tag. We need to provide both methods because not all browsers support JavaScript, or the user may have turned off JavaScript in their browser; and not all browsers support the
-==-
redirection tag – thus we ‘catch’ as many people as possible and point them in the right direction.
Firstly copy all the code above into your usual HTML editor, or otherwise just paste it into a text editor such as Notepad. You will need to modify parts of this code, as illustrated by the highlighted text. We’ll look at these one by one, going down the page:
The title ‘Top class web site services’ – change this to something appropriate to your own site
The URL ‘http://www.takanomi.com’ – change this to your own.
The number 2000 – this is the number of milliseconds before the redirection takes place, so if set to 2000, the redirect will take place after 2 seconds. It is important to set this to more than zero – otherwise you ‘lock’ people into your site as they will have difficulty going ‘back’ in their browser, and a negative site experience such as this certainly won’t help your business.
In the
-==-
tag, the number 2 – this again controls the amount of time before the redirection takes place, except this time it is in seconds rather than milliseconds. Set this to reflect the same amount of time as you have previously set in the JavaScript, in this case 2 seconds.
The other highlighted areas again reflect your own URL and your site’s domain – change these to be your own.
Hint – you can also add some special code from http://takanomi.com/exitblaze to this page that will be a significant traffic generator for you.
Save the file – you will usually have to name the file to be exactly the same as the existing 404 document on your server, but check with your host if you need to, to make sure. Upload the file to your host, overwriting the existing 404 file.
Now you need to test it, to make sure that any invalid URLs pick up this page, and to make sure that the new page behaves correctly. In my case, I typed in a nonsensical URL into the browser location bar, such as http://www.takanomi.com/adfsafd.html (remember the first part has to be your domain), and sure enough, it picked up the redirection page, and redirected to the main page of my site. If you have any problems, just go back and double-check the code for any slight errors that may have crept in during the editing process.
Once you’re convinced it’s working correctly, you can rest assured that you’re successfully mopping up those 404 errors and sending your visitors to your site correctly. You never know, you might even increase your sales – that’s exactly what happened to me when I installed the system on PopUpMaster.
Steve Shaw develops systems and software to help you
succeed in your online business. The article above has been
extracted and condensed from his e-course on how to publish
articles to promote your web site – to receive the full
e-course direct to your mail box, and also discover a much
quicker, highly efficient way to submit your articles, sign
up now at:
http://www.takanomi.com/publish-articles.php.
