Hi, Fiona Lewis here from Super Savvy Business with this week’s Website Word of the Week. 00:35 - I have a tip for you and it’s all about something called a 404 page.

Have you ever been surfing a web and you click on a link, and when you click on that link and you go to the website the page doesn’t exist and you get some sort of error message that just says… “404, this page doesn’t exist”?

The other thing that can happen sometimes is that you might type in a URL directly into your browser and when you go to that page the same thing happens because perhaps you made a mistake in the URL that you typed or perhaps the page that you typed in just doesn’t exist anymore.

This is quite common. 01:10 - Now what we can do to not only keep Google happy but also improve user experience is to create a good quality 404 error page.

It’s a bit boring when you go there and it just says, “Look, there’s no page here”. But then, they don’t really help you or show you where you can go from there to find maybe what you were looking for, or how to get out of that error page.

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Cool Ideas For 404 Pages & How To Run With The Hare (Visitors) And Hunt With The Hounds (Google)

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Most times, what you’ll end up doing is actually clicking off that site, which is not good for your website in the long run because it is considered a bounce. And we want to reduce the bounce rate in Google’s eyes because the lower the bounce rate, the higher quality and the most relevant your site is seen. 01:55 - So what is considered a good 404 page?

Well, I’ve done a bit of research and found some really interesting, some imaginative and some user-friendly 404 pages.

The quick rule of thumb is: first of all, tell people that the page doesn’t exist but then give them some links of other pages where they might want to go, where they might find the content that they are looking for. So maybe it might be back to the Home Page, it might be to the Product Page, you might even list some of your most popular products or your most popular articles or your page…

Really, just think about what is going to be most useful to people if they arrived on your page and they can’t find what they are looking for. 02:35 - Now one of the things Google says that we should avoid is to have the 404 page show up in the search results.

This can be set to what we call a “no index”. Or, through a Robots .txt file we can actually say to Google we don’t want this page to show up in search results.

The only other tip that Google gives us is to make sure that our 404 page is in the same type of design as the rest of our website; so it needs to be congruent. 03:05 - So anyway guys, have a look at the examples of 404 pages; some of them are really great designs, some of them are hilarious, others are just so imaginative!

So sit down, have a brainstorm, talk to your team, work out what you can do, which pages you want to send people to if they do arrive on an error page, and have some fun with it most importantly.

That’s all for now; my name is Fiona Lewis from Super Savvy Business with this week’s Website Word of the Week.

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Take care and bye for now!

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Go to http://www.supersavvybusiness.com/category/traffic-news to see all the 404 page examples that I have put together for you.

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