It is good practise to have your own customised error page, which is in your own template look and feel, as this provides a consistent user experience and allows you to communicate a suitable message; whilst being in control of that message. Additionally if you don’t create a formal process for errors of this nature you may risk how well your site is perceived by search engines.

Most search engine optimisation and usability experts will recommend you have a customised error page that makes some apology to the user, explains in basic terms what has happened, and suggests some useful and popular content or pages to visit as an alternative. Tip: Don’t reference “404″ in the page content as it is meaningless to the user.

Here’s what we do, which seems to work for us :

Example of a customised error page

Whilst all of this is professional and does something to rescue a poor user experience; for a commercial website, this is a missed opportunity. Make the most of your error pages by turning what could have potentially been a poor user experience into a commercial opportunity by creating a commercial error page.

Tips for Creating a Commercial Error Page

1. Start by doing some simple analysis into your most popular products and pages with highest conversion rates.

2. Do your research first, and if your are a new site, wait a couple of months to get some statistically meaningful performance data.

3. Don’t just put your most expensive products on the page, as this may look hollow and may not convert at all. Wait until you have some interaction and conversion rate data beforehand.

4. Identify top 3 to 10 products and present them in the error page content.

5. Identify top converting pages and explain what these pages are, asking if they might be of interest to the user.

6. Put your search box on your error page.

7. Optimise your error page by testing performance of different products.

8. Analyse the visitor route to error and see if there is a pattern or commercial inference to be made.

Here’s the best commercialised error page I’ve ever seen.

Best Commercial Error Page We Have Seen

Note the friendly and apologetic intro, the huge search box in prominent position, and the placement of the trendy, popular and celebrity-fave footwear items. This brand is working hard to make me like them and to get my business.

It’s worth saying that I was surprised to find a huge number of giants in online retail with a lot of opportunity to increase commercial usability and user experience, by improving on their current solution. Such as ASOS and their automatic redirect to the homepage , Argos and their complete lack of customisation and possibly the biggest surprise of all was Amazon and their slightly formal and completely non-commercial message; which for a web retail giant like Amazon, could be a considerable bit of scooping up to be done. (As you have gathered, I didn’t need to look past ‘A’ to find a surprising amount of missed opportunity.)

Automatic re-direct to home

Er... Where Am I?

Mal Function

Kudos to Zappos for leading the field. Do please let me know if you come across any really good or really bad error pages in the comments!

If Immanuel Kant was alive today, I think he’d be an SEO on the side. I think the combination of knowledge fuelled by common results of repeated experimentation, combined with the all- too- common Cartesian doubt (did we really drop a place – or did they gain a place) would seriously appeal to him.

So, it is with some sense of compassion that I wanted to reference this hilarious Google result for the search term “Google Ireland”. Have a look at the top ranking results…

Notes on a small Ireland

How good is that?

Maybe someone did a misspell in the meta keywords, cos – like New Zealand is an Ireland, right? Of course the search engines don’t use meta-keywords to inform the ranking algorithm though.

Regardless. My point is that SEO is an inexact science, though we can use learned inferences and experimentation to support our hypotheses, but when all is said and done – even Google can fall foul of their own algorithm.

Diddums.

We can hopefully help you a little further as here we’ve taken the Top 5 Ranking Factors from the SEOmoz report, and explained what they refer to in layman terms.

1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links

Anchor text refers to the clickable text part of a hyperlink. Anchor text is thought to be weighted quite highly in search engine algorithms as the linked text is normally highly relevant to the landing page. Thus, the anchor text of a link is an indicator of what the linked page is about and can help search engine spiders understand the subject of the target webpage better.

It is best to try and use anchor text which is similar or identical to the keyword targets for your website. Whether the link is from from an internal or external source, even if you can’t use one of your keyword targets, never, ever use a generic phrase such as ‘click here’.

2. External Link Popularity

External link popularity is a measure of the quality and quantity of external links that point to your website. External link popularity is an off-page factor that is supposedly impartial. The theory is that the more links that point to your website, the more popular it is therefore the more useful the pages should be. Content-rich sites should attract lots of links easily; content-poor websites should find it difficult to attract websites.

However it isn’t just about the quantity of links – it’s also about the quality. Not all incoming links are equal; a link from a well-repsected site from a well-respected page (such as the BBC’s homepage) will be worth far, far more than 10 links from an obscure link directory. Naturally, the more respected the website is, the harder it is to get a backlink therefore the more weight the link will carry.

One-way links are thought to be the best kind of link to have (where Site A => Site B only). Reciprocal linking (where Site A => Site B, and Site B => Site A) is useful, particularly if both websites are well respected, however the link is not thought to carry as much weight as a one-way link. Three way links (Site A => Site B => Site C => Site A) are at attempt by some webmasters to create more ‘natural’ looking links. Three way linking can sometimes be better than normal reciprocal links as each link looks like a one-way link.

3. Diversity of Link Sources

Link diversity refers to the number of different root domains that link to your website. Although link quality and link quantity are important, the variety of links is also a critical factor in the search engine algorithms. Example www.themediaflow.com/about and www.themediaflow.com/contact are two different links but are not diverse as the root domain is the same ‘themediaflow’.

The more domains that link to you, the more trust and authority your site is likely to have. Links from a variety of sites are also likely to create new traffic opportunities as well as giving your site exposure to a larger audience. Linking repeatedly from the same domains also looks slightly artificial – a wider sphere of influence means your site will tend to look more authentic.

Having a wide source of links is also a good insurance policy – if you have links from just one or two websites, what if one of the sites loses all of it’s content? You’ve suddenly lost a whole bunch of links. Or what if the search engines adjust their search engine algorithm? You could be out in the cold.

As a final word on link building, when you are building links for your site, don’t just look for the followed links (when links are created, you can apply an HTML attribute called ‘nofollow’ to the link which tells the search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the SERP. Many blogs, directories and bookmarking sites have ‘nofollow’ applied as standard to any link). OK, ‘nofollow’ links won’t pass your website pages any link juice however it is slightly suspicious to only have full-fat links pointing at your website – it will probably look more natural if you have diversity in your links. Also, link building is not just about the SERP – it’s about traffic. Some of the ‘nofollow’ links may actually drive good (free) traffic at your site – and having a diverse source of traffic is great insurance against search engine algorithm changes.

4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag

There are two titles that are worthy of mention: the first is within the metadata and the second is within a link.

Metadata title tags should appear in every page on your website and every page on your site should have unique title tags created for it. Titles should always include the keyword targets for that particular page and it is also a useful place to put in alternate spellings in the hope of ranking well (e.g. customisation vs customization). Always front-load your titles with your keywords, but don’t put too many in as this will ‘water down’ the relevance.

Link titles serve two purposes: to help users predict what will happen if they follow a link and to give more relevance pointers to the search engine spiders. Link titles are usually seen by the user when their mouse pointer hovers over a link. The link title should be descriptive, however they should ideally be less than 60 characters and certainly no more than 80 characters long. The link title should be used for supplementary information and to backup the anchor text of a link.

5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains

The link distance refers to how many hops you are away from a ‘Trusted Domain’. The closer you are to a ‘Trusted Domain’ the more trust/authority you inherit from that link.

So what exactly is a ‘Trusted Domain’? Trusted Domains are domains which search engines believe they can trust. Unfortunately, there is no known public list of trusted domains although places such as brands are likely to be on the list. Once a site is classed as a trusted domain, it is believed that any link published within the site will get a little bit of extra link juice. Even if you can’t get a link directly from a trusted domain, by having a link from another domain which does have a link from the trusted domain, you will probably still see a little extra link juice.

I’d say we’re pretty much in agreement with the SEOmoz Top 5 Ranking factors, though there are a number of other factors that can have both a positive and negative effect on your ranking in the SERPs that are also not to be ignored. Finally; one thing that is worth stressing time and again, is that you need to have a fair amount of good- quality, original content that grows and updates frequently. When it comes to SEO you really can not polish a turd.

To illustrate; imagine I’m a small business in the 1960’s seeking to make the public aware of its existence. I’d have to think about physical, visible signage for my premises and advertise in the classifieds. All of that costs money and would involve hiring specialist professionals to create such signage and ad copy. Fast-forward to today, and a small business director has everything they need to make their business brand known; strong and discoverable, just a few keystrokes away.

Of course this works both ways! So, just as a brand owner has some great tools and resources to reach a wider audience more quickly, so does a brand consumer have numerous outlets to transmit their dissatisfaction or voice their opinion. And rightly so; as it’s a good thing this so-called democratisation of the web allows all of us consumers to voice our opinions in an open and public forum. It can be a headache for brands however, as this unregulated, unofficial content on the web vies for attention with your own material. Now; we’re not about to advocate attempting to bury all negative publicity, it is still publicity. What we are advocating is that you seek to ‘own’ your brand message at least on page 1 of the search engines.

Why Own Page 1 for Your Brand Results?

•    Consistency of message
•    Brand recognition and reinforcement
•    Increase traffic to your owned and operated websites
•    Look like a big deal

How to Own Page 1! (It’s easier than you think).

Get Your Domain Name: Make sure you own your brand domain name. www.whatever.com and the local TLD for each market in which you operate; that is if you don’t already! Your own company website is the easiest way to own your first result.
Join Professional Directories: Add yourself to professional and local directories for your sector, thus controlling profile information and having the knock-on benefit of association.
Write and Distribute Press Releases: Writing specific and tailored news about your company is a great way to inform often, and in an official way. Distributing this news as a press release to your online press and having this covered is absolutely invaluable. Trade press publishers naturally tend to rank well due to the authority of their content.
Create a Social Media Presence: Social media is a fantastic, wide-reaching and cost-effective way of essentially, advertising your brand. Facebook pages, Linkedin profiles and CrunchBase profiles are all good ways to extend your brand message. We looked at a couple of good practise tips to be aware of, when expanding your social media brand in a previous post.
Blog and Comment: Nobody knows your business like you do. So get out there and blog, guest blog, comment on related blogs. Establish your internet credentials by showing exactly how much you do know about integrated circuits, or bridal gown design or whatever it is that you do.

Although we can’t control (nor should we want to control) what is said about our brand, but we can control what we say about our brand; so there’s really no excuse not to.

The HTML format allows for the inclusion of a variety of types of metadata, most commonly keywords and description however it can be expanded to highly-granular information such as the Dublin Core and e-GMS standards.

Metadata is typically hidden from a user when they visit a webpage, however a search engine spider will be able to pick up the metadata. Metadata helps a search engine spider understand what a webpage is about, helps to categorise the webpage, and therefore helps to facilitate search and retrieval (NISO, 2001).

Four Key Reasons Why Metadata Matters

1. Meta data works on image-lead pages
It’s a bit of a cliché but there is some truth in the statement oft-used by search engine optimisation (SEO) experts, that “content is King”. Certainly having a lot of content, that changes and updates regularly is a key criteria in optimising for search engines; however there are many valid situations, web pages and entire websites that are very image-lead. As an example many web designer and artist’ websites would naturally contain a gallery of graphical and image lead work. Ensuring you have detailed meta-data describing the site and page content and the nature of your business ensures that search engines have something to get hold of other than just the image content.

2. Meta data expands on existing content
There is often more than one way to describe something – perhaps there is an incorrect way of describing something or there is a commonly used slang expression. If you want to keep your pages corporate and don’t want to include this alternate content however you’d like to rank in the search engine results page (SERP) for the slang, adding them to your metadata may help you rank well for text which doesn’t actually appear on your on-page content.

3. There’s more than one way to spell
There is sometimes more than one way to spell a particular word, for example English spellings tend to prefer the ‘s’ whereas American spellings prefer ‘z’ (e.g. specialisation vs specialization).

If you want to keep your website consistent, you will want to ensure that you keep your descriptions and spelling conventions consistent throughout all your webpages. However what if you run an international website and you want to rank for the alternative spelling?

Metadata can help by allowing you to add these alternate spellings into your metadata. Effectively this data is hidden from your user when they visit the webpage so there are no consistency issues; however it allows search engine spiders to potentially rank your webpage for a variety of other terms.

4. Good metadata increases click-through rates
Search engines will often use the title and meta descriptions of each webpage when they list the result in the SERP. Pages with good metadata are much more likely to be clicked on than ones with poor metadata for example:

Poor metadata – the title of the page is unhelpful, the description doesn’t say anything about the company.

Better metadata – the title of the page explains what the company does and includes keyword targets, the meta description gives more detail about the company’s services and what’s on the page.

If any of the contents of your metadata match up with the phrase the user has searched for, the keyword terms will be bolded up in the SERP. Research has shown that users are more likely to click on a result the more bolded keywords there are in the listing, thus it is important to plan your metadata carefully and ensure that every page on your website has unique, hand-crafted metadata.

However if you leave your metadata out, it’s not the end of the world – search engines will often try and use some of the on-page content in the SERP if you don’t have a meta description and there are “over 200” factors which influence a web page’s position in the SERP for a given keyphrase (that’s the Google secret sauce) therefore you may still rank well even if you leave this key information out. It does tend to be harder and take a lot longer!

References

Google (nd); Google Basics – Serving results
Available from: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=70897&ctx=sibling
[cited: 25 August 2009]

NISO (2001); Understanding Metadata
Available from: http://www.niso.org/publications/press/UnderstandingMetadata.pdf
[cited: 25 August 2009]