Traffic Tips #2 – Patching Your Traffic Leak (Part 2)

If you check your website statistics, you’ll be amazed at how many of your website visitors actually leaked to a page that you probably did not create, that says “The page cannot be found” or something straight forward like “404 Page Error”.

A sample screen shot shown below.

Such page is commonly known as the “404 Error Page” and you might be wondering how in the first place your visitors landed on this page. There are few reasons:

1. The web page does not exist
2. They receive the wrong hyperlink
3. They typed in the wrong website address into the browser
4. The website address was incorrectly formatted e.g. www.domain.com/ABC.html is different from www.domain.com/abc.html (note the caps)

Do test it out with your website by entering a page that does not exist and see what happen… And imagine this is someone else’s website, what impression would you have on the site and its owner?

There’s pretty nothing much we can do on our end, except to ensure whatever page and link we promote are correct. Of course, to reduce the traffic leakage to the “404 Error Page”, try not to have too long or confusing domain name, folder and webpage filename.

On the other hand, we do not want to let go of the traffic that leaked to this page. Thus, here are some ideas you can incorporate into the error page which you can use in combination to minimize the negative impact and to retain your visitors:

1. Offer free downloads in exchange for opt-in
2. Offer surprise gift for finding this “hidden” page
3. Offer discount coupons for a product you’re promoting
4. Use tell a friend script in exchange for free gifts
5. Redirect them back to the home page

There are many ways you can go about this, just be creative at how you present this page, so that it does not give your visitors the impression that it is your or their fault for landing there.

Now, here comes the technical part…how to you control the look and feel of your “404 Error Page”?

Not to worry, you can make changes to your “404 Error Page” in just a few simple steps:

Step 1: Login to your Cpanel

Step 2: Click on the “Error Page” icon 

Step 3: Click on “404″

Step 4: Place your HTML code on how you want your page to look like into the box and click on the “Save” button.

That’s all to it and we’re done! Isn’t that simple? Now, all you need to do is to test your error page again.

Of course, you can do the same for other error pages, but 404 is the common one that most visitors go to.

If you’re hosting your blog like Wordpress instead of a normal website, you will have to change the 404.php file under your theme directory e.g. /wp-content/themes/theme-name instead of via Cpanel.

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