A Quick SEO Fix

May 3, 2011

One of the simplest SEO fixes can also have the quickest return on effort.

“So what is it?”, I hear you ask.

Fix Your 404 Pages

404 pages are what happens when your page can’t be found.

The first thing to remember is having 404 pages is ok. Nothing disasterous is going to happen: The internet is constantly evolving and pages disappear all the time and are replaced by new ones. But there are 3 things you can do to ensure you’re making your error pages as helpful as possible to search engines and your users alike.

Return the correct server response

Some webmasters think to return a custom design error page, you need to redirect the user to a 200 (OK) page. And even worse, some webmasters simply redirect all errors to their homepage.

Both of these options are not best practice. They will make it difficult for Google (and your users) to get a good understanding of the available content on your site.

Provide a useful error page

To help Google (and your users) discover your new and interesting content, you should provide a useful error page. This should contain suggestions and links to your new and interesting content. You can also include a site search function to help the user find what they were looking for.

Redirect your gone away pages

Using Webmaster Tools’ Crawl Errors report, you can see the pages that return a 404 response when they are crawled by Googlebot.

It’s then a simple case of 301 (permanent) redirecting them to a relevant page.

404, 301, 200? What?!

If all this talk of server response codes and error reports is like another language, leave your question in the comments and I’ll try and answer it in plain English for you.

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Gary - search, find and analyse
In 2010, we achieved full Google accreditation and had more search-related ‘can you help us?’ conversations than you can shake a USB stick at.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is fundamental to the planning, building and growing of a website, simply because Google (and its competitors) wants to feature unique, useful and jaw-droppingly interesting websites in its search results.

With every development Google rolls out, the SEO landscape expands and this will continue in 2011. Instant Search and Search Suggestions now make the longtail just as important as that elusive vanity phrase. Site Previews will enable users to pick sites based on look and layout. There’s more to search than just picking the right keywords.

However, the point of greatest interest will be where search and social media meet. The websites that succeed in search will be the ones that make a positive contribution to the social graph of their online communities.

And what about analytics? Now you can track almost everything, the challenge is to ensure business decisions and strategies are based on data that really matters. So 2011’s key question won’t be “How are we monitoring our visitors’ behaviour?” It’s going to be “What are we going to do with this insight?”

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