Welcome to this weeks SEO Video, Today we going to discuss the importance of 404 pages.

A 404 page is returned by the server when a user tries to reach a non existent page on your website. This could be due to the clicking of a broken link, a deleted page or miss-type of a URL.

Most servers will have a standard 404 page from your ISP , but are often crammed with unrelated links, unrelated text and use an unrelated design.

For both usability and SEO you want the user and crawl bot to remain on your website and not panic or bounce once confronted with a foreign 404 page design.

So how do you create a custom 404?

The 404 page can be a standard HTML page and should include the following.

• Try and avoid scaring the user with ‘ERROR’ or ‘INCORRECT’ and make the pages content as friendly as possible.
• Use the same template as the rest of your website to ensure consistency
• Use the free Google 404 widget (Linked from the supporting blog post)
• Add a site map to allow your users and Google to navigate back to your main content

Once you have designed your 404 page, you now have to ensure your server delivers a 404 HTTP status code and tell the server where to find your newly created and uploaded page.

We use 2 different hosting packages at Creare that require different methods of identifying a 404 page, Our Fasthost UK server allows you to specify the 404 page in the web space setting for a particular domain. Alternatively our dedicated servers and 1and1 accounts can be controlled via the .htaccess file and specifying the following code:

ErrorDocument 404 /newcustom404.php

Finally the official word from Google:

A good custom 404 page will help people find the information they’re looking for, as well as providing other helpful content and encouraging them to explore your site further.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=93641

Thank for watching.

After working hard getting page 1 position 1 listings for your clients or your own website, what is the next logical step? Today’s video will show you how to drill down the information provided by Google Analytics to illustrate the conversion rate and therefore ROI for 2 different dimension. The first dimension is keywords, allowing you to clearly see which keywords generates the most goal completions and the conversion rate of each keyword. The second dimension will allow you to see the trends of how particular regions or countries use keywords and your website to completing your goals. Both the keyword and area dimensions are designed to allow you to adapt and improve your strategy for optimizing your website. The idea behind custom reporting is that each client will have different objectives, the custom reports will show you any information you require and that cannot be found in the default analytic’ settings. You can also add any custom reports you create to the dashboard or apply them across multiple website profiles allowing you to feedback valuable information to your clients. Thanks for watching.

Script:

Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, we are going to take a look at Google custom search applications and find out how it gathers information about your search patterns and interests:

Search History - This can be done in two separate ways, either when your logged into your Google account or using cookies via your web browser.

If you are signed into your Google account, it automatically customises your search results based on your past search activity. This could be recent search queries in Google or websites you have visited previously. This service is called ‘Web History’ and is enabled by default, you can of course turn this functionality off or personalise this service.

You can turn the service off by simply logging in and by going to the top right hand corner of the screen, click ‘web history’. You can see it has stored information based on my previous search queries. You can can stop it tracking your history by clicking ‘pause’ or personalise the service from the options on the left hand side.

If you are not signed into your Google Account, your browser stores information using Cookies, this remembers previous search activity on the particular machine you are using. You can again turn this functionality by doing the following.

Log out, click ‘web history’ again and click the ‘Disable customisations based on search activity.’ link.

Google also use a tracking cookies to monitor your interest in a particular product or service and then serve adverts via adwords on sites that run Google Adsense.

So if  I was reading a review of a newly released video game and this site used adsense, it would store a cookie and my IP address. Then if I continued to read up on the video game and another review site had Google adsense; it would recommend related adverts such as ‘buy video game title’ or ‘video game price comparison’.

The second personalised search application is based on location. Google use your physical location to help customise your search results. This is done one of two ways, either your profile or account address details  when logged into your Google account provide Google with a location.

or an approximation of your location is made based on the location of your IP address, The location application also helps enhance Google maps or local business center listings to suit your location.

Thanks for watching if you have any questions or comments please leave them on the you tube channel or supporting blog post.