SEO Tip 3: Optimize Your 404 Page

Every site should have a custom 404 page, it doesn’t need to be anything fancy, or filled with catchy sayings. The standard 404 error is pretty annoying for humans, and the spiders hate it just as much. You can find some tutorials on the forums for setting up your custom 404 Error page.

You’ll want to optimize the 404 Error page so when a spider finds it (and trust me the spider will find tons of 404 content over time) the spider will just eat it up, and find content from it. Some useful tips to optimize your 404 page are:

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• Using your main keyword in the title followed by a pipe (|) in the title. Example:Custom 404 Page SEO Tip| vBulletinSetup
• Add some keyword rich content that is relevant to your sites niche. Try to keep it to under 250 words for the page, and try not to reach over a 3% keyword density mix. Be sure to follow some other SEO tips such as putting h1 tags and <strong> tags around the keywords. Maybe put a link to your sitemap on this page.
• Add your standard navigation to the page. This is not only helpful for when a human visits the 404 page to keep them on the site. The spider will also follow these links.
• Make the 404 page, powered by your sites templates. If using vBulletin you can create a custom 404 error page using the template system. Or if not, just try to match the look and feel of your site as closely as possible. Whatever you do, do not make a forum thread, call it 404 error and direct bots to that.

Be sure to keep checking back for our 7Days of SEO Tips. So far we’ve covered deep linking, and interlinking within your site.