Extra traffic right under your nose!

By Hani Banna
Posted Wednesday, July 7, 2004

Do you know what's the 2ND MOST VISITED page on your web site?

This may surprise you. But in my consulting work the error page is the second most visited web page on many of the web sites that I've seen!

Anywhere between 10% and 40% of your page hits could fall on your error page.

SCARY ISN'T IT!

Especially if you're not taking full advantage of this valuable page.

This could turn out to be a huge number of EXISTING PAGE VIEWS that you're missing out on. You could be using this traffic to generate more ACTION and SALES on your site.

I'm going to show you exactly how to take advantage of this little gem of a page - your error page.

1) The first thing to do is to check if you have an error page already set up on your web site.

Some hosting services will display their own default error page on your web site. YOU DON'T WANT THIS. You want to have your own error page so you can harness those EXTRA eyeballs.

Just type in your web site domain name followed by a fake web page, or even some garbage text. This will show you what your users experience when they hit your error page.

If your get a blank page or your hosting service provider error page comes up then contact them. Ask them (nicely) to set up your error page to point to a page of your choice. This is a fairly simple thing for them to do.

I like to keep the name of my error page simple. For example, the error page for MakingClicks is:

(http://www.makingclicks.com/error/error.html.)

2) The second thing to do is to check your page hits stats.This will give you an idea of how frequently your error page is being viewed by your visitors.

If your error page is being viewed a huge number of times..

then..

PANIC!..

No, you don't really have to panic. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have lots of broken links in your site. Web users are becoming more web savvy and will play around with the url in the address box on their browser.

But you can take advantage of this. Check out my error page at MakingClicks.com.

Just click (http://www.makingclicks.com/anything.html). This page doesn't actually exist. You will be forwarded to my default error page.

with our error page we've basically assumed that either the user is LOST or they can't FIND what they're looking for. In either case we've given them a way to get back to the home page, contact us or find what they want elsewhere - at our affiliate partners web sites!

3) FINALLY,

if you consider that your ERROR PAGE could be the MOST VISITED PAGE on your site. You REALLY want to make the most of it.

Don't treat it as an embarrassment and try to forget it.

Here are some things you can do with your error page:

- put a link to your homepage

- put your web site search on this page

- put a contact us form or survey to ask people what they want from you site

- exchange error page links with other web masters within the topic of your web site

- promote your affiliates: your visitors may have given up on finding what they want on your site anyway.

The possibilities are endless, it's almost like having a SECOND HOME PAGE!

Wishing you success.

About the Author

Hani Banna
Award winning Online Marketing Toolkit
(http://www.makingclicks.com/)