You have created your custom error page so now all of that traffic that use to go into the World Wide Web black hole now stays on your web page. But if you don't do the following 15 Minute exercise once or twice a month you are not Maximizing those Lost visitors

Custom error pages are a crucial part of your web page but they are just not enough. They are a failsafe. If you knew every bad address your surfers would type you could display a page that was more closely related to what the surfers was expecting then a catch all error page.

Most Web Hosts will provide you with a Cpanel, where you can create E-mail Accounts, Upload Web Pages and check your stats. Most of the Cpanel's are very similar if not identical to the one my Hosts uses.

When it is time to check my web page traffic statistics I click on Log and then Web/FTP Stats and finally AWStats. I am now presented with a List of Stats to look at. This Article will discuss the stat related to Http Error Codes.

If you click on the Pages not Found link under the HTTP Error code you will see a list of all Required but not found URLs. This list will be sorted in order with the most requested on top and the least requested on the bottom. Start at the top of the list and work your way to the bottom. Simply create a web page for each URL that is listed with a significant amount of traffic.

You would create a custom error page that redirects the user to the proper web page. As an Example if the error page is http://mydomain.com/page1.htm (missing the l in html) and you have a page called http://mydomain.com/page1.html you simply create a page called http://mydomain.com/page1.htm (missing the l in html) and set up a redirect to the right page http://mydomain.com/page1.html