Pages of Note

Terri Wells, over at SEOChat.com, posted a nice article regarding pages that you should have on your site. These pages, IMO, are some of those 1% SEO factors; not, necessarily, direct contributors to ‘good SEO,’ but good for the end-user and overall user experience. (Except the bit about custom 404s I mention later in this post) And, noticing the landscape, end-user experience inevitably carries weight, at some point.

I like the recommendation of the ‘about us’ page being developed as a kind of ‘home page’ to the area of a company’s site that detailing operations and business movements. This seems to me to be a great candidate for sub-domaining, to me.

Custom 404 pages, I think, might be weighted fairly heavy in the not-too-distant future, if the toolkit released by MSN in June 2008 or Google’s 404 widget release in late Aug 2008 are any kind of indication. When MSN and Google move toward the same goal, one should take proper note! Not only does a custom/dynamic 404 page clearly enhance overall user experience, but when a crawler gets to ’something crazy’ when it was spidering ’something relevant,’ you now have the ability, on a custom 404 page, to redirect the bot back to a 200 URL with relevant info. Happy bots = happy SEs.

Also, a very nice notable by Terri: “PRIVACY POLICY” Get one and post it. If you don’t plan on collecting info, declare it! If you do collect info, make a promise to your clients that you will respect their privacy. This helps to solidify an effective CRM program, too.

Robots.txt: Have one, even if it’s blank!

Sitemap: Be sure to have 2 versions: One for bots, and one for humans.

Good, general tips, but I think there’s reason to institute custom 404 pages.

Chat Man

clipped from www.seochat.com Web Pages to Include in Your Site By: Terri Wells 2008-09-15 Do you have an “About us”�page? Now let’s go to your “Contact us” page. clipped from www.seochat.com you should have a special page that explains your site’s copyright rules. Some content creators are beginning to embrace the idea of Creative Commons, reserving some but not all of their rights under copyright. By the way, it makes sense to include trademark information on this page as well clipped from www.seochat.com you should have a custom 404 page. The problem with a generic page is that it does nothing to help users find what they want. Do you plan to collect any information at all from users of your web site? If you do, you need to tell them what you plan to do with that information. This means you need to build a page with your privacy policy. Speaking of collecting sensitive information from your users, if you do that at all, you’re also going to need a secure page, and you’re going to need to document your security procedures. clipped from www.seochat.com how to use robots.txt files; official Sitemap page