How many times have you come across a missing page in a site? The 404 error : document not found error popping up in front of our eyes. What do you do next? Yes, that's right, push the back button or open up our own bookmarks to surf somewhere else.

Do you know that sites with such error is losing a lot visitors a day? In addition to that, your site can never reach the glamour it always wanted as it cannot build a reputable reputation. However, I do agree, sometimes, we as webmasters tend to be forgetful at times. 404 error pages do occur, and sometimes its the fault of search engines or directories of not updating their link database.

There's one method to actually re-direct this missing visitors back on track to your site. All you need is to generate a customized 404 Error Page. All you need is to add a file to your site named .htaccess. Put the following line in the file and save it.

ErrorDocument 404 /404error.shtml

Now you've got a personalized 404 error page. That's not it YET!! The next thing you need to do is to customized the layout of this error page. A same layout as your main page would be recommended as this tells your lost visitor that they are still within your site.

Next, you'll still need to inform your visitor of the missing page.

Finally, all you need is to make a menu bar or tool bar easily accessible so that any lost visitor can keep surfing through your site. Usually, this method can retain at least a minimum of 60% of lost visitors and of course keeping them longer gives you much more time to prove to them your site have lots to offer.