Page 15: WordPress doesn’t log or notify for any 404 Not Found Errors
You worry a lot about what people see when they visit your blog pages, but what happens when they visit and the page can’t be found? Maybe they mistyped something, a bookmark went wrong, a link was bad, or you just plain deleted something old. They get a “404 Not Found” error page, and generally in 99% of themes out there that page is blank with a “404 Not Found” error at the top. You are completely missing a GIANT opportunity to suggest something else to your visitor. Imagine going through the drive through at McDonald’s and asking for a “Big Mac” and having them say “we don’t have that – see you later…”! It’s like buying a car at the dealership and wanting it in blue, but when all they have is red or white the salesman just walks away. Read my post WordPress Hack #4: Create a Custom Error 404 Page to learn not only how to give your 404 Error page new options for visitors, but also how to get notified via email every time someone sees a “not found” error.
You really hit the nail on the head with this post…or 20 nails…
The funny thing is that everything you talked about here – are all things that i use on every blog. The comment form, the 2 sitemaps, the search log, some kind of stats, super cache, etc.
I’ve often wondered why a lot of these things don’t get built in.
Looks like the feed notations on commentluv didn’t work. delete the other one please.
Great resource you have compiled here. I think most people are aware of about half of these problems and the plugins to fix them, but this lays it all out.
Thanks!
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On the breadcrumb thing, were you not tempted to put JTPratt or some keywords or something instead of ‘home’ …? Would this not be better from SEO point of view?
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looking for the same plugin for a long time…thanks alot
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no really, because navigation for users always trumps SEO….
Do you still recommend wpSEO? This post was some time ago and things change fast. Is it still better than All In One or PlatinumSEO. I’ve tried AIO and Plat. Haven’t tried wpSEO. I can’t see a whole lot of difference, but I don’t have enough experience to know which performs better.
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I use wpSEO on all the sites that I had it on, but now (the newer version) requires a paid license. So now I use All in one SEO on new sites I setup.
I just switched to platinum SEO because of the automatic 301 redirects when you change your links. I wanted to change the way I structured my links but thought it would be a pain to do it myself – well, I tried the platinum SEO plugin – changed the permalinks and checked my pages indexed in google and they all showed the new link structure. Don’t know how it did that but I’m sold.
I think from SEO standpoint, not having a sitemap means you aren’t realizing your full potential with search engine crawl and having maximum number of entries indexed.
Good tips on HTML tags and SEO for blogs! I have a WordPress blog bolted onto my “Plumbing” site and used an overlay template to make it look a little more unique. If you click on my name you will see the home page and can navigate to my blog by clicking on the “Comments” link at the bottom of the page.
Caution:
Do not get sucked into the SEO blog plug-in that Jeff Johnson promotes. It has a link back to his stuff in the footer of the blog. That link makes your blog look unprofessional I think. The best SEO overlay for WordPress is Semi-o-Logic. It’s an expensive upgrade, but worth the money if you’re serious about SEO for your blog.
I don’t know if WordPress reads your blog, but several of these have been added to the basic installation now.
Some really nice points.. WordPress comments are nofollowed by default and it doesn’t give us any option to turn them do follow. No built in advertising system and Statistics is a big hole.
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I’ve done two things: I wrote a php script to set a number of WordPress options — like my permalinks to the values I always use. Secondly, I have a checklist and always install the Comment Luv, Keyword Luv, Top Commenters and DoFollow every time I install WordPress on a domain.