Upgrading to WordPress 2.0 brings many advantages but the installation may create some page not found, 404, errors for you.

If you see these when you have previously established a permalink structure, and you are certain that the pages exist, then you should check your htaccess file.

By default WordPress tries to write to this file to enable the rewrites that will conform to the permalink structure you have defined.

On some hosting accounts WordPress may not have the right permissions to edit the file and the rewrite functionality will fail. The rules will relate to WordPress 1.5 whereas you will be running WordPress 2.0.

In these situations you should edit the htaccess file manually, if you are confident of doing this and not shutting down your blog – take a backup.

WordPress 1.5 seemed to produce a very large set of rewrite rules whereas WordPress 2.0 handles rewrites differently and the rules are fewer. So do not worry if the replacement code is much shorter than the original code.

Good luck and I hope that this helps.

SEO (search engine optimization) has been a growing topic on the Internet for a while and many articles have been written about it. I agree SEO is important but with all the the focus on the external search engines and optimizing a site to attract visitors we can tend to forget what happens to the visitors when they get to your site.
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I often read many comments concerning issues in a site being included within the Technorati service.

Technorati is good and an excellent source of short term visitors for your main keywords before your entries are indexed by the large search engines. An issue with it is the lack of feedback when sites tags are not included within the Technorati search. This can become painful when you blog a topical entry and then wait and wait and wait for Technorati to pick it up.

One major reason for the posts to be ignored by Technorati Read the rest of this entry »

The three main search engines Google, MSN and Yahoo allocate different importance to various elements of your site and web page. This is driven by their different algorithms which they constantly refine as they seek to bring the most relevant search results to you and compete with each other.

One result of this is Read the rest of this entry »

When was the last time you looked at your blog feed in a feed aggregator and viewed your site in the same way that your readers do. To ensure you deliver a good customer experience this should be a regular practice, it can also highlight issues with your site that you may not have noticed.

If your feeds are set to full text Read the rest of this entry »

The forums are awash with comments concerning the status and impact of the Google Big Daddy update. Whilst Google is pursuing this to improve their infrastructure and the returned search results the implementation seems to be having an adverse impact on many online businesses.

Search results have become random. Some sites Read the rest of this entry »

Mambo is a good open source content management system and is used by many webmasters. The package itself tries to support seo, search engine optimisation, efforts and it is able to produce search engine friendly url’s.

Unfortunately there is a hidden problem which many people may not be aware of.
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