So this morning I decided to check and see how my 404 pages worked (should have done this a long time ago) and I discovered that my 404 page was a simple 1 line "Page Not Found" document. No theme, no navigation, nothing but those 3 horrific words.

20.1% of all my traffic resulted in 404's...

And even worse, after looking at Awstats I discovered 20.1% of all of of the HTTP requests to The Recognized Expert Marketing Show resulted in a 404 Page Not Found status. (Mainly because it took me years to discover vBulletin and vBSEO. All those WordPress, Drupal, phpNuke, Joomla, etc. links are all still out there! :( ) So 20% of my traffic was basically being forced to hit the back button on their browser!

So the fix...

Fortunately I ran across: http://www.vbseo.com/f34/create-cust...seo-use-11288/ written by Keith Cohen (Thank you!), which allowed me to create a custom (thematic) 404 error page.

But now I had another problem... Only about half of RecognizedExpert.com is contained in vBulletin, the rest of my content is held in a few WordPress blogs. I was able to use the Google Adsense Custom Search Engines to solve this one. (Added it to my search bar too!)

After a few quick edits of .htaccess I even had my non-vb directories displaying the new (correct) 404 page!

Code:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
ErrorDocument 404 /expert/404.php
</IfModule>

I guess the lesson here is don't let your 404's go unchecked. I got about 20% of my traffic back and hopefully will even make a little $ on the ad-driven Google site wide search feature.

So I logged into Google Webmaster Tools just a few min ago and was shocked at what I saw.

I never tried to focus on the keywords "get a number one google rank" but I have achieved top rankings for them (and a bunch of similar terms)!

get number one google rank = 2
number one google rank = 3

Yea they aren't HUGE terms to rank for, but they added about 10% to my overall traffic today.

Thanks yet again vBSEO.

Here is the page that is actually ranking (randomly!) :) get number one ranking on google

(Yes, vBSEO still works flawlessly...)

Also, I officially started using the new Prefix system.

(Thank you FightRice for showing me how to remove the prefix's from the page titles! http://www.vbseo.com/f4/vbulletin-3-...-titles-20107/ )

Here's an example from my Internet Marketing Radio Shows section of my site. (Members only vs non members only)

So, I started focusing on conversion the other day and wanted to show of what I came up with :)

Basically I am using vB and vBSEO (on one site) to host a radio show. It has ended up being the best platform I have ever used (obviously :) . Drupal, WordPress, Blogger, PHPNuke(whoops) Joomla all failed me. :(

So heres what I came up with (before everything was available to guests):

Not Protected (For Guests):
5 Tactics for SEO Success - Jill Whalen

Protected (Registration Required):
Members Only Guerrilla Marketing - Jay Levinson

Registrations have increased by more than 400% Yay!

Other than a few annoying issues with the new "Notices" feature and a pesky "aMember" issue everything has gone smoothly regarding the upgrade to 3.7. vBSEO works flawlessly, but the template needs to be updated for 3.7 :) (easily worked around at the moment though)

Now that blogging is added I would love to have an import tool to import things from wordpress (Papali Wailea blog for example) to vB. Eventually I suppose. :) Until then it will be a manual process.

I can't wait for tags to be added to to vBSEO sitemaps, and there is a lot of rewriting that I'm looking forward too but I did successfully and with nearly no problems migrate to 3.7.

Blogging looks great now: Likability Blog

vBulletin and vBSEO are the 2 greatest things to ever happen to my website, I really look forward to the 3.7 updates w/ vbseo.

What do you think? Here is a link to one of the show entries. :)

Podcast Example Entry: Selling To Big Companies

I feel like vBSEO and Chief First Post have given me quite the advantage over other podcast sites. :) I wanted the community feel and thought vBulletin would be the best bet, would love to hear your feedback though on the look and feel of the site (I have lots of theme changes to do still... :( )

Side note... Anyone had any luck on "Easy ways to justify images in blog entries?" Like to have text wrap to the left or right of an image? I tried custom BB code, but it's still a little confusing for my users. :(