404 pages and WordPress

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 at 8:00 am

If you are like me you may be a bit lax on setting up 404 pages. I was reminded of this when I was going through my reader when I found a new plugin mentioned Bing 404 for WordPress. You can read more about it here.

404 pages are actually quite a valuable piece of web real estate. Bing obviously knows this so they want to take advantage of them. They have made it easy to help your readers find something on what they were looking for which is better than the standard 404 page but you are better taking advantage of the real estate for yourself.

Now the theme on my PLR blog (Flexibility 2) has a nice default page that will give the reader a choice of topics.

404plrsecrets

This blog runs on an older version of that theme so I use a custom 404 page. In this case I will be changing it because of the recent release of my Profitable Blog Steps and using it as a place to promote that.

It is easy to do if you have made your theme files writable from the dashboard (chmod to 666). Go to Appearance – Editor.

editor

Then select the 404 Template (your theme may have a slightly different name such as 404 page but it will usually be 404.php).

404template

Then edit the theme files to create your own page and update. Now every time someone mistypes a url or clicks on a bad link they get to see an offer.

404wpme

And I have added additional promotion for my site.

Took me about 3 minutes or less to do and something I should have had up when I first changed themes quite a while ago. Don’t make the mistake I did and make sure you are using your 404 page in a constructive way.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.

After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.

If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.