Remember the importance of choosing a niche? Well, writing articles inside of that niche is the same way. You want your articles to be focused and specific, not broad and attempting to cover everything. If you have been writing an article that is a thousand words long and fits into multiple categories of your site, then consider breaking it down into a couple of smaller, more targeted posts that each have their own, distinct category.

Why? It keeps the user focused and forces you to keep yourself focused instead of rambling off about all different subjects in your post. So next time that you’re tempted to place a post into multiple different categories, go back, break it up, and make it laser-specific.

The only problem is is that there are no articles in all but one or two of these categories. And that is not impressive.

Why is this bad practice?

1. You are misleading the user – when they view a category with no articles on it, they will become frustrated. Blogging is all about building a relationship with your user base, and getting them frustrated is not the way to do it.
2. You’re linking to empty pages. You would not link to a blank, white page on your site, so why would you link to a page that had no content in it? It’s the same principle – it does the user no good.
3. You’re losing the chance to turn that visitor into a repeat reader. If a user views a category that has a nice list of articles in it, they are likely to visit multiple times to read all of them. However, if they go to a category with no articles in it, why would they want to come back? You can’t expect them to go through every category looking for the articles. Make it easy for them.

What Should You Do?

1. Start small. Create a couple of categories and write a couple of articles for each of them.
2. Don’t add a new category until you already have a few posts to put in it.
3. Structure your categories intelligently. Make sure that each of them is clear and concise, and don’t overlap with each other. You want the user to know exactly what type of articles he or she will be seeing when they view a certain category. You don’t want them to have to guess which category an article would be in because the categories overlap.

Remember, quality over quantity!

Chances are that some of your website’s visitors are doing the same thing. You are losing the visitor and perhaps a potential sale. Also, an unhappy user is not likely to become a repeat visitor.

So why let the life blood of your site (your users, of course) leave unhappy? Instead of presenting them with the standard “The requested page [url] cannot be found…”, give them something helpful.

Benefits of a custom 404 page

1. Capture mistyped URLs – see the common URL typos for your site how you can act upon it, like creating a redirect to the appropriate page.
2. Find outdated links – sometimes it is hard to keep track of which links are no longer in use when your site becomes large. This is an easy way to do that.
3. Increase traffic – keep that visitor on your site instead of losing them to the next search result in Google.
4. Provides you another opportunity to push some offer to the user, like downloading your free ebook if you have one, linking them to an affiliate offer that they may be interested in, or prompting them to subscribe to your RSS feed or newsletter.

What should be on it?

1. State clearly that they have arrived at an invalid page. Display to them what the invalid URL was.
2. Include your site’s main menu with a clear link to your home page.
3. Include a link to your contact page how the user can inform you or ask you about the missing page.
4. If your site has a search function, include it. If not, consider including a Google site search box.

How to make a custom 404 page

1. Create a page called error404.php, or name it anything that you wish. The file name doesn’t matter, but it’s good practice to include “4o4″ in the name.
2. Add this line in your .htaccess file: ErrorDocument 404 /error404.php

If you don’t know how to create a .htaccess file you can learn more about them here.

This is another simple technique to boost the usability of your site that you really have no reason not to do. So go do it!

If you’re answer is anything other than “like the palm of my hand”, you should immediately go and learn every aspect of your website – after you finish reading this article, of course ;)

Webmasters set up a new site, install a nice template and make some modifications to it for a more unique feel, and then start writing content. But not all of them give their site a full “test drive”, and end up missing something important – I know this because it happened to me on this very site.

Why is it important to test drive your site?

1. You need to make sure that structurally your layout displays correctly for all users with all browsers on all pages of your site. Obviously, you can only do so much of this yourself. This is where it is handy to ask fellow webmasters or friends to give your site a whirl and see what they think – and who knows, maybe they will like it enough to subscribe.

2. You need to see from the perspective of the user – sure, your design may make sense to you, but is it confusing to the user? The average reader won’t spend more than a couple of seconds looking for what they want, and if they fail to find it, they’re gone. Make sure your linking strategies are obvious and all of your site’s important options (like subscribing to your RSS feed) are clearly displayed to the user on all pages.

3. Notice what is not on your site. Are you missing a search function? Maybe your header logo does not link back to your index? Is there no way for a reader to get in contact with you?

This is where I made a mistake. On my homepage, there is a large eye-catching button for my RSS feed on the side menu bar. However, I never noticed that when viewing a single article, the button no longer displays. In fact, there was no way a user would even know that I even had a RSS feed, let alone be able to subscribe to it.

Here is the real disaster – all of the social bookmarking sites that index my articles and point interested users to them link directly to the single article, not the home page. So when any of my stories, for example, get traffic from Digg, the users are being taken directly to the article where I am not giving them an option to subscribe. Most of them are reading and leaving, whereas if I had that RSS button displayed they would have been far more likely to become repeat visitors.

Think of this: it’s real easy to click one button and subscribe to a site’s RSS feed and “preview” the content for a couple of days to see if you want to become a regular reader. But if you have to instead bookmark the site (most people already have more bookmarks than they’ll ever visit) and remember to visit it again in a day or two…well, let’s just say that the odds are not in your favor.

So, the moral of this story is to learn your site insides and out – you may be surprised with what you find. Think of all of the potential subscribers I could have missed out on if I had not caught this over site so early.