SEO process blogs for beginners / newbies

I recently had a problem with my wordpress permalink.
My blogs wouldn’t show up. On my home page, all my blogs appeared (10 posts per page), with all the links on the side menu etc. But as soon as I clicked on any link on my home page, or any blog heading to see that blog on a page by itself, the page was completely BLANK. NOTHING appeared. I viewed the page source and nothing. It’s like the page didn’t exist at all.

I didn’t understand why this was happening, because I posted my latest blog last week, and my blog rss feed URL and all my other blogs were showing up when I clicked the heading.

Luckily, I got help from the Wordpress support forum. I was really pleased. Basically what I did was reset my Wordpress permalink structure to default. I checked the page  and the blogs were showing up again. I put back my custom permalink structure just to make sure all wasn’t lost and this time, everything was still fine.

Wew! Obviously this could have really screwed up my SEO efforts. Let’s say someone bookmarked one (or many) of my blogs or some blogs had been indexed by the search engines. I would have been screwed if my custom  permalink structure didn’t work because that would have meant that the URL didn’t exist anymore. Someone goes to the link of one of my blogs and sees blank.

This is a log of what happened:

20 Sept 07
SEO mommy wordpress blog feed URL was showing error for past few weeks:

1. the blog summaries were not showing up in the feed
2. i kept getting an error message
3. i checked with the W3c validator and it found 6 errors on that page
4. (a few weeks ago, I guess to try to see if i could fix the problem, i  made a copy of the blog/wp-includes/feed-rss.php file on the server by making a copy, and renaming it blog/wp-includes/feed-rss-original.php.)
5.  Today i changed the file from (feed-rss-original.php) to its original name (feed-rss.php)
6. now the URL works, but my past entries still don’t show up under www.seomommy.com/blog/feed
7. I have to fix this problem
8. I added a test post to see whether it and my previous posts would show up since recently it looked like my last few posts were not being recognized. (I did something with the wordpress system recently and honestly i can’t remember the whole story…..)
9. Anyway, I created and saved a ‘test’ post and the test post showed up with the previous posts. I guess it just took a few minutes to work
10. The first few posts don’t show up and there’s no ‘previous posts’ link to them.
11. I deleted the test post and refreshed the feed page and the posts show up. (Again, the first few posts don’t show up and there’s no ‘previous posts’ link to them.)
12. I checked the feed URL in the W3C validator again and this time “This Page Is well-formed XML!”

Conclusion:

• I think that because I had messed with the names of the original file (although I just renamed the original files and made copies of them) that everything got messed up. Maybe the system was programmed to deal only with the originals.
• This is my conclusion because as soon as i changed the original file names back to their original names, the problem was fixed.

Note: I did a similar file name change to feed-rss2-comments.php and it showed an error as well. Then i renamed that particular file as it was before and now the comments from blogs posted are showing.

Can you believe. This problem started weeks ago and I thought I had to get the help of a technical guy to help me figure this one out. I don’t even know how/why I ended up thinking of giving the files their original names back. I don’t understand all the technicalities, but hey I did it, and it WORKED! The feeling of accomplishing someone on your own. WOW!