Search Engine Optimization and Broken Links: Tools You Need to Know About
One of the keys to search engine optimization is creating an effective website. An effective website is esthetically pleasing and easy to navigate. It should be intuitive so that visitors know where to find exactly what they want. And it should be compelling.
he information you provide about your product or service should persuade your visitors to purchase whatever it is that your selling, or to take whatever next step you wish, such as leaving an email address or signing up for a newsletter. One surefire way to ensure that visitors to your website will leave as quickly as they showed up is to have broken links on your site. Broken links are the equivalent of a house with a collapsed porch and weeds growing in front of the windows. Both make it appear as though no one cares about the place. And if your visitors perceive that you don’t care about your website, then they may conclude that you won’t really care about them either. Here are some tools to help you check for broken links on your website.
•Google Webmaster Tools: If you haven’t been taking advantage of Google Webmaster Tools then now is a great time to start. The dashboard allows you to determine if there were any errors experienced by the crawlers when you logged on. Not only can you tell if your redirects don’t resolve, but you can also get a listing of all of your site errors in an Excel spreadsheet. With that in hand you can get busy redirecting to the correct pages or fixing your code. Google Webmaster Tools also analyzes your content and tells you which pages are considered duplicate pages by the search engines.
•Link Sleuth by Xenu: All you have to do is download Link Sleuth, unzip it, and let it do its job. Link Sleuth will quickly check out your link structure and tell you what’s gone awry. This particular tool is quite helpful if you’ve begun using a content management system, which increases the likelihood that something has gone wrong with your links.
Broken links typically occur when you make large changes to the architecture of your website. While it may seem like a simple annoyance, the truth is that enough broken links can result in your website being deindexed or possibly penalized by the search engines. As a result, all the search engine optimization in the world won’t make a huge difference for your website if the search engines can’t get around it efficiently enough to index it.
If you’re new to search engine optimization or to creating a website, or if you’ve just made a substantial change to your site architecture, consider consulting with a search engine optimization professional who can help you identify all the places where things could—or have already—gone wrong. If you’re not comfortable using the tools listed above, or aren’t sure what to do once you have the information that they provide, a search engine optimization expert may also be useful. He or she can help you analyze the information provided by the tools and then determine your next steps. He or she can also take a look at your website as a whole and help you identify places where you can improve your navigation and suggest others ways to make it more user friendly. In short, anytime you make large-scale changes to your website, or build a website from scratch, it’s always a good idea to consult with an SEO professional to help you avoid any issues that could affect your business.
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