During a quiet Sunday I was working through some background checks on my own website to make sure things were all running smoothly and I came across two useful sites.
The first is a Broken link checker, it checks both internal and external links to ensure all your links are to active pages.
So Why check bad links ?
Bad links are bad for users, they may take people away from your site totally and they may be left in link limbo.
If you go to a site and the links don’t go to where they’re supposed to, does this give you a good or bad impression of the care given to the site.
But the big one is search engines like Google crawl through sites using the links, and finding dead ends will count against your site.
How to check for broken links?
There are many different site that offer this service but I came across this one http://www.web-site-map.com.
I liked this one because
1) it worked through the full domain, no need to go page by page, which some of the ones I looked at today did.
2) It listed only the links that had a problem, some listed every link and I needed to scroll through to find any issues.
The second tool which is very useful from a search engine point of view is the site map. The site map of a site uses links to show the layout of the site, and then the spiders that crawl the sites for Google can crawl your site accordingly. They are particularly useful if you’ve got a new site, or added pages, or made changes to your sites structure.
1) go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com
2) Enter your web site url.
3)Change frequency, how often do you update your site?, weekly monthly?, yearly? Or you can just leave this set to none.
4) Last modification, when was the last change made to the site. set the date .
5) Set the priority, The priority of a particular URL relative to other pages on the same site.
6) click start
7) Click on the link to download the file and save on your computer.
8) FTP the xml file onto the root file of your website.
9) log into Google webmaster tools > Site configuration > Sitemaps
10) Add the address where you uploaded the sitemap and submit.
11) To submit to Bing.com copy and paste url into address bar of your browser
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml
12)Change “www.YourWebAddress.com” to your domain name
13)Press ENTER
So how did you spend your Sunday?
Pippas Web
I am Pippa and I have run Pippas Web - web design for small businesses for 13 years. I help small business owners find their bit of cyberspace. I provide the technical know-how, so they can get back to running their business. If you like what I write in my blogs, you can sign up to my newsletter for more tips straight to your door. All list members get a copy of "How to get your business seen online in 2021".