John Halderman writes about personal growth and online marketing , helping people take command of their income, personal growth and wellness. He is also on Twitter
Now that you have people on your website or blog are they able to move around efficiently and get through on the links they click on? It takes a lot of work to get visitors to your site so it’s important to make sure they want to stay. Of course having good content is of utmost importance but many people will get aggravated if they can’t navigate smoothly between your site pages and through to links outside.
It’s important to periodically make sure that everything works properly. If you had a manufacturing business you would make sure all the equipment was always in proper working order and if you had a retail store you would keep it stocked and presentable for the shoppers, your web site is no different. If you are expecting thousands of visitors a day to your site don’t you think you should make sure everything is working correctly?
I know it probably was all working fine when you set it up, but remember what we are dealing with here. . . computers! They are far to human like to be trusted to be reliable! Stuff happens, it’s your responsibility to keep it running properly so your visitors have th best experience. So what should you be checking for?
A common problem is with broken links.
It’s a good idea to check all of the links you have, both internally and external. The external being the ones to check most often as you can’t guarantee that a link you have will remain valid. If your link is to a specific blog page or entry as these are often changed when site owners modify their sites.
Your on-site links to check are most often are the ones to photos and audio files. It’s easy to not realize, at the time, the ramifications of changes you make that may affect these items on your site. You will want to check for problems or ‘leaks’ in the flow of your site, that’s where you want your customers to go throughout your site. If they can’t access something you may loose them.
Also, search engine spiders don’t get the full picture of what’s going on with your site when they encounter broken links. Here again is another place where your efforts can get wasted by not paying attention to your links.
Here are a few places your visitors might ‘leak out’ from, become frustrated and never return to your site:
* Do each of your subscription forms lead to the proper location?
* Are you using custom “thank you” pages or depending on auto-generated
ones? Auto-generated thank you pages might not lead back to your site.
* Have you customized your error pages with links back to working
parts of your site? If a customer finds a missing page and ends up
on a default “404 error” page, you may never see them again.
* Are you giving away your traffic to web rings and link exchanges
that don’t have easy-to-find links back to your site?
You can also utilize some software tools to help with checking for broken links. A couple of free link checking services are, http://validator.w3.org/checklink and http://www.dead-links.com/ and there is a free software that works on your desktop, Xenu’s Link Sleuth at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
It is enough work getting good traffic to your site, don’t allow it to get wasted by broken links. We all know that ‘stuff’ happens on a web site or blog, so keep up with regular maintenance ensuring your visitors get the experience you want, so you get the results you want.
If you have anything to add to this subject that could help others maintain proper links, please leave it in a comment below, then . . .
Go to your site or blog and check all the links to make sure they are all still working as you intended.
John
