Don’t Let Broken Links Break Your Traffic

An intricate website with great content is a trophy worthy of shining and showing off. But what if no one can see it? Simple errors like broken links could be tarnishing your trophy site and turning away search engine, visitors, and supporters.

As a webmaster the two things you are probably most concerned with are traffic and content.  Your site’s sole reason for being is to generate traffic based on the content of your website. Of course you can’t have traffic if you don’t have content.  It only makes sense that these would be your top priority. 

While you focus on content and traffic, you might not realize that there could be trouble lurking around the corner.  Broken links is one of the things that many webmasters, both new and experienced, fail to consider and remember.

Links are almost just as important as, if not more than, the content itself.  Links in a website are similar veins in the body.  Just like blood cannot move from one organ to another except through the veins, a user can’t get from one page to the next unless a link is clicked. 

Broken links simply don’t bode well for your website.  They annoy users and make them feel like their time is being wasted.  Think about what it would mean for you if the link to your payment page was broken.  Your users wouldn’t be able to pay you.

Now that you know how detrimental broken links can be to your site, you should check to make sure that your site does not contain any.  The easiest and most effective way to check the links on your site is to use a link checker tool like the one provided by Total Web Talk. All you need to do is enter the URL for your website and the tool will check each of the links in your site.  The tool does all the work for you, checking the links within your site and alerting you about which ones are ok and which are broken. 

When you are using the link checker tool, you might notice that it only searches two levels deep.  You can easily check any third or fourth level links by entering URLs at that level.

You should conduct regular checks to make sure that none of the links on your site are broken.  If you have external links, you should use the link checker tool several times a year.  Since there’s not a very easy way for a webmaster to alert linkers that the site is being moved, you should do your own link check to refresh links whenever necessary.

Whenever you restructure your own website, use the link checker to make sure that all links, both internal and external, continue to access the right web pages.

Checking your links with the Total Web Talk tool is quick and easy.  It only takes a few minutes to check all the links in your entire website.  Once you have that out of the way, then you can move on to more important things like building content and driving traffic.