• Make Sure Your Visitors & Search Engine Spiders Don’t Reach Dead Ends •
• How To Easily Find Broken Links Using Free Online Tools •

As far as doing everything you can to give yourself the edge when it comes to your search engine rankings and keeping your site as visitor friendly as possible, I highly recommend you occasionally perform a broken links testing on your website and/or blog.

The search engines don’t like finding broken links as they crawl through your site. In a worse case scenario, you could possibly be penalized in your ranking status if the spiders find a lot of them!

Note: I have been unable to find specific information from Google, Yahoo or MSN on how many broken links would cause a penalty to be imposed or what the actual penalty would be.

Broken links can be ones that connect pages within your site or links that you have that are pointing to other sites. In the case of other sites, the usual culprit for a broken link is that the web page, or maybe even the entire website is no longer available.

Typographical Errors Cause Broken Links, Too

In addition, a simple typing error in a page name or file name can cause a broken link. I admit … I am sometimes guilty of this. Typing out a URL while hand coding my web page is normally the reason. As you know, just one itty-bitty letter or character error and bingo! “Page Not Found” will be the result.

Making a typographical error in a link can cause a major section of your site to be suddenly disconnected or “orphaned” from the rest of your site. This can cause a page or entire section of your site to be dropped by the search engines. Though this is a worst-case situation, it can happen if you’ve not done a good job of cross-linking your entire website.

Normally, web pages should be linked to more than just one other page on your site. But, orphaned pages are not necessarily that uncommon as websites grow with more and more pages of content and many categories and sub-categories, so it is important that I mention this situation.

Tip: Always make sure to test out all the hyperlinks you’ve placed on a webpage after you’ve uploaded it. The extra minute it will take to check to see that all links are active is good web maintenance practice and keeps your site looking and acting professional!

If you don’t make a lot of page or file name changes to your site (I don’t suggest you get into the habit of doing this), or delete a lot of pages, then you might only need to run a broken link check every three months or so (there isn’t really a rule of thumb on this). However, if you have a ton of links pointing to other sites and /or you do a lot of changes to page names in your own site (again, NOT a practice you should get in the habit of!), then I’d probably choose to do a broken links testing every month.

Safe & Reliable Broken Links Testing Freebies

Keeping your site’s “link health” in tip-top shape doesn’t take long at all, and the benefit is that not only are you putting your best foot forward to your visitors – no error messages nor landing on non-existent sites – but you are doing all you can to help keep the search engine spiders happy. You are providing them with a smooth, unbroken trail to crawl through your site!

Here are two free online link checkers that will help you to find broken links – try out both and see which one you like best:

• Xenu’s Link Sleuth
• W3C’s Link Checker

• Three Click Navigation Keeps Your Visitors Happy •
• More Than That And Most Likely It’ll Be “Bye-Bye” •

Here’s a very important rule I encourage you to always keep in mind when you are setting up your site’s HTML inter-linking structure: Remember It’s Gotta Be Three Clicks From Here-to-There.

This means that no matter where a visitor has entered your site, it shouldn’t take them more than three clicks to reach the information they’re looking for. It’s a well known fact that a large percentage of your site’s visitors are NOT going to be entering via your Home page. If you’ve done a good job of providing keyword focused content, many of the visitors will be coming into your site from a search engine.

On average, visitors are only willing to give you a three click chance to find what they are looking for, and if they can’t reach their target destination within those 3 all important clicks, you’ve lost them. Tah-tah … bye-bye.

Don’t Frustrate Your Visitors!

It is very frustrating to your visitors if they have to click through too many pages to get to the content they came hoping to find. Yes, you can argue that if they came from a search engine, then they are probably landing on a page that provides the information they were looking for.

But in many cases, they’re looking for more. Think about your experiences when searching for information. I don’t know about you, but I very often will seek out more info if I land on a site that has done a pretty good job of providing me what I’m looking for.

But if it is confusing to navigate the site, or it is too many clicks to get to other information that pertains to the subject I’m interested in … I’m gone.

Remember to make all the information on your site be no more than three clicks away from any point within your site. Providing multiple HTML linking paths throughout your site is encouraged. This can be achieved via your primary navigation, or through contextual hyperlinks within the content, even from the HTML site map you should have on your site.

The “three click rule” for HTML linking is yet another, important way for your site to be well received by those very much desired visitors.

• Some Dos and Don’ts When Inter-Linking Pages On Your Site •
• Keep It Easy For Your Visitor •

As far as basic SEO steps are concerned, it is important to provide good HTML linking to help your website rank higher in the search engines. In addition, the HTML links (called ‘hyperlinks’ because when you click on the link it takes you to another page) between all your website’s pages should also be thought of as a user-friendly, ease-of-navigation issue.

What do I mean by this? Well, let me use a real life example from a website that I am currently hired to not only search engine optimize, but to also rearrange so that the site visitors can more easily navigate their way around.

I’ll share this example: the site owner emails a very nice, content rich newsletter to her list each month. She also smartly utilizes each newsletter as a new page of content for her website. So, we can all agree that this would mean that she places twelve new, keyword focused web pages on her site every year.

In the simplest form of navigation hierarchy, it would make the most sense to have a navigation button (this is an HTML linking example) that would link us to a second-tier page where she could list out each month’s newsletter with a brief overview of what the subject was. These hyperlinks would take the visitor to the actual month’s newsletter.  The newsletters would site on what would be the third-tier.

Here’s an example of the newsletter links she could have on the second-tier page:

January 2008: Aromatherapy Using Rosemary  The herb rosemary helps bring clarity of mind. Learn how to use it when defining your New Year’s intentions.

February 2008: Aromatherapy Using The Essence of Rose  Yes, this is the month of love! Learn all about the scent of Rose and why it’s used for love and romantic intentions!

Each month’s newsletter would be hyperlinked in this fashion. Each newsletter would be sitting on its own web page. Each page’s file name would be keyword optimized such as the file name for January could be:
        www.nameofsite.com/january2008-aromatherapy-rosemary.html
        www.nameofsite.com/february2008-aromatherapy-rose.html

Unfortunately, This Is Not The HTML Linking Structure Currently In Use

My client has made a big mistake by linking her newsletters in the following way:

•  She has not provided a landing page from the navigational HTML link to a second-tier page as I have mentioned;

•  Her HTML linking structure for all the newsletters consist of one link at the bottom of each newsletter, stating “click here for last month’s newsletter”;

•  And worse yet … it isn’t the current month’s newsletter that is accessed when you click on her “Newsletter” navigation button, no! It is the oldest newsletter.

Can you understand how clumsy and aggravating this is to someone who wants to access her most current newsletter to see what she’s wriring about this month? Or to someone who wants to see a nice overview of all her newsletters because they wish to reference back to one they had read months before?

You need to think out the HTML linking you’ll use on your site. Not only is it advantageous for SEO ranking purposes to have all your website pages inter-linked, but it is also most important to have a very carefully thought out, easy-to-navigate website for your visitors.

Make your HTML linking structure simple, clearly defined and easy for your visitor to figure out ‘where to go next’. This is but one more way to you can encourage your visitors to stay on your site for a longer period of time. And the longer they stay, the more option you have to make them aware of your products or services!