How sharp is your deadlink checking tool?

If you’re told it’s the best one for the job in hand, then it must be …right?

Well, maybe not.

Introducing DeadLinkCity.com, the resource for checking dead link checkers.

It’s common knowledge that in today’s highly competitive online market, maintaining a healthy website is essential to keeping it search engine friendly and to keeping visitors engaged.

According to Moz, “Usability and user experience are second order influences on search engine ranking success. They provide an indirect but measurable benefit to a site’s external popularity, which the engines can then interpret as a signal of higher quality.”

On the surface, a couple of dead links might not seem like a big issue, and in the SEO world there’s some debate about their impact, but they can affect rankings by having a negative effect on usability. Changes in user behaviour due to broken links could result in the search engines assuming that visitors are not being given quality content – thereby lowering rankings.

Seven Website Usability Mistakes Businesses Need to Avoid

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All too often, a business sets up a website and then wonders why it isn’t doing well. The usual culprit? Poor website usability.

Website usability refers to the ease with which a visitor can use a website. If a business website isn’t providing the visitor with the information they require or expect, they’re likely to look elsewhere.

There a several common mistakes businesses make when it comes to website usability. Here, we list seven of the biggest blunders:

1. Unclear Homepage

A business’s homepage is the first thing a user will see, and they will want it to answer any major questions they have. The name and nature of the business should be clear, and the purpose of the site obvious.

Furthermore, it should be obvious where to go next from the homepage. Usually, users will expect a navigation bar that contains clear links to key pages, including an ‘About Us’ page and a ‘Contact Us’ page.

When a homepage doesn’t provide these things, visitors are apt to click away without staying to look around – and the business is likely to lose customers and clients as a result.

13 On-Page Tips for SEO Success

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How do you build a perfectly optimised page? In the ever-changing world of digital marketing, the very notion of what’s ‘optimal’ is often up for debate. However, there’s some tried and tested advice that’s essential for SEO success in 2016.

To give you a helping hand, here are 13 quick tips that every business should be able to implement.

1. URLs should be short, descriptive and easy-to-read 

Search engines prefer static, keyword-rich URLs, such as www.example.com/topic-name, as opposed to dynamic URLs, such as www.example.com/?p=578544. Essentially, a visitor should be able to identify what a page is about, based on the URL alone. The page content should also be unique to the URL.

2. Get redirects and referrals right 

If a page on your site is temporarily down, you should use a status code 503, which means that the page is currently unavailable, rather than a 404, which means that the page is not found. If you’re redirecting the page, you should use 301s, which are a permanent redirect.

3. Place primary keywords at the start of the title tag 

Your title tag should be a concise, accurate description of the page’s content and less than 55 characters long, so that it’s not cut off in the search results. The closer a keyword is to the start of the tag, the bigger its impact on rankings.

Six Small Business SEO Tips to Boost Your Traffic

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In today’s online world, Google is king. And with ecommerce the fastest growing retail market in Europe, a search engine friendly site is essential for small businesses.

To achieve this, you need to carry out search engine optimisation (SEO), which can feel daunting. However, there is a lot you can do without any expert knowledge and, in many cases, it’s these changes that can make the biggest difference.

Here are six SEO tips that will help boost traffic to your site.

6 of the Best Online SEO Tools

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From on-page optimisation to content creation, getting your site to the top of the search results (and making sure it stays there!) takes a lot of work.

Here at Dead Link Checker, we can help you with one key aspect of the process. Our tool allows you to easily identify and fix broken links, which can have a serious impact on your site’s usability and rankings.

However, there are, of course, other factors to consider. And luckily, there are plenty of SEO tools that can be used in conjunction with Dead Link Checker to keep your site search engine friendly.

Here are six of the best.

5 Monthly Website Maintenance Tips for Ecommerce Sites

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Your ecommerce website is like your digital store front. And just like you tidy your store and keep it up to date to impress customers, your site requires regular maintenance to keep attracting visitors.

From SEO to paid search, it’s likely that you spend a lot of money on online marketing. However, if you fail to allocate time to ensure that your site is as usable as possible, visitors will quickly leave, rendering these efforts futile.

A badly maintained site can also have a direct impact on your rankings. In order to determine whether your site is offering a good experience, search engines analyse how people are interacting with your pages – and factors like dropping traffic and a high bounce rate are clear signals that they shouldn’t recommend you.

Whilst there are lots of things that you should be doing on a monthly basis, here are five of the most important tips.

Broken Links: A Problem for SEO, Usability or Both?

Image by Hernan Piñera

On the surface, a couple of broken links on your site may not seem like a big issue – but in reality they could be doing some serious damage.

The online world is full of links pointing from one site to the next. And, as the web is constantly changing, sometimes these links will get broken. Consequently, dead links are part of the architecture of the internet – so as a site owner or SEO professional, it’s something you’ll have to deal with on occasion.