tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9500522092089429522023-11-15T06:40:47.843-08:00dead link checker - blogUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-950052209208942952.post-81491557486861269572018-09-04T03:20:00.000-07:002018-09-04T03:20:21.370-07:00IDN - Internationalized Domain Names<h3>
Domain Names containing International Characters</h3>
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<a href="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/images/idn.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="368" data-original-width="486" height="242" src="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/images/idn.png" style="box-shadow: 0px 0px 13px 0px rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.25); margin: 15px;" width="320" /></a></div>
When the world wide web first came into existence it used the English language, and a limited set of characters was enough to represent the name of any location on the web. All domain names were made up from the basic letters of the English alphabet, plus the digits 0-9 and the hyphen character. The basic 7-bit ASCII character set was used to represent these characters.<br />
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Some time later, it was recognized that there was a need for domain names containing non-English characters - for example European letters with accents, letters from the Cyrillic alphabet, Arabic script, etc. Unfortunately, the use of the basic ASCII character set was by then firmly embedded in the system used for registering domain names and translating them to IP addresses, and so a method needed to be found whereby these new symbols could be used without having to change the existing infrastructure of the internet.<br />
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Under the scheme known as IDNA2003 (Internationalising Domain Names in Applications), domain names containing characters outside the basic ASCII set are encoded as special ASCII sequences before being used on the internet. The encoding scheme takes as its input a domain name consisting of a string of Unicode codepoints, which can represent not only the ASCII symbols but also an enormous range of accented letters and symbols in non-English alphabets.<br />
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All uppercase characters - including accented characters - are first converted to lowercase and then the string is examined for any characters which are not representable as ASCII alphanumeric characters (or hyphens). If none are found, then the string is simply used as-is, with no further processing required. If non-ASCII characters <i>are</i> detected, however, then the string is encoded to produce an ASCII-compatible string using a scheme known as <i>punycode</i>.<br />
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<h4>
Punycode conversion</h4>
Firstly all basic ASCII characters in the input string are collected together, without changing their order, then if this string is non-empty a single hyphen is appended. This is followed by some additional ASCII characters which are generated using an algorithm which encodes both the positions and values of all non-ASCII characters from the original string. Finally the string is prefixed with 'xn--' which is a special sequence indicating that the URL has been encoded using punycode. This encoding is applied individually to each section of a full domain name, separated by '.' characters.<br />
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Some example encodings are:<br />
<table border="1" bordercolor="#808080" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" style="background: #FFEFE9; margin-top:10px;">
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<tr><th width="20%">IDN</th><th width="20%">Encoded</th><th width="60%">Notes</th></tr>
<tr><td>www.example.com</td><td>www.example.com</td><td>No encoding required.</td></tr>
<tr><td>www.bücher.de</td><td>www.xn--bcher-kva.de</td><td>The 'bcher' characters can be represented using basic ASCII. The single 'ü' requires punycoding and is represented by the '-kva' suffix. The 'xn--' prefix indicates that the string is a punycode string.</td></tr>
<tr><td>кто.рф</td><td>xn--j1ail.xn--p1ai</td><td>The strings before and after the '.' are both individually coded. No basic ASCII characters are present in either string.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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Note that punycode encoding is performed automatically by your browser when it encounters an HTML link containing non-ASCII characters - this allows web authors to create pages with links written in their native character set, and lets the browser display them correctly in the address bar or link preview, whilst also presenting the correctly encoded version when requesting pages from the internet.<br />
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<h4>
Exceptions to the Rule</h4>
The IDNA2003 system specified that the ß character (Sharp-s or Eszett) should be translated to 'ss', and that the ς character (used in Greek when a sigma appears at the end of a word) should be translated to a standard sigma σ prior to encoding. These rules were in part due to difficulties with lowercase conversion - there was no uppercase equivalent of ß (it was written as 'SS'), and the uppercase versions of ς and σ are both Σ, so the conversion to lowercase would have been ambiguous. For example, SCHLOSS.DE could be converted either to schloss.de or schloß.de leading to two different websites.<br />
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A new IDNA2008 standard was therefore published in which, amongst other things, all uppercase characters are disallowed (along with some other symbols, punctuation, and variant characters). Consequently there was no need to disallow the ß and ς characters, so they are permitted under IDNA2008. However, this leads to a problem.<br />
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If a website contains a link to, say, <span style="font-family: inherit;"><u>http://faß.de</u></span> then under IDNA2003 this would have been translated to <u>http://fass.de</u> whereas under IDNA2008 the ß would trigger a punycode conversion to <u>http://xn--fa-hia.de</u> which is an entirely different domain. A website containing an HTML anchor<br />
<span style="font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><A href="http://faß.de">Faß</A></span><br />
would link to one page under IDNA2003 and another under IDNA2008. Since the encoding of domain names is handled by the browser, this leads to differences in behavior depending on whether a browser follows one standard or the other.<br />
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In practice, most browser vendors seem to have elected not to break pre-existing websites, and they continue to interpret ß and ς characters under the 2003 rules whilst generally following the 2008 scheme elsewhere. However a notable exception is Firefox, which encodes ß and ς under the 2008 rules. So following a link to <u>http://faß.de</u> (or entering it in the address bar) will go to <u>http://xn--fa-hia.de</u> in Firefox, but to <u>http://fass.de</u> in Chrome or Explorer.<br />
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Dead Link Checker pragmatically sides with the majority of browser vendors and interprets the link as <u>http://fass.de</u> even though this is not the most up-to-date standard. If browser behavior changes in the future, Dead Link Checker will be updated accordingly.<br />
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<h3>
Security Considerations</h3>
Theoretically when one of these domain names containing a ß or ς character is registered, the registrar ought to take steps to ensure that the alternative domain is either owned by the same client or is offered for registration simultaneously - this helps to avoid security issues where a malicious actor could divert traffic intended for a genuine domain name, potentially serving malware from the alternative website. However even if the same client owns both variants of the domain name there is nothing to force them to present the same content on each domain.<br />
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IDNs also present a security risk with homoglyphs - different characters which are written the same way but are represented by different Unicode codepoints. For example, many letters in the Cyrillic alphabet (а, с, е, о, р, х and у) look identical to letters from the Latin alphabet, so a domain name containing these Cyrillic characters can appear to be a valid link to one location whereas in fact it leads somewhere entirely different. Most browsers attempt to guard against these attacks by displaying the punycode version of the domain name in the status/address bar whenever mixed or ambiguous character sets are present. The results are inconsistent - <u>http://www.pace.com</u> (using Latin characters) displays as expected in the status bar of both Chrome and Firefox. However <u>http://www.расе.com</u> (in which the 'pace' is written using Cyrillic characters) displays as punycode in Chrome and Explorer but not in Firefox, where it looks identical to www.pace.com. This type of behavior could lead to links taking the user to an unexpected and potentially malicious destination.<br />
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<h3>
URL Encoding</h3>
The section of a URL following the domain name - the optional path and page name - is not encoded using punycode. Instead, any characters not in the basic ASCII set are first converted to sequences of 8-bit data values using an encoding such as UTF-8, and then these values (which are typically between 128 and 255, still outside the basic ASCII values) are represented as a percent symbol followed by the value converted to a two-digit hexadecimal string. So for example, the Σ character with Unicode value 931 is converted to the two 8-bit values 206, 163 which are then represented in %-encoded hexadecimal as %CE%A3<br />
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So, the URL <u>http://letters.com/Greek/Σ.html</u> would become <u>http://letters.com/Greek/%CE%A3.html</u> and <u>http://φκφ.com/Σ.html</u> would become <u>http://xn--vxaxb.com/%CE%A3.html</u><br />
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<h4>
Further reading:</h4>
<a href="https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/idn-guidelines-2011-09-02-en" target="_blank">ICANN - Guidelines for implementing IDN</a><br />
<a href="https://www.punycoder.com/" target="_blank">Punycoder - an online punycode converter</a><br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8" target="_blank">Wikipedia - UTF-8 encoding</a><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-950052209208942952.post-75657940601724277952017-09-26T08:57:00.000-07:002018-06-11T10:05:41.735-07:00Dead Link Checker - change of ownership<h2>
DLC Websites, the new owner of DeadLinkChecker.com</h2>
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In August 2017 DeadLinkChecker.com changed ownership, from Traffic Names Ltd to DLC Websites. The transition went as smoothly as we could have wished - thank you for bearing with us. We will of course be continuing to provide the same great products and customer service that you have come to expect.<br />
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We've a number of ideas for future enhancements to Dead Link Checker, but if you have any suggestions for improvements then please let us know!Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-950052209208942952.post-28803633893416598552016-12-07T09:43:00.000-08:002018-06-26T09:41:19.162-07:00How sharp is your deadlink checking tool?<h4>
<i style="font-weight: normal;">If you’re told it’s the best one for the job in hand, then it must be …right?</i></h4>
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<i style="font-weight: normal;">Well, maybe not.</i></h4>
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<h3>
Introducing DeadLinkCity.com, the resource for checking dead link checkers.</h3>
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<img border="0" data-original-height="222" data-original-width="640" src="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/images/blog/dead-link-city-blog-640.png" /></div>
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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.<br />
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<a href="https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-usability-experience-and-content-affect-search-engine-rankings" target="_blank">According to Moz</a>, “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.”<br />
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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.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><h3>
Clean it up</h3>
A web page is a complicated thing - there is far more to it than text, pictures, and links to new pages - there are many ways that elements within the HTML can refer to other resources. For example, an image might be displayed using an <img> element, with the image's URL specified by the 'src' attribute. However it could also be displayed by setting the 'background-image' property of an element's CSS style, and this could be done directly in the element’s HTML definition, or in an inline <style> element, or an external CSS file. For another example, a section of inserted text can be marked with the <ins> HTML markup, which has the option to link to another page using the 'cite' attribute.<br />
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So, it might not be the most interesting of jobs but a thorough check for dead or broken links is an important part of maintaining a clean and healthy website. There are plenty of tools available to help with the process; some form part of a suite, others run independently, some have to be downloaded – they might be on a paid subscription or free of charge – most people have a favourite that they’ll use without question …and there’s the rub. <b>One of the most important factors that’s probably never considered is this; does your broken link checking tool actually check every link? And how can you be certain that it’s reporting accurately?</b><br />
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<h3>
Fully equipped</h3>
You can verify your link checker of choice by running it over a benchmark test website, which is known to have examples of errors in obscure linking methods, to see how many of them are picked up and how many are missed.<br />
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<b>DeadLinkCity.com has been developed specifically for this purpose - a benchmark by which dead link checkers can be tested for accuracy.</b> The website contains faulty examples of every method that an HTML page can use to link to another, with 74 bad links on the website and one further broken link that might be detected if the tool does not obey the directives in robots.txt file. Therefore, when an accurate tool is crawled over the site, it will return 74 relevant error messages.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/images/blog/deadlinkcity.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="DeadLinkCity homepage" border="0" data-original-height="567" data-original-width="640" src="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/images/blog/deadlinkcity.png" title="" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Screen shot of the <a href="http://www.deadlinkcity.com/" target="_blank">DeadLinkCity.com</a> homepage</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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If you don’t try it you’ll never know, so have a go. Run your favourite SEO tool over <a href="http://www.deadlinkcity.com/" target="_blank">DeadLinkCity.com</a> and see what happens. If it finds all 74 errors, then you can be pretty confident that it will do a thorough scan of the sites you’re maintaining. If it finds fewer than 74, it would be worthwhile noting which links have not been discovered, so that you know which parts of your site might not have been checked adequately. It would also be worth getting a new tool that is thorough and accurate, so your site is optimised properly.<br />
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For other ways to improve usability, read Dead Link Checker’s <a href="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/resources/user-experience-checklist.pdf" target="_blank">Website User Experience Checklist</a> to ensure your website is as user friendly as possible.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-950052209208942952.post-44003375520567347742016-11-26T01:54:00.000-08:002018-06-26T06:22:55.205-07:00Seven Website Usability Mistakes Businesses Need to Avoid<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Laptop" border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="425" src="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/images/blog/laptop.jpg" title="" width="640" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image by <a href="https://stocksnap.io/photo/DOT1T5II2J" target="_blank">Startup Stock Photos</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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There a several common mistakes businesses make when it comes to website usability. Here, we list seven of the biggest blunders:<br />
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<h2>
1.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Unclear Homepage</h2>
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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><h2>
2.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Inconsistent Layout</h2>
Another common website usability-fail is lack of consistency. The branding, design and organisation should remain the same across the entire site, rather than varying from page to page.<br />
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An inconsistent layout means that users will struggle to find the information they’re looking for on each page quickly and easily. This is likely to leave them confused and annoyed, not to mention doubting the professionalism of the business itself.<br />
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3.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Poor Accessibility</h2>
Usability can be a particularly important issue for individuals with certain disabilities. If a website has barriers preventing some clients or customers from accessing or interacting with the site, the business is ignoring a significant portion of the population.<br />
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Fortunately, there are simple steps every business can take to ensure its website is accessible to everyone – for example, by adding captions to videos for users who are deaf or hard of hearing, or underlining clickable links so that colour blind users can perceive them.<br />
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These changes might sound complicated at first, but are actually incredibly simple to make, and will significantly improve website usability for large groups of users.<br />
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4.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Confusing Navigation</h2>
Users don’t want to waste time trawling through a business’s website searching for the information they want. If they can’t navigate a site quickly and easily, they’re likely to give up and look elsewhere.<br />
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While in many cases it pays to be innovative, when it comes to navigation you should stick with convention. Users expect logos to link back to the homepage, clickable links to stand out, and content to be organised into categories. They’ll also want to move quickly and easily between related pages, and for navigation tabs to be clearly visible on every page.<br />
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5.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Dead Links</h2>
Clickable links that work as expected are crucial components for website usability. Nothing makes a user give up on a website faster than a 404 error message arising from a dead link.<br />
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By using a <a href="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/" target="_blank">broken link checker</a>, business owners can check their website for dead links. Such tools are free and easy to use, and enable businesses to quickly identify and rectify any broken links that may be impeding website usability.<br />
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6.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Too Intrusive</h2>
Most people are loathe to hand over their personal information to a website – especially one they’ve only been browsing for five minutes. Ask users for their mother’s maiden name and credit card details before they can access the site, and they’re likely to run away quicker than you can say, “And your passport number?”<br />
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To ensure that users feel their privacy is being respected, businesses should only ask for information that is necessary, and only ask for it once the user has had the time to browse the website and build some level of familiarity and trust with the business.<br />
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7.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Unreadable Content</h2>
Businesses build websites to communicate with a wide audience. If users can’t find the information they need in the website content, then communication has failed. Unfortunately, clear and relevant website content is a stumbling block for many businesses.<br />
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Content should be free from spelling errors and grammatical mistakes, and written in language that is appropriate to the audience. It is also important to lay out content in a way that allows users to quickly scan the page – for example, by using short paragraphs and subheadings – so that users can easily find the information they want.<br />
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As you can see, there are plenty of ways in which website usability can unintentionally be diminished. Luckily, it’s easy to avoid these blunders. With a little forethought and the right tools, any business can improve its website usability.<br />
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Would you like to improve your business’s website usability? Use Dead Link Checker’s <a href="http://www.deadlinkchecker.com/resources/user-experience-checklist.pdf" target="_blank">Website User Experience Checklist</a> to ensure your website is as user friendly as possible.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-950052209208942952.post-73252856648951639082016-11-18T02:10:00.000-08:002018-06-26T06:24:36.963-07:0013 On-Page Tips for SEO Success<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Macbook" border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="640" height="424" src="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/images/blog/macbook_640.jpg" title="" width="640" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image from <a href="https://pixabay.com/en/macbook-mac-apple-ipad-iphone-577758/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Pixabay</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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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.<br />
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To give you a helping hand, here are 13 quick tips that every business should be able to implement.<br />
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<h2>
1.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>URLs should be short, descriptive and easy-to-read </h2>
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.<br />
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<h2>
2.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Get redirects and referrals right </h2>
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.<br />
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3.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Place primary keywords at the start of the title tag </h2>
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.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><h2>
4.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The meta-description should be a compelling page description </h2>
As well as including a number of relevant keywords, the meta-description should be a compelling description of the page that makes visitors want to know more. It should be around 150 characters long and should include a call to action such as ‘find out more’.<br />
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5.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Make sure the headline is consistent with the title-tag </h2>
A H1 that doesn’t closely relate to the page’s title-tag can result in a high bounce rate. This is because visitors will click on the page in the search results expecting one thing, and then immediately be confronted with a heading that doesn’t match their expectations. Make sure the H1 is topically relevant and utilise similar key phrases to the title-tag.<br />
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6.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Create unique, valuable content </h2>
The page should be described by visitors as useful, high quality and unique. Content shouldn’t be repeated word-for-word anywhere else on the site or online, and should offer value beyond self-promotion. This will increase positive visitor interactions with the page, such as browsing for longer or returning, which tells Google that you’re offering a good experience.<br />
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7.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Use relevant keywords in the body text </h2>
You should use primary keywords(terms closely related to your main service or products, which get high levels of search) and secondary keywords (terms that you still want to target, but which receive lower levels of search or are likely to bring in less revenue) in the body text. However, keywords should only be included naturally and never over-used. Always remember that user experience comes first.<br />
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8.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Design the page to be shared </h2>
Many influential digital marketers believe that social accounts can boost SEO. Your page should make social sharing as easy as possible, with obvious social sharing buttons and a short URL that will easily fit into a social update.<br />
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9.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The page should be viewable from a range of devices </h2>
<a href="http://searchengineland.com/its-official-google-says-more-searches-now-on-mobile-than-on-desktop-220369" target="_blank">Mobile search has now overtaken desktop search</a> and, with penalties for sites that don’t make their pages mobile-friendly, every page should be optimised for a range of screen sizes. A grid layout, such as the <a href="http://www.roomfive.net/" target="_blank">roomfive.net site</a>, is one of the easiest ways to create a responsive site.<br />
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10.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The page should have high quality backlinks </h2>
In 2016, backlinks will still matter. And if your page’s content is unique and valuable, it should attract natural backlinks (the only kind you want), which will be seen as a ‘vote’ for your site by Google. However, there are a number of things you can do to encourage backlinks, such as sharing interesting or informative pages on social media.<br />
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11.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Don’t forget internal links </h2>
Internal links matter too. You should be able to reach the page by no more than four clicks from anywhere on the site, and internal links to any relevant pages should be provided.<br />
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12.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The page should be easy to navigate and easy to understand </h2>
A perfectly optimised page is one that offers an outstanding user experience. The page should be clear and logically laid out, with features such as subheadings and a clear navigation bar to guide the reader.<br />
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13.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Find and repair dead links</h2>
First and foremost, broken links negatively impact user experience, making visitors more likely to bounce off a page or not return – something that will also affect rankings. Our <a href="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/website-dead-link-checker.asp" target="_blank">dead link checker tool</a> can help you to easily find and repair broken links.<br />
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From crafting a compelling meta-description to including social sharing buttons, creating a perfectly optimised page is about more than just bunging in a few key words. By following these tips, you can make your page search engine-friendly.<br />
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Have you got any on-page SEO tips? Let us know in the comments.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-950052209208942952.post-57983529234644798822016-11-02T02:23:00.000-07:002018-06-26T06:25:54.412-07:00Six Small Business SEO Tips to Boost Your Traffic<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Small business SEO tips: SEO written on scrabble pieces" border="0" data-original-height="425" data-original-width="640" height="424" src="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/images/blog/SEO-tiles.jpg" title="" width="640" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image from <a href="https://pixabay.com/en/seo-sem-marketing-optimization-758264/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Pixabay</a></td></tr>
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In today’s online world, Google is king. And with <a href="http://www.retailresearch.org/onlineretailing.php" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">ecommerce the fastest growing retail market in Europe</a>, a search engine friendly site is essential for small businesses.<br />
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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.<br />
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Here are six SEO tips that will help boost traffic to your site.<br />
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Begin with the Basics </h2>
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If your site isn’t user-friendly and technically sound, there’s no point doing anything else on this list. First and foremost, it should be attractive to look at and easy to navigate.<br />
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You should also make sure it’s intuitively laid out and has clear headings, as well as copy and subtitles that make it easy for visitors to work out what each page is about.<br />
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Optimise with the Right Keywords</h2>
Effective keyword optimisation is central to any SEO strategy. Essentially, this means including the relevant words and phrases that your target market are searching for in your page copy and meta-copy (the title tag and meta-description, which appear in the search results).<br />
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Carrying out keyword research, using tools such as <a href="http://www.wordtracker.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Wordtracker</a>, will give you an insight into what these phrases are. So, for example, a party supplies company might find that a lot of people are searching for the phrase ‘buy Halloween costumes’, making it a good term to include on relevant pages.<br />
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If you operate on a local level, you should also make sure that you include plenty of area-based key phrases such as, ‘buy Halloween costumes in Bristol’.<br />
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Start a Blog </h2>
A blog is one of the best and most natural (something Google is a big fan of) ways to optimise your site for key terms. It’s also a great way to target longer-tail lifestyle phrases that you wouldn’t be able to naturally include on product pages.<br />
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For example, if we return to the party supplies analogy, good phrases to base content around might be ‘what are the best Halloween costume ideas?’ or ‘how to dress as a vampire?’<br />
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One post a month on a relevant topic, which you’re confident will appeal to your target audience, can increase brand engagement and keep visitors coming back.<br />
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Ensure URL Structure is Clear and Simple</h2>
Search engines (and people!) prefer clear, simple and keyword-rich URLs. The best test is to make sure that someone could accurately guess the subject of your pages from their URL alone. The content of every page should also be unique to its URL.<br />
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Carry Out Quality Link Building </h2>
Links from high quality domains are one of the best ways to improve your rankings. Google sees each link as a ‘vote’ for your site, and as a sign that you’re offering high quality content.<br />
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However, link building is notoriously difficult, and ‘spammy’ or ‘black hat’ techniques are a sure-fire way to earn a penalty from the search engine. That being said, there are a number of things that small businesses can do to encourage natural links, such as:<br />
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Create high quality, informative blog content that people may naturally link back to<br />
Regularly share links to your content and site via social channels, to get them in front of as many potential linkers as possible<br />
Create useful resources or guides, and then ask to be included in relevant organisations’ ‘useful links’ section<br />
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Find and Fix Dead Links</h2>
Not only do dead links make it harder for search engines to index your site, they also make your site less user-friendly, which will have an indirect impact on rankings. This is because hitting lots of 404 error pages can cause visitors to ‘bounce’ off your site, or not return – an indicator to Google that you’re not offering a good experience.<br />
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Our free <a href="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/" target="_blank">broken link checker</a> will help you to quickly find dead links on your site – but what should you do once you’ve identified them? The best tactic is to set up a 301 redirect to send the visitor from the old page location to the new one.<br />
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It’s also worth setting up a custom 404 error page, such as Flickr’s humorous ‘<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/flickr-server-error-shows-this-panda-picture-2014-2?IR=T" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Bad, bad panda! Come on. We want photos</a>’ page, possibly with a link to your contact details, in case users really need a particular piece of information. This can help to keep visitors engaged until you can fix the problem.<br />
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In today’s competitive online market, a search engine friendly site is essential for small businesses. By following these straightforward search engine optimisation tips, you can improve your rankings and boost traffic.<br />
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To find out more about how to maintain a search engine friendly site, read our eBook, ‘<a href="http://www.deadlinkchecker.com/resources/maintaining-seo-friendly-website.pdf" target="_blank">Maintaining a Search Engine Friendly Website</a>’.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-950052209208942952.post-24102216152527470182016-10-06T02:31:00.000-07:002018-06-26T06:27:11.503-07:006 of the Best Online SEO Tools<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="website maintenance – business working coffee" border="0" data-original-height="426" data-original-width="640" height="426" src="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/images/blog/CoffeeCup.jpg" title="" width="640" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image from <a href="https://pixabay.com/en/business-working-cafe-coffee-926221/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Pixabay</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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Here are six of the best.<br />
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Wordtracker </h2>
Optimising your content with the right keywords is an essential part of creating a search engine friendly site. Essentially, good keyword research involves identifying the words and phrases that your audience would use to find your products or content, and then optimising your copy with this language to make it easier for them to find.<br />
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Wordtracker is an industry standard keyword tool, which generates thousands of recently searched for keywords for any term, as well as providing competitive data to help you target the phrases with the best potential. The large number of results returned by the tool also enables you to dig deeper for longer tail phrases (longer keyword phrases, which are typically very specific) related to your products.<br />
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<a href="https://my.wordtracker.com/sign-up" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Pricing</a> | <a href="https://my.wordtracker.com/sign-up" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Free Trial</a><br />
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Ubersuggest </h2>
If you’re looking for a free alternative to Google’s keyword tool, Ubersuggest is well worth a look. The tool works by combining the results from a range of suggestion tools, to provide you with a large number of long-tail keyword phrases based on real search queries.<br />
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Not only do the results provide you with a variety of key phrases to investigate, it can also be incredibly useful when it comes to generating content ideas.<br />
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<a href="http://ubersuggest.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Free Tool</a><br />
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Crazy Egg</h2>
Every webmaster wants to know how users interact with their site. By understanding factors such as where people click and how far down they scroll, you can gain an insight into what about your site’s design works and – more importantly – what doesn’t.<br />
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Crazy Egg is a great tool, which lets you see exactly what people are doing on your website. The tool generates a heat map that shows you where on your site people are clicking, how far down they’re scrolling, where they’re coming from and who clicks on what the most.<br />
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<a href="https://www.crazyegg.com/pricing" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Pricing</a> | <a href="https://www.crazyegg.com/pricing" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Free Trial</a><br />
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StatCounter</h2>
One of the most comprehensive free plans available, StatCounter allows you to monitor your website’s traffic and provides you with a wealth of stat-based information about your visitors.<br />
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Features include information about individual visitors, such as where they are from, their system settings and their navigation path through your site, a breakdown of your most popular pages and information about where your visitors are coming from – plus a whole lot more.<br />
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<a href="https://statcounter.com/sign-up/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Free Tool</a><br />
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ContentGems</h2>
Setting up a blog on your site is a great idea. Aside from building your brand and your relationship with your customers, a blog can help to improve your rankings by encouraging links, likes and shares and optimising your site for key phrases.<br />
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ContentGems finds the best content around topics you want to cover, to help you come up with great content ideas. The tool monitors sources including news, blogs and social media accounts, and filters them based on your chosen keywords, social signals and more.<br />
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It also makes it easy for you to share curated content to your social channels, helping you to maintain an active social presence and establishing you as an authority in your industry.<br />
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<a href="https://contentgems.com/plans" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Pricing</a> | <a href="https://contentgems.com/plans" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Free Version</a><br />
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Hootsuite</h2>
In 2015’s online world, social media is potentially vital to SEO success. There is some debate on the topic – with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udqtSM-6QbQ" target="_blank">Google’s Matt Cutts stating that social signals don’t affect search engine rankings</a> – but many influential search engine marketers believe that social accounts can boost SEO.<br />
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If you’re looking to improve your social presence, Hootsuite is the go-to tool. It allows you to simply manage all of your social accounts from one dashboard, schedule posts and find curated content to publish. For those on a budget, the tool also offers a free version.<br />
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<a href="https://hootsuite.com/en-gb/plans" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Pricing</a> | <a href="https://hootsuite.com/en-gb/plans/free" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Free Version</a><br />
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If you want to get your website to the top of the search engine results, there are plenty of tools out there that can help, covering everything from keyword research to content creation.<br />
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Our <a href="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/website-dead-link-checker.asp" target="_blank">broken link checker tool</a> could also be a great addition to your tool kit, allowing you to find and fix broken links that can negatively impact your site’s usability and rankings.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-950052209208942952.post-49677832968335404262016-09-09T02:37:00.000-07:002018-06-26T06:29:24.422-07:005 Monthly Website Maintenance Tips for Ecommerce Sites<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="website maintenance – Apple computer and calendar" border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="525" height="426" src="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/images/blog/Apple-Computer.jpg" title="" width="640" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image from <a href="https://unsplash.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Unsplash</a></td></tr>
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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Whilst there are lots of things that you should be doing on a monthly basis, here are five of the most important tips.<br />
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1.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Keep an Eye on Site Speed</h2>
Site speed is something that many business owners overlook. However, it’s a critical factor when it comes to keeping your visitors happy. Don’t believe us? Take a look at the following statistics:<br />
Consumers expect your site to load in two seconds or less (source: <a href="https://www.seo.com/blog/5-monthly-website-maintenance-tips-for-small-businesses/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">seo.com</a>)<br />
40% of consumers will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load (source: <a href="https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Kiss Metrics</a>)<br />
Slow loading websites cost retailers around £1.73 billion in lost sales each year (source: <a href="https://econsultancy.com/blog/10936-site-speed-case-studies-tips-and-tools-for-improving-your-conversion-rate/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">econsultancy</a>)<br />
If you’re building a new site, fast load speed should clearly be a priority. But site speed can also slow down over time as you add new pages, images, social buttons, etc.<br />
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You should regularly check your load times to ensure that you aren’t losing valuable business. You can analyse the speed of your site’s pages using tools such as <a href="https://gtmetrix.com/resources.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">GT Metrix</a>.<br />
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2.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Update Contact Information and Forms </h2>
Clear contact information and easy-to-use contact forms are essential for ecommerce businesses – but it’s <a href="http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/are-small-business-websites-really-this-bad/5583/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">surprising how many sites lack this basic information</a>.<br />
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Make it a priority each month to ensure that your contact details are up-to-date and that your contact forms are working properly. A technical error or a typo in your email address will result in you losing valuable leads.<br />
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3.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Refresh Your Blog</h2>
A huge number of commercial sites have a regularly updated blog – and there’s good reason for this. Aside from helping to build your brand and communicating who you are as a business, a blog will help to improve your rankings.<br />
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This is because great content drives traffic, keeps visitors coming back and gains links, likes and shares – all of which indicates to the search engines that your site is offering a great experience.<br />
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You should update your blog with a post every month. However, the post needs to be of high quality and appeal to your audience. Otherwise it won’t achieve any results and you’ll be wasting your time.<br />
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4.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Update Promotions, Deals and Stock Information</h2>
There’s nothing more frustrating than clicking on a deal or ordering a product, only to find that the site’s information was out of date.<br />
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If you do run promotions or deals, make sure you regularly refresh them. Aside from making sure any dates are clear, you should remove any old offers, as they’re a clear sign of a neglected website.<br />
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You should also regularly run through your site and make sure that any out of stock products aren’t incorrectly listed. All product information should also be correct and up to date.<br />
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5.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Check for Broken Links </h2>
The web is constantly changing and as a result, sometimes links can become broken. Whilst this might not seem like a serious problem on the surface, it will be doing some serious hidden damage.<br />
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First and foremost, a large number of broken links can cause search engines to have problems indexing and ranking your site. However, most importantly they can have a hugely negative affect on your site’s usability, causing visitors to become frustrated and quickly leave.<br />
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This can also have an indirect impact on rankings, as the consequent drop in traffic and increased bounce rate will signal to the search engines that your site is offering a bad experience.<br />
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Tools such as <a href="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/" target="_blank">Dead Link Checker</a> allow you to regularly check your site for broken links and alert you of any problems.<br />
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A poorly maintained ecommerce website is undoubtedly bad for business. Whilst there are lots of checks you should carry out on a monthly basis, these are five of the most important.<br />
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For more tips on how to maintain your website and keep it search engine friendly, read our Beginner’s Guide to <a href="https://deadlinkchecker.com/resources/maintaining-seo-friendly-website.pdf" target="_blank">Maintaining a Search Engine Friendly Website</a>.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-950052209208942952.post-4395047365348525982016-07-27T02:43:00.000-07:002018-06-26T06:30:33.340-07:00Broken Links: A Problem for SEO, Usability or Both?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Broken links" border="0" data-original-height="333" data-original-width="500" height="426" src="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/images/blog/Broken-Links.jpg" title="" width="640" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/hernanpc/7115374283/in/photostream/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Hernan Piñera</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>In the SEO world there’s some debate about the true impact of dead links. There’s no doubt that they’re bad news, but some influencers suggest they’re more of a usability issue than an SEO issue.<br />
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So, are broken links a problem for SEO, usability or both?<br />
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Broken Links Will Damage Your Site’s Usability</h2>
There’s no debate here – broken links will negatively affect your site’s usability, which in turn can damage your brand.<br />
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We’ve all encountered a dead link at some point and it’s a frustrating experience. Whether you’re trying to view a product or watch a funny cat video, hitting a 404 error page can result in you simply giving up and leaving.<br />
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It’s likely that you’ve put a lot of time and effort into getting people to visit (and stay on) your site. So it seems silly to risk them ‘bouncing’ off because you haven’t maintained your links – especially when this can act as a ‘roadblock’ in the conversion process, resulting in loss of revenue.<br />
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Consequently, keeping an eye out for broken links is an important part of website maintenance. If you have a huge website, the odd one or two might not be a massive problem, but if your site is relatively small, even a couple of dead links could be a big issue in terms of usability.<br />
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Broken Links Can Impact Your Site’s SEO</h2>
It’s when it comes to the impact of broken links on SEO that there’s more of a debate. In September 2014, <a href="https://www.seroundtable.com/google-broken-links-19201.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Google’s John Mueller suggested that the search engine views a couple of dead links as a usability issue</a>, when he stated that:<br />
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“If you find things like this (broken links), I'd fix it primarily for your users, so that they're able to use your site completely. I wouldn't treat this as something that you'd need to do for SEO purposes on your site, it's really more like other regular maintenance that you might do for your users.”<br />
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However, many influential sites suggest that this only applies if the broken link problem on the site is relatively minor. For example, Search Engine Round Table state that, ‘…if GoogleBot only hits broken links on your site and your internal navigation is all broken, it may have a problem indexing and ranking your web site.’<br />
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The Impact of Broken Links on Usability Can Also Affect SEO</h4>
Broken links can also negatively impact your rankings indirectly, due to their impact on usability. <a href="https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-usability-experience-and-content-affect-search-engine-rankings" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">According to Moz</a>, “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.”<br />
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As a result, changes in user behaviour due to broken links, such as not sharing, returning or linking to your site, could result in the search engines assuming that you aren’t providing visitors with quality content – lowering your rankings.<br />
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So, are broken links a problem for SEO, usability or both? The answer is: both. There’s no doubt that they can seriously damage the usability of your site, resulting in visitors only staying for a short time – which in turn can affect your rankings.<br />
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And whilst Google may see a couple of broken links as a usability problem, a large number can result in the search engine having problems indexing your site.<br />
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Worried about broken links affecting your site’s usability and rankings? Our <a href="https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/" target="_blank">broken link checker tools</a>, including a single site-checker, multi-site checker and auto-checker, can help you easily find and fix them.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com