After you have built a good website, optimized it for search engine rankings, and submitted it to major search engines the last thing you want is for something to go terribly wrong and ruin tons of work.
Keeping your file structure clean on the server is extremely crucial, but there are also even more important factors.
Broken Links
You have no idea how many websites I have been to that had dead links. A dead link is a link that when you click on it, you get an error page because it was either the wrong URL, there is an html or php file missing, or something just went wrong on the server side. If you have your Google Webmaster’s Tools account set up, in a week or so you will be able to see all of the errors Google found when crawling your site. Of course this is a little too late if you ask me, because if Google finds errors, you may not rank well in Google.
There are several tools you can use to report broken links on your site:
- One easy to use tool is the Broken Link Checker. The good thing about this tool is that its free, and easy to use. The bad thing is that it doesn’t continuously check your server and pages for errors that could be destroying your traffic.
- The best tool I have found for this issue is Web CEO for PC. You can download a wonderful trial version of the program but the Site Audit utility and Quality Check utility aren’t included unless you purchase the full program which for $199 isn’t bad at all. You get not only the Site Audit and Quality Check, but you get a Rank and Link Analyzer as well as a free fully customizable reporting system for your clients. This suite is amazing and I highly recommend it. Most of the lessons I teach you here come with the program, but in much more detail.
For smaller sites that contain 10-25 pages, I always recommend doing a full walk through of the site. Print out a sitemap or a list of all of the pages on the site. Then start on your home page and click to ever page from every page. Mark off each page once it has been fully checked. As you can imagine, this is a very laborious task, so I would still recommend going with the Web CEO program.
Usability vs. Visibility
Now there is another factor that will help you determine what your site is lacking and where it could use some focus. Usability and visibility differ because visibility describes how a spider and server work with a site, but usability determines what a visitor sees.
- Usability - Important for searchers and on site users. A little important for search engine rankings.
- Visibility - Important for search engines spiders, but not so much for users. This factor determines how easy it is for a search engine to view your site.
Again, tools like Web CEO allow you to simultaneously check visibility and usability.
Every once in a while it is a good technique to do a deep clean of your entire server and website. I usually check my site and pages every 1-2 months. Go onto your server and check for files that aren’t in use anymore. Old html files, or contact forms need to be removed because spiders tend to view them as a sign of laziness on the part of the webmaster. Checking image sizes and file types can help clean up the way your site operates as well. Using Adobe Photoshop to optimize photos for the web is a great way to speed up load time.
I would also recommend again, learn CSS as soon as you can. Stick with it until you get it. If you would like for me to teach you CSS, simply email me or comment here. If enough people want to learn CSS really quick, really well, and for free, I will teach you on my blog with open questions available.
Keeping things clean like navigation above the fold, utility links, breadcrumbs, alternate navigation all increases the user experience and the visibility to search engines.
The next lesson “Special Optimization Issues - Unusual things pop up often” explains the importance of usability vs. visibility and what keeps a search engine from crawling your site.
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January 23rd, 2008 at 12:47 pm
[...] Website Maintenance - Like changing the oil, this is just as important [...]