Use Broken Link Finder Website Software - Avoid Looking Ridiculous

You need website software to track down all your broken links to avoid looking ridiculous and driving your visitors away. Why? Imagine this scenario...

You're gathering all the information that you can on a topic that's very important to you. You've found a page that is a brilliant introduction to a paper that is all about your subject, so you click on the link to the paper...and nothing happens except for a 404 error report.

The link is dead, and you can't even find it on the sitemap. So you click the back button, vowing in your frustration never to go back to that incompetent website. If that was my site that you were visiting, I would be furious that you had been unable to find my great paper, just because of a stupid broken link.

That is what would happen if I had been lazy in managing my website and allowed broken links to accumulate. Even if you are just using photo album website software to show your photos to friends, you wouldn't want them to think you couldn't do anything right!

And my websites are more important to me than showing off a few photographs.

Having broken links in your website is one of the worst mistakes or bad habits that a webmaster can have, and there is no excuse for it because website building software includes many broken link checkers, and some of them are free.

I once checked a website that I was visiting for broken links and it had more than twenty five thousand of them, so I didn't visit that site again!

This fault can leave your internet home business reeling from its effects, and you can't correct the damage that has been done to past visitors. You can only prevent it happening to future visitors. It's not just human visitors either...search engine robots are stopped dead, and some search engines penalize you for having too many broken links.

My own website would have its reputation smashed if I allowed this mistake, because it is all about teaching beginners how to make their own websites. Visitors wouldn't accept my advice if I didn't follow it myself! They would rightly see it as unprofessional. If one day I decided to write and sell an ebook or a series of videos, they might even think it was a shady operation. And that's not even including everyone who hit the back button and never visited me again.

Website design software is easily available to check for broken links quickly, and programs that create visitor-friendly site-maps make that part of regular management easy too. I think the site-map generator software that I use also has a link checker, but I prefer to use Xenu, which is a free program. I've made a video about it, but it is really so simple that you probably won't need my video.

Many webmasters and website owners hate taking time to look for broken links. OK, it's boring and your website design software will help you to find your bad links quickly, but fixing them takes time.

The Xenu website building software allows me to display broken links grouped by link or by page where they are found. So I choose to group them by page, then I can fix all on one page before moving to another. It does take time, but think how much time you'll have wasted when you make your own website if nobody ever makes a return visit.

If you spend 150 hours a month designing websites, then have to spend two hours fixing broken links don't you think it is worth it? If you spend an hour a week designing websites, then you probably won't have more than a couple of broken links to fix each month. You could be even more pro-active and check each page for broken links as you create it.

Of course, it used to be hard work going through your website and checking each link by clicking on it (I know, because I used to do that fifteen years ago). But now the programmers have made it so easy that even if you are an amateur using photo album website software you can make sure that every link works.