SEO tools and link validator tools for a new website

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New Site, New Problems

It happens all the time, for big reasons or little ones, and it’s one of the greatest challenges to an SEO campaign: a website redesign in which all or most of the URLs on the site change. Suddenly, every inbound link to your site is outdated. Bookmarks lead to broken links. Traffic plummets. Your search engine ranks drop off the map! And these problems can linger long after the revamp.

If your site was recently redesigned, or you’re still working through repercussions from a long-ago revamp, or even if you’re planning your site’s next incarnation, here are some ideas for handling the sticky situations that crop up:

Page redirects Do all your outdated pages redirect to appropriate new ones? Don’t just redirect them to the home page. Ideally, each old page would redirect to a new page with similar subject matter. If this is not the case with your site, your task for today is to create a list of old URLs that are still getting traffic and the new URLs that they should be redirecting to. Then send it to your IT team member, who can help set things right using a server setting called a 301 redirect.

File Not Found page Do you have a kinder, gentler File Not Found (404 error) page? The page should, first and foremost, apologize to your patient readers for not being the page they’re looking for. Next, it should help them find the page they’re looking for! This could be by providing a site map, search box, or suggested links. And don’t forget to include the global navigation on this page, just like on any other page of your site. If your File Not Found page is not helpful, your task is to propose new traffic-friendly content for the page and either implement it or deliver it to the person who can do so. Inbound links Do you still have a multitude of links pointing to your old pages? If so, your task is to sweep the Web for links to your old URLs and request updates.

Internal links Did you clean up the links in your old navigation? You’ll never know until you check. Run a link validator, a program that checks your website for broken links internally. Here’s one to try: www.dead-links.com. Massive site revamps have been known to cause more harm than good. So we would be remiss if we didn’t tell you this:

Sometimes it’s best to follow the old maxim,“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Before you think about a site redo just to “keep things fresh,” take stock of whether you’re satisfied with your rankings, whether you have a good number of inbound links, and most important, whether your site satisfies the overall goals of your organization. Maybe, just maybe, you don’t want to tempt fate with a redesign.

Prevent Link Rot

Next time you redesign your site, use URLs that you won’t need to change ever. Put some serious thought into file-naming conventions that will grow and expand with your website. Here are some rules of thumb:

• Don’t name files with words like new, old, draft, current, latest, or any other status markers in the file name.This status will surely change as “new” files become “old” and “draft” files become “final.” (It’s a common problem! Last we checked, there were 771 listings in Google containing the preposterous file name final2.html for shame! and 520 listings for final3.html.)

• Name nested folders by year, and possibly month, for press releases or other dated materials. Put files in their final location as soon as they are launched rather than starting them out in a folder called “current” and moving them later.

• Leave out any information that may change in the future. For example, you don’t want to include the name of a current copywriter in the file name.This URL will feel outdated and awkward three years from now when that individual no longer works at the company. Names of servers, the city where you’re headquartered, or any other contemporary information should also be left off file names. Follow these guidelines, and your search engine presence may survive the next site redesign without a hitch!

Fun Tools for Site Assessment

You’re well into the third month of Your SEO Plan now how is your team holding up? Are you all working together like a well-oiled machine? Or is your “team” more like a collection of squeaky wheels, revolving doors, and bottlenecks? We covered some strategies for encouraging members of your organization to join your SEO effort. Here are some good questions that may help you keep everyone on the same path:

Are my edits getting implemented? This is a biggie for many in-house SEOs: Just getting simple (or not-so-simple) edits made to the website may require jumping through design, IT, and even legal hoops. If your recommended edits aren’t being taken care of, take time today and figure out why. Are you sending your requests to people who don’t have authority or access to make the changes? Are your requests playing second fiddle to another department with more “pull”? Or, did enthusiasm wane after the first round of edits didn’t turn out the hoped-for quick results? Get the inside scoop on the holdup so you can take steps to flush it out!

Is SEO integrated into our processes? For Your SEO Plan to succeed, it needs to be part of the web development process. That means an SEO review before, during, or (worst case) after changes are made to the website. It also means integration of SEO considerations into the website style guide, if your organization has one. If you’re feeling like an outsider, or if you think SEO is being given short shrift, you need to work on ways to integrate SEO into company processes. This means you may have to take on the role of SEO evangelist: Write up the first draft of an SEO style guide and deliver it to your developers. Ask to be included in copywriting or design meetings. If you don’t overdo it, you can even send articles or SEO tips to a team member who might benefit from this information.

How’s that conversion tracking going? By now, we hope you have conversion tracking in place for your organization. If your tracking method requires participation by members of your team (for example, you need Sales to track calls from a special 800 number), revisit it today and see if it’s working. Are you getting the information you need? If not, what needs to change?

From time to time throughout Your SEO Plan, we’ve pointed you to helpful tools available on the Web. Today, we’ll share a few more of our favorites! Every one of these can help your search engine visibility; read through the descriptions and spend your hour exploring the ones that interest you the most:

Link validator There are many free tools online to check your website for broken links on a page-by-page basis. (For example, LinkScan/QuickCheck at www.elsop.com/quick/ and several spider emulators do this.) However, it’s much more useful to run link validators sitewide. One site that offers a deeper crawl is the one we mentioned : www.dead-links.com.

Slow page load checker Your site visitors and prospective customers aren’t the only ones who grow weary of slow-loading pages; some SEOs believe that search engine spiders also give up and walk away (Google Webmaster Tools will report these timeouts, if there are any on your site). You can find a good online tool for checking page load time at www.websiteoptimization.com.

Link popularity comparison Use the tool at www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ to compare your website’s link popularity with that of your competitors.

Keyword density tools The site www.live-keyword-analysis.com offers a quick and easy way to check keyword density in any text you choose.

Your own browser Here’s a tool we know you already have: a browser. You know how to view page source using your browser. You can also use your browser as a makeshift spider emulator. Here’s how: Select Preferences or Internet Options from your browser menu. Then, figure out how to turn off image display and disable JavaScript.

You can choose to reject all cookies while you’re at it. Voilà! Your browser is now a speed machine and a crude approximation of a search engine robot. If you use Firefox, a must-have SEO extension is “Web Developer,” available at this URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60.

Accessibility check One of the fringe benefits of Your SEO Plan is that it will improve your website’s accessibility for the disabled. By the same token, a more accessible website will tend to be more robot friendly as well. Jan Schmidt of Collaborint Web Management

Services, a web design and development firm specializing in web accessibility, explains that many SEO practices “not only make it more efficient for search engines to crawl a website and index the content, but can also improve the disabled user’s experience by providing easy-to-navigate links and machine-readable page text.”

Tools are available to check your page with everything from voice browsers to colorblindness simulators. We recommend you start with Cynthia Says, a free web-based tool located at www.cynthiasays.com. Links and descriptions of many more accessibility tools can be found here: www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/complete.

Redirects and more Rex Swain’s HTTP Viewer (www.rexswain.com/httpview.html) is a rare gem because it shows what kind of redirect is in place on a given page. This can be useful to you if you’re wondering what kind of redirects you have on your site but can’t get a straight answer from your IT department (maybe because you don’t have an IT department?).

If you’re the type to spend hours testing out gadgets and techno-goodies, here are a couple of SEO tool smorgasbords that you may enjoy: www.seomoz.org/tools.