In recent years, most bloggers have the awareness of implmenting pretty permalink structure in their WordPress blogs. But pretty permalink structure does not mean it is optimal. Without optimal permalink structure, it will not bring you any additional benefits you can enjoy. In this post, we’re going to look at different permalink options and which permalink structure is best to choose. Of course, there isn’t a one solution fits all cases. Definitely there are better choices you can make.

What Is Permalink?

A permalink is the permanent unique URL pointing to a specific blog post, page, archive page as well as category page. To make it simple, a permalink is the unique address that is used by your blog readers to locate your blog’s entry in web browser.

Pretty permalink is the idea to craft the URL in such a way that it make sense to all non-technical people. It is the basic of the permalink optimization process.

Permalink optimization is one of the important element in SEO. The main benefit having permalink optimized is that it helps to increase the keyword ranking in search engine results. Ultimately it will bring targeted traffic to your blogs and help you to achieve business goal.

Permalink Structure

There are several types of permalink structure that you can implement on your blogs. However each of them has pros and cons. Depending on your situation, you can choose to implement one of them.

#1 Post Number

By default, WordPress is using post number as the permalink. It’s an ugly permalink and very unfriendly to the search engines and your readers. By simply looking at the URL string, you have no clue what is this article about unless you go through the full article. Same theory applies to search engines as they are designed to behave like human.

http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=123

This type of permalink is absolutely not recommended unless you do not want to rank your blog post well in search engines.

#2 Post Title

When you’re creating blog entry, WordPress allows us to specify post slug. It is identical to your post title by default. Post title (slug) is the second type of the permalink structure you’re going to into details.

http://www.yourdomain.com/your-post-title/

As we can observe from the example above, post title permalink is a keyword rich URL. It’s very simple and pretty enough to give you a clue whether the information on the page is what you want before you actually open it in your browser. Same theory, search engines are using keyword rich permalink as one of the important element when they are deciding the rankings of your articles.

There is one problem with this implementation. If you have more than one article with same post title, then WordPress will automatically add a number at the end of the permalink. For example:

http://www.yourdomain.com/your-post-title-2/

http://www.yourdomain.com/your-post-title-3/

It doesn’t matter to have a number at the end of the permalink because it does not affect how we and search engines interpret the relevancy of the article based on permalink.

#3 Date + Post Title

Another common permalink structure is to have date + post title.

http://www.yourdomain.com/2010/03/23/your-post-title/

The date in the URL is the date of creation of the blog post. It’s unnecessary to have date in URL in most situations. It’s not a keyword that you are trying to rank for in search engine results. Many readers have a bias for new content and more likely to click on something which is newer. Furthermore, if you change your date of publication to re-post your older article, your permalink will be changed and you might lose your SEO benefits that you have in your old permalink.

So this permalink structure is not recommended unless you have a very good reason.

#4 Category + Post Title

The last common permalink structure to be discussed is category + post title. Category is considered as a keyword and this structure allows you to insert more keywords into the URL. It certainly will bring you SEO benefits. From my opinion, it’s better than date + post title.

http://www.yourdomain.com/category/your-post-title/

But there are two drawbacks for this approach. First, if you assign two categories to a post, then you will have two permalinks for this article. WordPress will choose which one to show, not you.

The second disadvantage is if you plan to change the category of your blog entry, then your permalink will also be changed and potentially you may lose your SEO benefits. Of course, there are some plugins which can resolve this issue by redirecting your old permalink to new permalink but you have more work to do.

Which One Is The Optimal Permalink Structure And Why?

I strongly recommend to use post title as permalink. It’s short, simple and good enough to improve your search engine rankings. And you have less work to do when you re-structure your blog or category.

Conclusion

Post title permalink is the optimal permalink structure. As you can see from your web browser, I’m using it in this blog.

How about you? Which permalink structure you’re using and what is the reason? Do you have other permalink structures which is good to recommend? I would like to hear from you and please share with us in the comment box below.

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1. Top 8 Tips To Optimize URL Structure For Search Engines

When talking about off-page optimization, we usually refer to inbound link building. It’s an important factor to rank your web pages high in search engine result pages. Very often, people continue to acquire inbound links without realizing there is a risk.

Today I’m going to discuss about the risks and issues of off-page over optimization.

#1 Building Link Too Fast Too Many

When we’re acquiring inbound links, it’s very easy to get them too fast too many. Link building is a tedious process and you can say it as a painful process. In order to simplify the process, many people start to use third party services to automate the process such as automated directory and article submission.

The original idea of these third party automated services is good but you need to understand how they work before you employ them as part of your optimization process. The truth is many of them do not allow you to control the number of submission per day. Some automated services submit your links and articles to all directory in one shot. This is a big big mistake and Google is going to penalize you.

The recommended daily submission rate is between 1 and 10. Today you can have the rate equal to 5 and tomorrow you can make it 10. By using this approach, you can make your link acquiring process natural. This is what search engines want.

#2 Unnatural Link Distribution

Unnatural link distribution is another issue in off-page over optimization.

Let’s look at one example. Assume you have 100 websites linking to you. But all of them also have links pointing to each other. This looks very unnatural for visitors as well as search engines. It’s like your website is included in some kind of link farm.

The recommendation is getting quality 1 way incoming links and they do not have inter-connection which can form a loop.

#3 Unnatural Anchor Text Distribution

The last risk I would like to discuss is unnatural anchor text distribution.

In point 1, I talked about mass submission of links and articles. It’s not going to give you links too fast and too many, but it will also make your anchor text unnaturally. If those service providers only allow you to have 1 anchor text for all submission. Then you need to be alert.

The natural anchor text distribution is not all your incoming links are using same anchor text. Perhaps some of them are using your brand name, some of them are using your blog post title. As a human being, everybody can insert different anchor text when they’re linking to you. So be sure to use different anchor text when you’re building inbound link from now onwards.

Conclusion

The risk of off-page over optimization is often overlooked by many webmasters. By understand the issues mentioned above, you can make sure your’re not accidentally hurting yourself by going too far with your off-site SEO efforts.

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2. 2 Practical Internal Linking Techniques
3. 14 Common SEO Mistakes & Errors

Keyword research is the fundamental step in SEO process. I agree that it is a tedious and painful activity. But if you do not find correct keyword to target, it might waste your time and resources.

Here are 2 simple and quick ways to find traffic generating keywords for your web pages and posts.

#1 Google Search Box

Assume that you have a site related to SEO and you would like to write an article about link baiting.

So you can go to Google and type in “link baiting”. Here is the screenshot.

You can see there is a list of keywords suggested by Google. You can actually click the keywords shown in the list and go directly to the search engine result pages. For example, clicking on “link baiting ideas” will take you straight to the result page.

As you can imagine, this suggested list make your life easier to look for longtail keywords. Since longtail keywords are much easier to rank in Google, it’s a good idea to start targeting on them.

While searching for “link baiting” keyword, many people will also notice other keywords presented by Google and click on them. This makes those other keywords great terms to include in your article content.

#2 Google Related Search Terms

You need to use popular keyword for this method. For example, we can search for “seo” term. Once you’re inside search engine result page, you can go to the bottom of the search result page and find related search terms. Here is the screenshot.

Each releated keyword is link to another relevant search engine result page. It is also a good idea to target these keywords.

Conclusion

The methods mentioned above are quick and simple ways to find great keywords for your SEO purpose. But they are not all for your SEO process. You still need to go through keyword searches analysis and competition analysis before you decide which keyword to target.

Do you have any other quick and simple ways to look for great keyword? Please share with us below.

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2. SEO Strategy: Targeting Longtail Keywords
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Getting backlink juice pointing to your websites isn’t easy for all of you, more often it is a painful task. So we need to make sure the link juice is flowing properly easpecially internal linking within our websites which is under our control.

Robert Enriquez has made a blog post about link juice leakage at SEOMoz. And I feel that it’s important to share with you.

If you have serious link juice leakage, then it will affect your search engine rankings a lot. Placing the nofollow link attribute on your website is a very important SEO technique to control and fix the flow of link juice and PageRank. Today I’m going to discuss about the top 9 link juice leakage.

#1 User Function And Admin Links

Login, signup, sign in, logout, register and any admin links are just providing user function. And there is no vital information on these pages and there is no value to index them in the search engines.

#2 Logo And Header Picture Links

You should nofollow logo and header picture links as there is no anchor text unless you get customers by images (tangible products).

#3 RSS Feed Links

Most of the blogs do provide a link to readers to subscribe to their RSS feeds. Not only it will give you link juice leakage issue, it will also create duplicate content. You want search engines to index your blog post but not RSS feeds.

#4 Archive Pages

There are various form of archive pages such as tag pages, category pages and archive pages. They all contain your blog post and are considered as duplicate content. Nofollow and noindex those archive pages if you do not want them to be indexed by search engines.

#5 Contact Us And Feedback Pages

Usually this page only contains a form that needs to be filled out. So there is no need to index this page.

#6 Copyright And Privacy Pages

These pages do not contain any relevant information to your website. So they should not be indexed as well.

#7 Comment Page

As the number of comments grow, the leaking of link juice tends to be serious. You can use nofollow link and canonical link to prevent it.

#8 Home Page Link

Home button is another issue which cause link juice leaking. Since the anchor text is ‘home’, there is no point to follow the link unless you’re selling a home.

There are 2 ways to handle this. First one is to change the anchor text to your keyword other than ‘home’. Second one is simply add the nofollow attribute to your link.

#9 Read More Link

In most of the blog, you can find the ‘read more’ link in the blog’s main page. This does not contribute the link juice to your blog post because the anchor is not your targeted keyword.

You can find this issue in my blog too. Actually I plan to make the change but I haven’t taken the action due to time constaint. I’ll do it in the near future to resolve this problem.

Conclusion

You should review your website now to find out how the link juice flows from one page to another no matter it is a blog or e-commerce site. By assigning the proper flow of your link juice and PageRank, you can have a much better search engine rankings. If not, your keyword rankings on search engine result pages will be greatly affected.

Related Posts:

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2. Is Your Site Being Penalized For Low Link Popularity?
3. Ultimate Link Building Tips And Strategies

Search engine optimization is about content. The higher the quality of your web page content, the higher it will be ranked for your keywords. Without effective content optimization, your off-page optimization efforts might be wasted. The following explains top 5 tips about optimizing your web page content.

#1 Keep Your Content Fresh

Google and other search engines love fresh and unique content. It helps to separate your site from countless others in your niche. From user point of view,  we want to read the most updated information. This is what search engines trying to emphasize.

Blog is a good way to produce fresh content. And one of the biggest advantage in blogging is it will update post content automatically by attracting comments. This will certainly keep your post content fresh and hot enough with better rankings given by search engines.

#2 High Text To Code Ratio

Maintaining a high text to code ratio is always preferred. Search engines are different from human. They like to index simple pages as compared to pages with lots of fancy codings such as Ajax, Flash and etc. The more is your codes, the more likely the errors will occur. And it will prevent search engines from crawling and properly interpreting your web page.

#3 Maintain Appropriate Keyword Density Percentage

Since keywords are the terms that people searching to find your web pages, it’s important to maintain appropriate keyword density percentage. In any of your web page, you should target a few keywords instead of just having one. This is where Google determine your page relevancy to a niche.

Having a low keyword density for your targeted keywords will result in low positions and having a high percentage may cause Google to think that you are stuffing keywords. For the best effect, choose 1 ~ 2 strong keyword phrases and target for 2% ratio for keyword to article length. For example, if an article is around 300 words, then it should have 6 keyword phrases.

#4 Start Strong And Finish Strong

The secret of SEO is to start strong and finish strong. This is often overlook by most of the people. You should place your main keyword phrase in the first and last paragraph of your content. The purpose is to attract the attention of your readers and relate your article to what you’re searching for.

However it doesn’t mean you can ignore the rest of your article. Sprinkle the keyword phrases throughout the remaining content will help to strengthen its SEO effectiveness.

#5 Strategic Links On Keywords

One of the effective ways to increase your search engine rankings is to embed internal links in your page content pointing to another page of your site.

For example, intead of waiting for a visitor to click to your “SEO” page, you can write a phrase like “affordable SEO” and link to your “SEO” page. This will not only bring traffic to your “SEO” page, but it also increase the search engine rankings of your “SEO” page.

Conclusion

While you’re optimizing your web page with other on-page and off-page techniques, you should not forget the importance of content optimization. With 5 technique mentioned above, content optimization gives you the best effect.

Related Posts:

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2. Keyword Stuffing Can Kill Your Website
3. Exact Match Domain Gets High Ranking With Error Page

Recently Digg has released new feature called DiggBar. It’s nothing special, just inserting a frame in your website with some features if your visitors are referred by Digg. I’m not a fan of it.

The Problem

With a URL frame around content, there is no SEO benefit from promoting Digg. If you see carefully, the URL address is still pointing to digg.com instead of your website URL. Generally it also increases their traffic and reduces your traffic. I heard that they’re planning to have an ad tracker in the toolbar so they’re clearly planning on adding advertisements to your blog and website in the future.

The Solution

Don’t worry, there is a solution for this. You can simple add the following code to your website in the <head> section.

<script type="text/javascript">
if (top !== self) top.location.href = self.location.href;
</script>

If you’re using WordPress blog, then you no need touch the code. You can simply download the plugin written by me and activate it. The plugin is called Frame Free.

Sandbox filter is a filter created by Google some years ago to fight against spam in the search results. Usually sandbox is applied to new domains which are less than 2 years. Under the sandbox effect, no matter how well you optimize the website, it just doesn’t rank high on Google. On average, the sandbox effect is 6 months, but it can vary from less than a month to over 8 months.

If you have made major changes to your website and you found that your rankings have dropped off 30 to several hundreds positions, then it’s likely you’re in Google sandbox. You might think that it’s unfair. According to Google, the delay of inclusion of brand new websites is to encourage webmasters to build content instead of building mini-networks.

The Google sandbox is something beyond your control and you cannot avoid it. You cannot fight the sandbox. The only thing you can do is to adapt to it and patiently wait for time to pass and sandbox effect will be slowly disappeared. But there are a few steps you can apply to minimize the damage for new websites and new domains.

#1 Create Good And Relevant Content Actively

As time passes by, relevant and fresh content will take you to the top of search engine. Relevant content will make your website becomes authority in the industry. Not only that, fresh content will keep your readers coming back.

#2 Gather Quality Inbound Links

When getting inbound links, keep in mind that they need to be from trusted sources such as DMOZ, CNN or other reputable places. In addition, links coming from .edu and .gov domains might help because these domains are usually exempt from the sandbox filter. Build the links slowly and steadily instead of getting 100 links a day as it will kill your website completely without releasing from sandbox.

#3 Buy Old Or Expired Domains

Sandbox effect is more serious for new sites on new domains. If you’re buying old or expired domains and launch your new sites there, you’ll likely to experience less problems.

#4 Host On A Well Established Domain

Another solution is to host your new site on a subdomain of a well established domain such as wordpress.com and blogger.com. The sandbox effect is not so severe for new subdomains unless the domain itself is blacklisted. However subdomains on free hosts are generally not a good idea in terms of branding.

#5 Concentrate On Less Popular Keywords

The fact that your site is sandboxed doesn’t mean that it’s not indexed by Google at all. You website can still be on the top ranking of search engine results if you’re targeting less popular and competitive keywords. I’m always advice to target long tail keywords first for newly established websites while waiting to get to the top for the most lucrative keywords. This is the technique I have been using for this blog.

Conclusion

Although Google doesn’t confirm the existence of sandbox but many people have experience its effect. It’s often reminded that Google is not the only search engine or traffic generation source. We should create multiple stream of traffic to minimize the damage of Google sandbox. If you’re planning your SEO efforts, try to include other search engines. This will help to minimize the damages of the sandbox effect in addition to the 5 points mentioned above.

Please share with us what is your thought and your approach in minimizing the sandbox effect.

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The biggest mistake many new entrepreneur make when starting a new business is to create a product or service based on something they enjoy and interested. Creating product or service based on your interest isn’t bad. But is there any demand and market for the product after several months working hard creating it?

This is the major problem many new entrepreneurs are facing. They have no idea where to find people buying their products. They are spending many sleepless night just to create fantastic products but finally realize that nobody wants to buy their greatest products.
 If you do an analysis carefully, you will notice that those people are creating product before they find the market that wants the product. In the real world, what entrepreneur should be doing is finding the market first before they start to create their own products and services. This will give you a better chance to success.

How can we find and research the market? In this article, I’ll be showing you one very good way to find a profitable market by applying killer keyword strategy.

Looking For High Keywords Searches

Let’s start with keyword research. We need to find what are the words people are searching and how many times they are searching. The more times someone searches for a word, the more popular and more demand the word is. So it make sense to look for those keywords with high searches.

There are many tools available to find out how many times people are searching a keyword per month. One of the free and recommended tool is Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Personally I use this tool very often.

Assume you are in dog training niche. So we can start by searching “dog training” in Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

From the diagram, you can see that the 2nd column is the number of searches per month. You should look for those monthly searches of at least 10,000. The higher the better. It might not worth your effort to create a product for those searches with just 1,000 or 2,000. And you might not be able to grow your business in the future.

For our illustration purpose, I’ll choose “dog training classes” and “puppy dog training” with total monthly searches 14,800 for both. I believe you can analyze more keywords and find the perfect keyword for you.

Just to explain a bit more why I choose “dog training classes” and “puppy dog training”. With “dog training classes”, you can actually create some kind of online membership site which people can subscribe to dog training class learning how to train a dog. For “puppy dog training” keyword, you can easily create an ebook teaching people how to train puppy dog.

Checking Keyword Competition

Next, we need to check how much competition in the search engines for each of these keywords. The competition here means how many other websites or web pages are promoting related product or service.

It is an important factor because if the competition is very tough, then it is difficult for you to acquire customer.

Let’s go to Google and enter the keywords “dog training classes” and “puppy dog training” separately. The number of competiting web pages are 18,200,000 and 872,000 respectively. It is very clear that “dog training classes” is much more competitive than “puppy dog training”.

But wait, there is a little trick that you should do to really understand who are your actual competitors. If a website does mention the keyword in their content but doesn’t have the keyword in their title, chances are they probably aren’t promoting the product.

By using the following command, we’ll be able to get a much better list of our competitors. This command will eliminate those web pages that are not mentioning our keyword in the title tag.

allintitle: dog training classes
allintitle: puppy dog training

Now the results look a bit different from the above without using “allintitle” command. “Dog training classes” is less competitive with 8,360 competing web pages. Given that there are only 8,360 competiting web pages for “dog training classes” keyword, it makes your chances of ranking well much easier.

Results/Searches Ratio (R/S Ratio)

This is the most important step – data analysis. Here are the data collected.

Keywords: dog training classes vs puppy dog training

Number of Searches: 14,800 vs 14,800

Number of Competing Web Pages: 8,360 vs 44,000

Let’s do some calculation based on the data we’ve collected. It is called R/S ratio (results/searches ratio). Results mean the number of competing web pages. It can be used to determine how much demand there is for a product/keyword.

The keyword “dog training classes” is searched 14,800 times and number of competitors is 8,360, so R/S is:

8,360/14,800 = 0.56

Let’s look at another keyword “puppy dog training”. It is searched 14,800 times and number of competing web pages is 44,000, so R/S is:

44,000/14,800 = 2.97

Typically we’ll look for R/S ratio which is less than 2. The lower the R/S ratio, the more profitable the keyword will be for you. So the winner is “dog training classes”.

Conclusion

When we’re trying to build an online business, it’s important to find the market before creating your product. In the market finding process, killer keyword strategy should be applied to find those keywords with low results/searches ratio (R/S ratio). It will help you to build a more profitable business no matter which industry you’re in.

Related Posts:

1. SEO Strategy: Targeting Longtail Keywords
2. Keyword Stuffing Can Kill Your Website

If you want your web pages to rank high in search engine result pages, then you should make sure your URL is properly optimized. This is one of the important on-page optimization technique.

Why We Need To Optimize URL?

First reason to optimize URL structure is to increase search engine rankings which will bring us free natural traffic. Secondly human readable URL structure can increase your clickthrough rate. People click more on readable URLs as they give us idea about the actual content on the web page.

Here are top 8 tips that you can employed in every single web page URL you have in your website.

#1 Convert Dynamic URL To Static URL

You should avoid using dynamic URL and stick with static URL. There are a few reasons for this.

Here is the example of dynamic URL:

http://www.example.com/product.php?category=media&title=twitter

From the example above, you can tell that a dynamic URL is having characters such as “=”, “&” and “?” in the URL. In general, dynamic URL content gets indexed very slowly and some search engines might have problem indexing it. Besides, dynamic URL is not readable and it will lower the clickthrough rate in search engine results.

So the above mentioned dynamic URL can be converted to static URL as follows:

http://www.example.com/product/media/twitter/

#2 Separate Multiple Keywords In URL Using Hyphens (Dashes)

Separating multiple keywords in URL using hyphens will make it easier for search engines to understand your URL structure and exactly when it starts and when it ends for each keyword.

http://www.example.com/duplicate-content/

#3 Limit The Number Of Words In Your URL

Search engines limit the crawling if the page URL contains too many keywords. Generally keywords not beyond 10 in your web page URL is the best. Search engines always prefer short and descritive URLs.

#4 Keep Your URL Structure Unchanged

You should keep in mind that once your should keep your URL stable and remained unchanged once it is created. It means you should take care of URL structure optimization when you setup your website or blog at the beginning.

If you would like to alter the URL structure at the middle, then the best idea is to redirect your old URL to new URL. This will ensure that Google and other search engines are able to transfer your link juice and PageRank from old URL to new URL without hurting your site.

#5 Keep Only Keywords In Your URL

We should keep only keywords in URL. And remove all numbers and words such as “the”, “of”, “in”, “your” and etc. If we keep those redundant words in the URl, it will dilute your keyword density in the URL and possibly make our URL exceed the length of 10 words.

#6 Use One Version Of URL To Access Your Web Page

Multiple version of URL for the same web page is considered as duplicate content in the eye of search engines. Search engines treat each URL uniquely. Each URL is an independent content even if the URL is just single character different from another URL. For example:

http://example.com

http://www.example.com

Although these 2 URLs are pointing to the same home page, search engines treat them differently. So only use one version of the URL and stick to it.

You can use 301 permanent redirect to forward your home page URL to a preferred domain. For example, you can forward example.com to www.example.com. Or simple use Google Webmaster Tool to set the preferences for www or non-www URL version.

#7 Keep The Number Of Subfolders In Your URL To A Small Number

Always keep the number of subfolders in your URL to a small number.

http://www.example.com/blog/wordpress/plugins/twitter/twitter-tools/

The above URL is using 5 subfolders and this is really a bad idea of URL structure. Keep your content up to 2 or 3 subfolders deep in URL and separate multiple keywords with dashes.

#8 Keep Your Primary Keyword Near To The Starting Point Of Your URL

You should put your primary keywords near to the starting point of your URL. Search engines think that words at the left hand side of the URL are the most important keywords. Look at the example below:

http://www.example.com/duplicate-content-hurts-website/

Conclusion

In conclusion, be careful while setting up new domain or URL structure of each blog post. Dont’ underestimate the power of URL structure. Optimized URL structure will give you an edge in the search engine rankings.

Please share with us if you have any other URL optimization tip.

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Broken links are bad for visitors because they give the impression that your site is not well maintained. Not only that, they’re also bad for SEO because search engine bots will stop from crawling all your pages if they meet a broken link.

A link is considered as broken link if the web server response with a 404 status which is a common error defined by the industry standard. Search engines have changed a lot these few years. One of the changes is it will consider user experience during the evaluation of the web page ranking in the result page. Link validity is included as one of the important factor in user experience design.

Google specifically advises webmasters to check for broken links in its web design guidelines. In particular Google has been very vocal about wanting to provide quality pages to its end users. A broken link is equivalent to a dead end. One or two of these issues is not going to drop you off the first page of the search results. However, long term publishing of broken links can degrade the overall quality of your web page and reduce search engine rankings both in your visitors eyes and the search engines.

Furthermore, broken links can reduce the chances of getting listed in the DMOZ directory and Yahoo! Directory and will likely discourage other webmasters from linking to you. Both of these will affect your search engine rankings as well.

2 Types of Broken Links

In general, I have categorized broken links into 2 types, external broken links and internal broken links.

External Broken Links

It’s nearly impossible not to have external links pointing from your website to other websites. It’s a good practice to refer your visitors to resources outside your website. Since those resources are out of your control, it is very likely that other webmasters remove the web page you are linking to. In this case, I categorize it as external broken link because the destination page you are linking to is no longer exist.

The solution for external broken links is easy. You can either remove the entire link from your web page or find a link to replace existing broken link.

Internal Broken Links

Internal broken links are referring to those non-working links reside in your web pages pointing to other web pages within your website. This can happen if you’re changing the name of a web page which is equivalent to changing URL. You can create a 301 redirect to guide the visitors or search engines to a new URL if they reach your web page using old URL.

Another scenario is you delete an web page permanently from your website due to various reasons. In this case, you need to remove all the linkings pointing to the deleted web page. If you don’t do it, search engines will think that you’re linking to a non-existence web page which is a bad experience for readers.

Check Broken Links Automatically

When you site is continuously growing or you already has a big site, then it’s nearly impossible to check all the links manually. If you’re using WordPress, then you’re lucky because you can simply install Broken Links Checker.

Broken Links Checker will scan through your whole WordPress blog to look for broken link. If there is a broken link, it will display the link in your dashboard which you can view it easily and take appropriate action.

Provide 301 Redirect To New URL

I would like to share with you another useful plugin for WordPress which is Redirection. It provides an easy feature for you to redirect from an old URL to new URL without touching any server configuration files.

Conclusion

Broken links are bad for readers as they break the user experience. Not only that, they also stop the search engines bots from crawling your web page and eventually it will affect your search engine rankings. To prevent such issue to happen, you can check for broken link in your website periodically.

Related Posts:

1. 5 Inbound Link Tips For High Search Engine Rankings
2. How Your Competitors Can Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings
3. One Way Links vs Reciprocal Links vs Three Way Links