3 Simple Checks before launching your optimised website
We realize that building a website can be a huge undertaking. It is no surprise then that there is the potential for some smaller details to be looked over when the launch time comes for a website that has undergone search engine optimisation. Relatively minor tasks may seem unimportant, and it is true that the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts, but a watertight SEO strategy should ensure that even the smallest details are optimised allowing for user experience and search engine indexation. So, here is a list of three simple checks that should always be conducted before launch…
1. Make sure there are no broken links
Links, unfortunately, are very fragile and they get broken easily. It can happen during simple procedures such as having a page of content moved, deleted or renamed and the end result is a link that takes you to somewhere that doesn’t exist. Obviously this isn’t good for the website visitors and it is certainly not very good for the search engine bots, so making sure broken links don’t occur on a site is very important. If you run a website that frequently updates its content through a blog then there is an increased chance of broken links occurring, particularly internally. External links can also become broken if the domain they are pointing to has moved or has been deleted, so again, thorough checking of these links is highly recommended. There are lots of tools that can be found online that will help with locating these broken links and fixing them. From a technical point of view, broken links don’t have much of an impact other than reducing the amount of paths a search engine bot can use to crawl and index content and they are perhaps detrimental to PageRank. However, since the Google Panda update was released, fully optimised websites must offer a positive user experience if the website is to be deemed of high quality. Having links that lead nowhere are not going to be beneficial to the users and therefore risk damaging how the search engines rank your site. Broken links damage a sites image and you should always check that they do not occur on your site before launch.
2. Make sure the spelling and grammar is correct
For complex sites where hundreds of pages of original content have been written, it is almost inevitable that a few basic spelling or grammar mistakes will crop-up. Traditionally, these spelling errors would have little technical impact on a website but again this has changed with the launch of the Panda update. Panda has placed particular emphasis on the quality of content and spelling errors are obviously reflective of low quality page content. Not only will these grammatical detract from the high quality user experience that visitors expect when visiting a site, but that website can also expect to be penalised in terms of having their rankings in the SERPs lowered. There are many ‘spell-checker’ tools on the web that can be used to check spelling, but grammar errors can often be more difficult to spot. It might just mean taking that extra bit of time to paw over your content, double and triple check it for errors before launching your fully optimised website.
3. Make sure the HTML Code is validated
Again, this is not directly the most important part of an SEO campaign, but validating your HTML code ensures that the search engine spiders will not encounter any difficulties when crawling your website. Validating HTML can also have long term benefits in minimising maintenance requirements on a website and verifying that your code will function properly on various internet browsers. This can be quite a long process as there will often appear to be errors within the HTML that appear to have no visual effect on the display of the website in the browser. However, it is a worthwhile activity because it can minimise the risk of larger scale coding errors occurring as further updates are made as the site expands. Validating your HTML and fixing all the errors will help ensure that your website is optimised for search engine crawler efficiency upon launch.
These are some very simple tasks that might not be hugely influential from a technical point of view, but if an SEO campaign is to reach its full potential then every base will be covered. These checks will help prepare your website for its launch, but that doesn’t mean that after the initial launch they can be forgotten. Constantly checking for broken links, spelling mistakes and HTML errors will ensure that your website is constantly maintained for maximal efficiency when it comes to SEO. For more information on the SEO services we offer here at Dental Design please call 01202-677277
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