How To Manage Your Website Links Easily

Even in the Internet’s infancy (ten to fifteen years ago), it was relatively easy to view websites and webpages. This was largely due to the fact that programs like Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer allowed individuals to interact visually (as opposed to textually – through arcane commands).

The same could not be said for website and webpage creation, however. In the old days, only people who knew html (hyper text markup language – a specialized language for website creation) were able to engage in these activities. As a result, many people searched the Internet, in some form or another, but few created their own content.

These days website and webpage creation is exactly the opposite of what it once was; it is now extremely easy. Content creation/management systems such as Blogger and WordPress have taken over, allowing many individuals to create and modify their own content through a series of graphical menus. What used to be a hobby for only those with elite skills can now be enjoyed by nearly anyone.

Website Management

There is a good chance that you, the reader, happen to own or operate a website of some sort. Perhaps, you are currently making use of a free hosting service like Blogger or WordPress.com. Perhaps, you have invested a little money and are currently utilizing a self hosted solution (making use of any number of CMS’s). In any case, you likely deal with both content creation as well as website management.

We will not deal with content creation in this article; however, I would like to touch upon the notion of website management. What exactly is website management? To put it rather simply, website management is the process of keeping all of your information up to date. Why is this important? First of all, you want to make sure that the content on your site is accurate and accessible. Secondly, you want to make sure that the relationship between this information (often represented by links) remains relevant.

Link Management

One of the most important website management tasks is that of link management (making sure that your links are pointing to the correct place). Now, no one wants to manually go through their entire site looking for broken links; this would take ages to do and would be extremely monotonous. Luckily, there are software tools which will do this for you automatically.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

There are many, many software tools out there that can help you check for broken links. One of the easiest is Xenu’s Link Sleuth. All you have to do is:

1. Download Xenu’s Link Sleuth
2. Install the program and run it
3. Choose Check URL from the File Menu
4. Enter your website URL
5. Hit OK

Xenu’s Link Sleuth will automatically go through your entire website and analyze each link. All you have to do is look at the Status column. If everything is green and the Status column is filled with “ok,” then everything is fine. If you see red, it’s time to take a look at that particular link (on that particular webpage). The benefit is that you immediately know which link is the offender.

Conclusion

More and more people these days are creating their own websites. Consequently, more and more people have to deal with website and link management. If you are one of these people, go ahead and give Xenu’s Link Sleuth a try. It will likely make tasks, which were once laborious, nearly painless.