May 3rd, 2010 by Dan

In order to keep your website error-free and easy to access, it’s essential that, like your car, it is given regular “health checks”. These need to be thorough, so it’s a good idea to employ a search engine optimization company to do the work. Remembering the old adage that a motor car gets a much better service if you know at least a little of what goes on under the bonnet, here are some of the things that search engine optimisation services cover:

General crawl errors. These can pop up at any time, but left unchecked they can build up enough to have negative effects on your internet reputation management plan. Search engine optimization services check for and resolve timeout and 404 errors, improving or removing pages so the errors don’t reappear. In response, the search engines will minimise the bandwidth needed to crawl your site, making search engine optimisation far faster to achieve. Minimising errors and making the content more accessible can get new pages into the search engine indexes faster and more often, leading to enhanced SEO.

There are several search engine optimization tools that SEO companies use to help locate and clear crawl errors quickly. Google Webmaster Tools includes a diagnostic for this, found under “crawl errors.” This gives a report of all errors such as “Timed Out” and “Not Found”. The wise search engine optimisation company will test each error found with an http header checker tool. FireFox has one as a plug-in. Often, a recurring pattern is discovered, in which case only a few repairs are needed, rather than hundreds. The ones to focus on first are 404 errors with external links. Repairing these will radically improve your SEO link building.

Error reports are about more than uncovering dodgy URLs. For example, the problem may be caused by multiple redirects ending in a 404 code, and if the web mechanic discovers this it can save them a lot of deep diagnostic delving under the bonnet. Another thing to watch for is the “restricted by robots.txt” message on the error report, as it often turns out the URLs haven’t been blocked by robots.txt in the first place. An SEO mechanic will run the http header check tool again, if they’re bemused by URL reports. Usually, what has actually happened is that the URLs listed are part of a redirect chain, which contains or terminates in a URL that has been blocked by the text robots.

Even if you have your site overseen by a search engine optimization company, it’s often a good idea to invest in a few SEO tools yourself, to double-check they’re doing a good job. Xenu’s Link Sleuth and SEO Toolkit are both considered essential workshop tools by SEO link building companies, who can customise them to their own specifications. Using Google Webmaster tools with Googlebot will check for both internal crawl errors and internal link redirects. Another trick is to disable JavaScript and CSS, and then browse the site using the Web Developer toolbar, setting the “User Agent” status to Googlebot.

Link to us

If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.