Check Your Links

I was talking with a perspective client, an accountant, last week who was concerned because they had broken links on their webpage.  The good news, is that broken links are easily fixed. The bad news was that they found out that the links were broken from someone who was looking to utilize their accounting services and that person was initially quite put off by the broken links and nearly didn’t even call because, after all, if there is not attention to detail on an accountant’s website, are they really going to pay attention to of of the little details that accountants are supposed to pay attention to?

This accountant called the person who was in charge of doing the initial website build and left a voicemail. Then, when he had not received a phone call by the next day, he followed up with an email. By the time I spoke with him, he was really frustrated because it had been over a week with no response. He didn’t have the information needed to fix the links himself, but he wasn’t getting a call back.

First, it is great to have links on your webpage. Usually these are found in blogs, but they can certainly be in other parts of your site. It is vital, however, that the links on your page are not broken. When your website gets crawled for content to help decide when and who to deliver your site to during searches, you need to have all of your links in good working order, If you don’t, your site can’t deliver the appropriate information to the search engines, and clients will not be able to easily find you. Equally as important, you have clients and perspective clients looking at your website. You want to put your best face forward, and that can’t be accomplished if you have broken links.

For this reason, it is very important to make reviewing your website on a regular basis a scheduled event, just like doing payroll or filing your taxes. Put it on your calendar so you will be reminded. No less than quarterly would be recommended. You can’t just build it and forget it. You have to make sure that the content being delivered is accurate and up-to-date.

With Starfire Web Development, you can be assured that your phone calls and emails will all get answered right away, so you won’t have to spend a week or two trying to get a hold of us. Even better than that, however, is that Starfire offers the ability to edit your own website, so you won’t even NEED to call to get things like broken links taken care of. This leaves much of the editing that you need done, in your hands. Of course we’re always willing to do the work for you as well, but you can easily log on and take care of anything you want to.