When you launch a website, it is important that a variety of things are set up, including search engine optimization and link verification. However, when a website is updated or changed it is important to make sure that everything is still working as it should be.
Websites filled with links that go to nowhere or pages that are not indexed by search engines will harm your business and reputation. To ensure that a website runs smoothly, whenever an update is made, it should be viewed by a real person and tested with an online tool.
Here are five free online tools to run these tests and validate your website.
HTML and Link Validation
http://validator.w3.org
It is critical that all of your links function and that your coding works properly. This website will allow you to check a variety of coding languages to ensure that they work properly. By double checking a website’s code, you can ensure that people are visiting a site that looks professional and well maintained and ensure it will properly display in all browsers. We also recommend that you validate the website for mobile devices.
Check Load Time
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt
One of the fastest ways to drive visitors away is to create a website that takes forever to load. Most people, especially with high speed internet connections being so readily available, are not willing to wait for a website that takes forever to show up.
Google has begun to lower search engine ranking results for websites that have long loading times. In addition to testing the load time of your website, the load time checker can also find bottlenecks in servers, which can help you find the cause of any bottlenecks.
Grammar and Spelling Check
http://www.paperrater.com
Google has been cracking down on low value websites to ensure that they are posting content that is high quality. To make sure that you meet search engine standards, you should check all of your content for proper spelling and grammar. Additionally, people who visit a website and see spelling errors are not likely to trust it or buy from it. Google offers spelling auto correct, so if you use a web based content management system such as wordpress you should never have misspelled words on your website.
It is important that you run a spelling and grammar check to get rid of obvious errors in your text. Having misspelled words on your site will also hinder you from ranking for those keywords.
Browser Compatibility
http://browsershots.org
There are four major browsers that people are using to visit websites with now: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. Additionally, not everyone that uses a browser uses the newest version, so there are dozens of possible browsers that people could be using to reach your site with. Therefore, it is important that you make your website as friendly as possible to the highest number of browsers. Frequently website designers find that images and text that line up properly in Internet Explorer do not in Firefox and vice versa. Scripting and codes also tend to behave differently depending on the browser running it. To ensure that you are using the most compatible code possible, use this website to see what your website looks like on a variety of browsers.
SEO Checkup
http://www.seositecheckup.com
While there is not a way to ensure that a website is completely SEO friendly using an online tool, or for that matter any tool, this website can check to ensure that all SEO related coding is up to standard. Since HTML tags for titles, headings, images and links all play a part in search engine rankings, this site can check to make sure that those are in line with current SEO standards. This tool can even check for the most commonly found keywords on a site so that you can verify that your keyword usage is where you want it to be. Additional SEO tools we use are ahrefs.com, seomoz.org, and serpanalytics.com
Emily is a blogger who works for a lead generation company Fullbeaker. She also has worked with a conversion optimization company on her own site and focuses exclusively on website testing.
2 Responses
Many of people want to talk about progressive enhancement but in the real world IE6 is still a major demographic. While we all would like to see IE disappear but face it, its just not going to happen this year.
What do we do about sites built on Godaddy that we cannot fully optimize? Is this a bad choice to post using their system. I look forward to discovering more about how to cheaply increase conversions.