I was reading Rae Hoffman-Dolan's post on Simple Linking Maintenance for WordPress Sites and was reminded of a tool I used to use regularly to not only identify broken links, but to quickly identify other SEO issues within a website.
LinkExaminer is an SEO friendly link scanning utility that not only helps users to identify broken links within their website, it can help to identify other SEO problems such as missing titles, robots.txt exclusion, and redirects caused by the http headers.
The tool is simple to use. Once downloaded, you can open the application and easily begin analyzing your site:
- Select Scan from the application menu
- Select Set URL
- Input your website URL
- Under the same menu select Start
The application will then begin scanning your website and compiling data related to its findings. In the end you'll have a detailed breakdown of each URL on your site, including the URL, HTTP Code, whether it's an internal or external link, if it's affected by the robots.txt file, if it's missing a title, meta description, or meta keywords, and what the page title is. All of which are elements that could be impacting your SEO.
Some key things to look for are 404 errors, duplicate titles (this can be easily identified by sorting by the title column), missing meta elements such as titles and descriptions, and pages restricted by the robots.txt file.
LinkExaminer is a great way for website owners and SEO's alike to get a quick snapshot of areas within their site that might need a little bit more attention.