It’s easy to spend a lot of time focusing on marketing your holiday let website. However if you aren’t careful your efforts could be going to waste. There are lots of ways your website can be less effective than it should be, and one way is via broken links.
What are broken links?
Broken links can occur in several ways. Let’s say you’re writing a blog post and you want to link to another page on your holiday rental website. If you wrongly type the URL it won’t work. People will click on it to go to that page and they won’t reach their destination – the link is broken.
Another example of a broken link is where the link to a specific page is correct, but the URL of the destination page changes. This could either be on your website or on someone else’s. Either way, it’s another broken link.
How can they damage your website?
Put yourself in the place of a visitor to your website. You read an article, see a link and click it to find out more. Unfortunately the link is broken and they can’t go to the information they wanted. At the very least this would be frustrating – at worst it could lead to them going elsewhere and ruining any chance there was of them booking your holiday rental.
Broken links can also have other knock on effects as you will see below – neither of which are particularly appealing.
Do they affect SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimisation, focuses on making your website easy for search engines to find and rank favourably. Broken links do not help your cause. Search engine spiders crawl websites to find new pages and index them. The better the pages are the higher they will be ranked. If the spiders find broken links on your site it can lead to a lower ranking. The more broken links you have, the lower your ranking could be as a result.
The worst case scenario would be that your website would fall out of favour entirely – and that isn’t going to bring in much business at all.
Google hates broken links
We all know there are several major search engines out there today. However, Google is the one most of us use on a regular basis. While it may be annoying to continually have to jump through hoops to ensure your website is as good as it can be, it’s the one sure way to get your website to rank as highly as possible.
If you have several broken links scattered around your website, Google is likely to penalise you as a result. One or two odd ones might not matter too much, but you should still fix them as soon as possible. If you don’t you may not like the consequences.
Is it time you check the links on your website?
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