Avoid these common mistakes with your links

By Radhika Venkata
Posted Sunday, September 26, 2004

Links are the main pillar of your website. To navigate from one page to another page in your website or to another website, you need to keep the links.You can also create page jumps in the same page or different pages of your website.

If your links are not working properly, it is difficult to navigate and your visitors get '404 File not Found Error'.

If your visitor wants to buy your product and clicks on your order link to found this '404' error, how would that be?

If you keep a free demo on your site for demonstration purpose to your visitor and your link doesn't work means, you are losing a potential customer.

So why don't you take a little bit more interest in creating your links?No matter where you are keeping them-your website,your emails,Autoresponder courses, banners etc.

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1.Proper html format for the link:

<*A HERF="order.html">Order here!</A>

(* next to < is just to make the format to display here)

This is the basic format for keeping a link.

The URL is case sensitive.Though the '(www.yoursite.com)' is not case sensitive, the 'order.html' part is case sensitive.So one typo...That's it. Nobody goes to your order page.

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2.Always keep good content pages in first level directories.This keeps you in good ranking in search engines.

(http://www.yoursite.com/one/two/page.html) has less chances of crawled by search engines than (http://www.yoursite.com/one/page.html).

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3.Always check links by going to that pages.If you keep them in emails, then send them to your email address and check the link by yourself.

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4.Participate in link exchanges:Search engines think that your site is popular when other sites point to your site.This keeps you in good positioning in search engines.

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5.One common mistakes most people do is when they update the website and changed the html pages to another directory, they will forget to keep some sort of redirection to the new page.Especially true with important pages that has many links in it.

So people who bookmarked the old page can be redirected to new page.

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6.Affiliate links:Most people are reluctant to click on the affiliate links.You have to hide them sometimes to get good click thru ratio.

Check out here:
(http://www.webmasters-central.com/t/siteprotection/affiliatelinks.shtml)

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7.Long URLs in the links:These tend to break when you send them in emails.When you click on them they don't send you to the page that you are supposed to.

You can use the above redirecting technique with short URLs.

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8.If you are advertising about a particular product use the link that lands the visitor on the products page.Don't use your main website URL for everything.

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9. Track your links in your ad campaigns: Well you want to know which campaign brought you profits. For this you should know howmany people clicked on your URL and how many bought your product. Here is a little script that you can use to track your urls in your campaign. (http://www.scripts4webmasters.com/clicktracking/index.shtml)

About the Author
Radhika Venkata
Subscribe to 'EbookBiz Magazine' which is completely focused on ebook business and Internet Marketing. Receive FREE Ebooks with Resale rights every month! (http://www.ebooks-world.com/freetosell.shtml) Webmaster Resources: List Your product, ezine or web site free! (http://www.webmasters-central.com/)