1-Minute Marketing: Fix Your Dead Links and Typos

$\"1$ If your staff is the face of your company in the store, you wouldn’t want them mispronouncing product names and leading customers to the wrong aisle. In the same way, a business website is the face of your company online, and every typo and dead link degrades the confidence and patience of both customers and prospects.

Don’t let a few misspelled words and other errors drive away online visitors. Go over the content of your website with an eye toward editing awkward sentences, catching typos that spell check misses (such as homonyms like for, fore and four), and finishing incomplete thoughts that may have been cut off or just never finished.

If you wrote the web content yourself, you may want someone else to look it over, because it’s always harder to edit your own writing.

As for dead links, these are the active links that, when clicked, send users to an error page or to a page that no longer exists. The easiest way to check for dead links is to click on every link on a website to ensure it leads to the correct page. If it doesn’t go where it should, make a note where the link occurred and where it should have gone so you can change it. Most small business websites aren’t huge so this is possible to do in a few hours, but if you have a larger website, you can use web tools to do this automatically. However, the tools will catch links leading to error pages, but they will not catch links that go to working pages that are not the correct destination.