You could spend a lot of money designing the perfect website. But if you don’t have the right back-end systems in place, your website will go nowhere. Unless it’s intended to be a private website where only a select few can see it.
Most people can’t understand why they only get a handful of hits a month while competitors get heavy traffic. There is usually a good reason for that, and it comes down to your website not being optimized.
Drag-and-drop website builders have some built-in tools to put you on the right path, but they aren’t nearly comprehensive enough to make things perfect. So, if you want to ensure that your website is accessible to as many people as possible, try the following helpful tools presented by our sponsor, LinkedIn.
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Connect your website to Google Search Console
It is always good to take advice from internet search and optimization kings. Google provides this free tool to help you monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your website’s presence in Google Search results. There are several reasons to plug your site into the console, but most importantly, it tells you how the search engine finds and crawls your site.
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The tool tells you if there are indexing issues with pages, and you can request re-indexing if new content has been added that doesn’t show up on search results. It also provides valuable information on your visitors’ browsing habits, like search terms they used to find you or how often your site appears in search results.
Use Link Checker to check website fluidity
You might have a flashy design, but if you have broken links or links that redirect, that isn’t good. Link Checker is a beneficial tool that scans website links and gives you a summary of their health.
It provides more information on any 200-errors (“Some of the links to this resource point to broken URI fragments”), 404-errors (“The link is broken. Double-check that you have not made any typo or mistake”), or any links left out from robot exclusion rules.
It is an easy way to see if all the content and links are pointed in the right direction. Broken links can cause your site to rank further down on Google search results, which means less traffic.
Mobile-Friendly Test
Designing a website the way you want is great, but you must remember that many people browse the net on mobile devices. That means you must have a robust, mobile-friendly design to accommodate those visitors.
Sure, most browsers can scale web content into a mobile version. But something is bound to look out of place, broken or displayed weirdly. The Mobile-Friendly Test does exactly what the name implies: it checks your website for mobile-friendliness.
Nibbler
For a comprehensive website test, nibbler scrutinizes your site to report back with a scorecard from one to 10. It considers several things, including accessibility, SEO, social media and technology.
After a successful test, the results are broken down per section. With 10 being the highest score, you see what needs to be changed to improve your website. The Accessibility score, as an example, is contributed to by internal links, page titles, headings and mobile-friendliness.
Technology considers how well the site is designed. Experiences focus on how satisfying the website is likely to be for users. The test is free to complete, but you will be limited to three reports.
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Ubersuggest
This has nothing to do with ride-sharing or food delivery but rather an online tool to see how your website stacks up against competitors. By checking your domain or keywords associated with it, the site reports the working strategies for others in your market.
You can see the top SEO pages from competitors, suggested keywords for your webpage to rank higher in search results and even some handy content ideas to drive more traffic.
Bonus: Find the team to make it all happen
Sure, you can post on a free job board site like Craigslist. You can attract many candidates with those sites, but you won’t necessarily get the right ones. When you need to hire someone, you don’t have time to wade through a ton of resumes that don’t fit the job.
It’s a lot of work sorting through all of that! You might not even find anyone who fits the job.
That’s why you should use LinkedIn Jobs instead. It can help by matching your role with qualified candidates so you can find the right person quickly. LinkedIn screens for skills, and you can use many different tools to narrow down your search. It really is so much less work.
What are you waiting for? Go to LinkedIn.com/Kim now to post a job for free.