You’ll probably know how badly for SEO your e-business is having broken links in your website. Is very common to link external pages and then forget about those links. Those pages can go offline and you’ll never get noticed.

To prevent this, you’d better check your links frequently, especially those external ones, but also those one that point to some other pages inside your website.

The most obvious way to do this is manually, by clicking on each link. This can be a tough task if you have a very big site or with lot of external links. So I recommend you to use an application that helps you with this control.

A very good one and free for Microsoft Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP is Xenu’s Link Sleuth. This application checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continuously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

If you don’t want to install any piece of software in your PC, you can still try Dead Links.com, a broken link checker that has a free service for small websites. If your site is really big, you can use one of the paid services. I tested the free one and it’s really good.