Learn the Effective Purpose of Screaming Frog Tool to Find Broken Links in a Website

Websites are not only a major platform to transfer knowledge for people, but also a great resource for companies to market their products. Thus, it is very crucial that companies as well as individuals have all their sites running, by which they can reach to a better and larger crowds in society. A website may be built in a single page, or even consist of numerous internal links for other purposes. It can be laborious for people to manually check the functioning of each site in a thorough manner. It is thus to help such persons that there are numerous seo tools, which can perform such same tasks in a more efficient and quicker manner.

Basics of This SEO Tool and Its Purpose

SEO simply stands for Search Engine Optimization, meaning that through this technique, the rank of a particular website in any search engine can be increased. This, on a longer run ensures that more traffic comes to their site, thereby increasing their popularity and/or business. Thus, it is mandatory to ensure that all the pages or the main page itself is properly running for other people to access them easily. While a site’s rank can increase when the site is running properly, it can steeply decrease when a particular site or link is not available. The most dreaded notification, affecting a site owner would be the 404 error. In layman words, it means that that particular URL does not exist in the main server, which can be caused either due to accidental deletion, or even by a hacker, who would like to show their hacking skills. Thus, to prevent any such disgrace for them through this method, they can use a tool called Screaming Frog, which is basically a SEO tool for this purpose. The tool is quite simple and efficient to use that any person can get to use them easily, even if they have got no previous knowledge about this software. This software can help people to quickly identify such broken links through different methods.

Working on This Tool Requires Less or No Previous Knowledge

This tool can be available for people both in free and in paid versions. While the free version can do the same things that a paid version can do, it is restricted to just 500 URL’s, irrespective of its duration. There are also several modes for people to operate this software. It can work both on keyword or phrases technique, or even work on finding broken hyperlinks in a particular site itself.

Crawling is the prime method to be performed by this tool. Companies can use this tool by giving in their URL and can make the tool to crawl through all hyperlinks. This ensures that all hyperlinks that can be present in the site are also tested, before any results are displayed. If this software is used by people who use them for SEO purposes, then it can fetch all pages matching the given term or phrase, just like any other search engine. The only exception here though would be that they can get to find the broken links through them. All they would have to do after entering their required keyword is simply edit those filter sections that can be available in this tool.

Next stage of using this tool would be in filtering their requirements. People can either use this filtering mechanism before they start their search or even after they have completed their search mechanism. There are also numerous methods through which they can filter their results. Filtering after performing the web crawling feature can help the people to obtain their results in a much quicker time. If people require only the 404 error pages in their site, they can choose Response Code option in this software and choose Client Error (4xx) that is available in those filters. This can help them in finding such broken links in their website. Once people filter them, it can retrieve all broken links that can be present in that particular site. The link for that particular page can also be found in this tool, based on which they can rectify their errors easily. On the other hand, it can also be used in a more general way, when this same filtering process is used with keywords or phrases. This helps a user to find all broken links, which have either the keyword to match with its URL or match with those contents present in its main page. This can help such people to intimate the corresponding website owning company, by which they can easily rectify their error.

Visit those websites by using the inlink functionality. This facility can help people to determine if any link presented through tool is actually broken or not. If they wish to visit any site, they can simply click on any link present in the inlink area. After they have clicked, it can redirect them to the original page, by which they can get to check if such site is actually broken and displays 404 error or not.

People can view these links either separately or even get to export them in bulk in the form of a spreadsheet. This can be helpful if a company has numerous links in their website and would like to identify all those broken or invalid links in a very short manner. This can be helpful for people who use them only for their own company. Also, people have the option of choosing various display options such as spider or list, by which they can get to view complete details in a simple manner. Also, one has the option of narrowing their search even further, through this advanced mode of filtering. This can include the type of content they would like to view, and those they would not like to. Search facility in this tool also helps them to determine every kind of page that meets those requirements as mentioned in their search criteria, including images, CSS, etc.