3 Link Maintenance Tasks to Improve Your Campaigns
Contents
Linking is an important aspect of any high-quality website. However, many website owners overlook their linking campaigns due to lack of time or knowledge. If you fail to maintain and optimize your site’s current links, you could lose traffic due to poor linking practices.
For this reason, you should incorporate link maintenance tasks into your usual website management routine. This way, you can ensure your links are always optimized and functioning properly. You can also improve your campaigns by optimizing your current links, which will increase the quality of your content.
In this post, we’ll introduce three link maintenance tasks you can use to improve your campaigns. These will be done with the help of our own plugin, Pretty Links. Let’s get started!
1. Update Your Pretty Links’ Target URLs Regularly
The Target URL is where your pretty links point to.
In the Pretty Links plugin, target URLs refers to the destination of your links. As such, you should check your target URLs on a regular basis to ensure the links on your website are still up-to-date. This helps prevent broken links from remaining on your website, and gives you a chance to update potentially outdated or irrelevant links.
Fortunately, this task is easy to carry out. On the WordPress dashboard, simply navigate to Pretty Links > Pretty Links on the left side menu:
Once you’re on the Pretty Links page, click Edit below the link you’d like to update. Go to the Target URL input, and update the URL accordingly:
The frequency with which you need to update your links will depend on your industry. For example, industries with ever-changing information (such as technology and healthcare) should update more frequently than others industries.
2. Perform Split Testing to Optimize Your Links
The Split Report gives you a look at how two links on your website compare.
Split testing, also referred to as A/B testing, is a method that enables you to test out different aspects of your linking strategy. Essentially, split testing enables you to compare links to see how users interact with them, and which links are most effective. It also enables you to create more effective linking campaigns, by giving you insight into best link placements, anchor text, and more.
Using Pretty Links, you can easily setup and implement split testing on your website. Go to Pretty Links > Pretty Links and click Edit below the link you’d like to test. Once on the Pretty Link page, open Pro Options and choose Rotation from the Dynamic Redirection dropdown:
This will expand the section to display new options. This will enable you to rotate the target URL for the link to open different destinations in specific circumstances.
Add the Target URLs you want to test and check the Split Test option. Next, select a Goal URL and click Update. From this point forward, data will be collected on how many clicks each link receives. Once you've got enough data gathered, you can view the Split Testing Report, which you can find by going to Pretty Links > Pretty Links. You'll notice a new option called Split Test Report under the link you’ve tested.
With results in hand, you can use these to make changes to your current setup. For example, you can optimize the main link’s anchor text, or alter its placement to improve the number of conversions.
3. Trim Your Clicks Database
By trimming Clicks, you make it easier to keep track of trends and locate information.
While split testing can yield valuable results, another way to track performance is to monitor link clicks. Basically, these tell you how often your links are clicked, which can be hugely beneficial to determine their performance and improving your marketing campaigns.
However, your clicks database can fill up over time. To both improve website loading times and make it easier to track your links, you can trim your database.
To do this, navigate to Pretty Links > Tools > Trim Clicks. Here, you have the option to Delete Clicks older than 30 days, Delete Clicks older than 90 days, or Delete All Clicks:
If you don't want to lose any data, you can export your clicks first. You can do this by going to Pretty Links > Clicks and clicking Download CSV (All Links) at the bottom of the page. Once you've downloaded this document, you can free up the database, without losing any information.
Conclusion
The links on your website provide quality to your readers, and support your other content by conveying additional information. For this reason, failing to maintain your links can have a huge negative impact on your website. After all, old, non-functioning, or poorly implemented links don’t provide much of anything to your readers, and it can also make your site seem dated and untrustworthy.
In this post, we’ve shared three link maintenance tasks you can use to improve your campaigns. These can be completed with the use of Pretty Links, and to quickly recap, the tasks are:
- Update your pretty links’ target URLs.
- Perform split testing to optimize your links.
- Trim your clicks database.
Do you have any questions about link maintenance, or how Pretty Links can help? Let us know in the comments section below!
About John Hughes
John is a blogging addict, WordPress fanatic, and staff writer.
Cindy
May 4, 2018
A way to automatically place a list of pretty links on a page or post would be fantastic. There is no way to automatically check to see if links are still valid and doing it manually when you have hundreds or even thousands of links is just not possible. Also manually adding every single link to a single "list" page is extremely time consuming. So having a way to do it automatically would save time and enable us to use other plugins to regularly check the links to make sure they are still valid. That way if we are notified they have broken we can update them or remove them right away.