In today's fast-paced hi-tech environment, Web sites and individual pages quickly become obsolete, and so do external links placed on your Web site and pages. Regular link checks are vital to keep any website free of errors. Broken links, HTML errors and other issues annoy visitors and make it difficult to browse through your site...a real pain for visitors and webmasters alike. Broken links degrade the usability of your Web site, and are strongly advised against by major search engines. Many search engines recommend checking your Web site for broken links and for correct HTML as part of their Web master guidelines.

Fixing broken links is easy provided you know exactly which links to remove or modify. But how do you know which links are broken and which aren't?

Good Web development tools such as Macromedia Dream Weaver or Microsoft Expression Web can scan your project for broken links within the project, ensuring that the correct pages are addressed by every link. Unfortunately, they don't take the next step, providing no tools for you to check your outgoing links for validity when published.

Scanning all of your HTML pages and manually verifying each and every outgoing link for 404 and other errors may be an option if you have a single-page Web site with only a few external links. But, that is obviously not an option if you are managing a larger or dynamic Web site.

The same goes for validating every HTML page on your Web site. While you may have a perfectly valid template, can you be sure that no element in your site's dynamic content has all HTML meta-tags such as Title, Description, Keywords, as well as image Alt tags? These tags are not required by HTML standards, but using them properly makes your Web pages more informative to visitors and more valuable in the eyes of search engines.