Is your website fully functional and tested without errors? If not, and you have broken links or sections of your website that cause errors it is important that you address these problems immediately!

Not only will it look unprofessional for you from your customers' perspectives, but errors within your website can detrimentally affect your search engine rankings. This is especially prevalent with Google. Google seems to have little tolerance for websites with errors where pages, images or links don't load, and we have seen websites that are ranking in the top 10 quickly lose positioning and almost vanish from search engine results.

If the website errors are due to web pages not loading where they are linked correctly, you should take a look at the web hosting company you are using in case:

• Their server is too slow for your website;

• Are their servers at capacity for the amount of websites hosted on their servers?

• Or are their web servers unstable and go down quite often.

No matter what the reason; ask your web hosting company what they are doing about it. If they don't fix the problem quickly, then find a new web hosting company. -don't accept excuses where they are not going to fix the problem in a timely manner- There are a lot of hosting companies around, so there is no reason why you should settle for poor quality.

While cost is not always indicative of whether or not a web hosting company is going to provide a quality service -we have seen expensive web hosting companies provide low quality hosting services, and low cost companies provide high quality service-, don't choose a cheap web hosting company because you thin you may save a couple of hundred dollars a year. If your site has consistent errors, and you lose positioning in the search engines then it will cost your business a lot more than a couple of hundred dollars a year.

What do you need to do to find out if your website has errors?

• Manually check your website by having a few different users navigate through it. Make sure all links work correctly, and that all images are showing where they should be.

• Look at your web statistics reports to find out if any errors are showing. If you don't have these types of reports for your website, change hosting providers straight away!

Andrew Seidel - SEO Specialist and Search Engine Placement Consultant in Sydney, Australia.

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