Xenu Link Sleuth Tool

There are plenty of SEO tools available on the internet a simple free SEO tool search, will begin to show you the vast options out there. Today we would like to take a more in depth look at Xenu’s Link Sleuth. This tool is often considered the broken link finder, but it can do so much more than simply find broken links.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a Free Download and runs on all versions of Windows. This piece of software in simple terms is a site crawler – once you input a url it crawls the site and spits out a report at the end. So what are the key areas this tool can be used for?

1) Finding broken links on a website?

Simply by entering your url this tool will crawl your site and find broken links for you.This tools main focus is on finding broken links on a website, by entering your url this tool will then crawl your website and find the broken links for you. In some cases broken links can stop search engines robots in their tracks, preventing it from completely mapping out a website for submission to search engines. From a visitor / user perspective broken hyperlinks often look unprofessional , and visitors who encounter difficulties will probably not return to the site – which could lead to a loss of prospective clients.

2) Xenu will provide a report in an excel format

The ability to export this report to data can be quite handy, the report even shows some really interesting information such as type of page and title tag of each page crawled.

3) Ability to check the length of title tags for SEO Purposes?

Using the above report, filter the html pages and check the length of the Column titled ‘Title’ and this will give you the length of the title tag. If you then filter these for anything above 65 you have now a list of Title Tags which need to be shortened!

4) Find 302 redirects on a website

By simply changing settings on the crawl preferences to ‘treat redirects as errors’ the tool will then spit out

5) Ability to generate an XML sitemap for my site

6) Finds missing alt text

Again, by filtering excel to images you can easily see the areas that do not have alt tags in place.

So, as you can see xenu which is often referred  to as a broken link finder can actually carry out many more tasks, that will help for SEO purposes – generating sitemaps, title and alt tags are all really useful pieces of information.  To find out more about SEO and optimising your website, contact us today.