Avoid Broken Links: 5 Safeguards To Be Sure That Your Resource Box Links Work

It’s pretty frustrating to go to the trouble of writing a really insightful and eloquent article, only to later discover that the link in your resource box doesn’t work for one reason or another.

If this has happened to you, you know what I’m talking about (this has happened to me when I was first starting out too). If this hasn’t happened to you, then be thankful and take this opportunity to put a new safeguarding system in place so that you’ll never run into this problem.

Why would a link in a resource box not work?

It all has to do with formatting–if you enter your link the proper way, then your link will work.

But if you inadvertently slip up and the link becomes formatted incorrectly, then it won’t work.

How can you be sure that your resource box links will work?

The good news is that there are some definitive (and easy!) ways to be absolutely sure that your links are functioning correctly:

1) Format your URL properly.

Ensure that the URL of your web site is a fully qualified URL that includes ‘http://’ – this helps to ensure that web sites convert the URL into an active link to your web site when it is published.

For example, rather than providing a URL like www.submityourarticle.com in your resource box, it should be http://www.submityourarticle.com.

I know that our fingers can stumble sometimes when we’re typing–sometimes what I do is simply bring up the web page I’m trying to drive traffic to, and then copy and paste the URL from the address bar. That way I don’t need to worry about mis-typing.

2) Don’t try to put italics or bold in your URL.

Yes, it’s true that there is an optional Advanced HTML resource box that you can fill out, but that doesn’t mean that that box can take bold, italics, underline or any other HTML coding.

The HTML part of the HTML resource box has to do with the anchor text–in the HTML resource box you can hyperlink keywords to use as your anchor text for your link. When you’re doing that in SubmitYOURArticle.com, the system is set up so that you don’t need to enter any HTML code at all–you just follow the simple steps for hyperlinking your anchor text.

So, one thing to remember is this–you will not be putting actual HTML code in either of your resource boxes, even the HTML Resource Box.

3) Try putting your URL on a new line.

This isn’t mandatory, but it is also often preferable to put your URL by itself on a new line, so that it stands out better to increase click-throughs, and to avoid any possible problems with individual publishers if the article is wrapped incorrectly when published.

4) Don’t put any punctuation after your URL.

Avoid adding punctuation immediately after the URL, such as a comma or a full stop, as this can create problems on certain web sites when they automatically convert the URL into an active link. So, rather than something like:

For more information on how to submit your articles  automatically to thousands of potential publishers, go to:
http://www.submityourarticle.com.

Remove the final full stop, as follows:

For more information on how to submit your articles  automatically to thousands of potential publishers, go to:
http://www.submityourarticle.com

5) Test out your links!

This may sound obvious, but perhaps the most foolproof way to be sure that your links work is to test them out before submitting your article.

You can do this by going to the preview page, and then just clicking the links in your resource box to be sure they lead to where you want them to go.

If you’re using ArticleLeverge, you can do the same thing–just click the links you’ve created to be sure there isn’t a typo in the URL and that it’s formatted correctly.

Bonus Tip! Be sure your URL isn’t too long.

When email publishers receive your articles, they can specify how they’d like your articles to be formatted to best fit their website. The standard format is 60 CPL (characters per line), so if your link exceeds 60 characters, then there is an increased chance that the link will be broken.

A too long URL may lead to a broken link, but at the same time publishers are still obligated to ensure that the link is valid when they publish the article. Many article directory type sites also allow the CPL to be changed before the publisher copies/pastes the article, so this could be what is happening too.

My advise to you is to ensure that the link in your resource box is under 60 characters at the very max–a longer URL than that can cause the link to break, and an overly long link also discourages click-throughs (seems that folks are less likely to click on a URL that is really long).

Alternatively, if your links have to be longer than 60 CPL, just accept that there is a cost involved in that, where a few of the published links may be invalid, and you may have to ask publishers to correct them.

It also might be an idea to link to your top level domain in your text resource box (if it is under 60 CPL) and then save your longer links for the HTML resource box. That way you would still be getting links to your various pages, but with less of a risk of having the broken links.

And that’s it basically–for just a few seconds of work you can save yourself that “Ugh! No, I didn’t just do that!” feeling.

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