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The following is a guest post by Chris Falzone, Web Developer at Edinboro University.  Chris has a personal blog and you also connect with him through Twitter or LinkedIn.  This is the second post in the .eduGuru Blogger(s) Search Contest.

Many of you may heard of and perhaps are already using Xenu’s Link Sleuth to check your website for broken links.  However, what you may not know is some of the hidden extras that I have come to love.  Most of the features can be found, by simply sorting the results in a certain way.

So here are some of the uses I have found:

1. Find Broken Links: Sort the list by “Status” and you can quickly see all the broken links on your site.
2. Optimize Page Load Times: If you sort the results by “Size” you can easily see what images, videos, ect. are taking up the most space.
3. Find Duplicate Titles: Sorting by “Title” will allow you to see pages that have duplicate titles.  This has many advantages, from  SEO (See Google’s SEO Quick Start Guide) to finding and removing duplicate content within your website.
4. Find Buried Pages: The “Level” column shows you how many clicks the user would have to perform to get to the page.  If you sort this in a descending order, you can quickly find pages that are buried and make decisions to either make the page more accessible or perhaps remove the page if it is not needed.
5. Find Link-Heavy Pages: If you sort on the “Out Links” column you will get a list of the pages with the most out-bound links.
6. Find Least Linked Pages: The “In Links” column tell you how many pages are linked to a particular page.
7. Find Images Missing Alt Text: Start by sorting the list on the “Type” column.  Now scroll down the list keeping an eye out for image content types.  A glance over at the “Title” column will show you images that do not have alt text included.

As you can see, just by looking at the results a little differently you can accomplish many different tasks in Xenu.  Here are a couple other tips that may help you out:

• By right-clicking a result in the list and selecting “Properties” in the menu, you can view lings like:  what pages link to this url, what links are on the page, and the title or link text.
• By right-clicking a result you can also access the Google cache, Wayback Machine, and Alexa results for the page.  I have found Google Cache and the Internet Archive to be a life-saver a couple times that I’ve lost pages.

What other uses of this product have you discovered?

This post was written by:

Kyle James - who has written 178 posts on .eduGuru.

Kyle is an Inbound Marketing Consultant at HubSpot and  formerly the webmaster at Wofford College. Kyle is an active contributor in the social media spectrum. Although his background is technical, he claims to know a thing or two about marketing, but mostly that revolves around SEO, analytics, blogging, and social media. He has spoken at multiple conferences on topics ranging from e-mail marketing to social media and Web analytics. He's definitely a fairly nice guy.

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