What is Content Monitoring for Website?

In very basic terms, content monitoring of websites mean checking websites periodically and detecting any changes or problems in the content. There are many things which could be monitored on a webpage, for example:-

• Availability of the web page
• Changes in the content
• Presence or absence of specific keywords on the page
• Presence or absence of specific images on the page
• Presence of errors and so on..

Monitoring is usually associated with frequency, i.e how often content should be monitored. This frequency usually depends on what is being monitored. For example, whether a website is up or not would be checked much more frequently than content of a specific web page.

Why Content Monitoring is important?

Content monitoring is extremely important to ensure that your website is serving according to your defined purpose. Web is changing continuously and malicious users and hackers are getting smarter day by day. Not only that, technology is changing constantly and any kind of migration such as database, web servers, hosting providers might mean broken content or links on your website. Content monitoring should become an essential part of your daily routine if you are responsible for the content of your website. Some of the reasons to monitor your website on an ongoing basis are:-

• As an editor or lead of editors for any website, you want to remain on top of quality of content.
• Ensure that pages are not modified without your knowledge.
• Check for possible attacks from hackers or malicious users - they usually change content after taking over the site.
• Validate product listings and keep an eye on the quality of listing for your e-commerce website.
• Your website aggregates or sources data from many places and you want to ensure quality of external data.

What does iCheckWebsite check in content monitoring?

Content monitoring feature of iCheckWebsite is an amazingly simple way to monitor quality, accessibility and SEO goodness of your webpages on periodic basis. This feature is extremely important for individuals or teams who are responsible for adding, updating, testing or maintaining content of any websites.

Some of things you can monitor in your content with iCheckWebsite are:-

• Content is available and pages are not throwing any error.
• There are no missing images on the page.
• Required files are included on the page.
• There are no broken links on the page.
• Mandatory links or other controls are present on the page.
• Title of the webpage is present and is unique across all the pages.
• Alt-text is associated with images, videos and other objects.
• And many more..

This is a partial list of checks which could be carried out on all the pages of your website, without any human intervention on a periodic basis.

How do I get started with monitoring content using iCheckWebsite?

It is extremely easy to start monitoring content using iCheckWebsite. After logging in to iCheckWebsite using your username and password, you need to follow just three steps.

1. Add Sites - You can add a single website or build a portfolio of sites according to your needs. Not only that, if needed you can specify URL patterns to test, specific URLs to test or number or URLs to test depending on your unique needs.

2. Define Tests - After adding sites you need to monitor, you can specify what you need to monitor. Every website in your portfolio can have different checks associated with it. These checks are essentially items you want to monitor. You do not need any technical knowledge to define these checks - for standard checks you just need to select appropriate select box and for custom checks you need to enter values in a text box. iCheckWebsite is built to be used by non-technical as well as technical users.

3. Set Schedule - After adding website and defining checks, it is time to specify frequency for your monitoring. Depending on the needs, you can specify whether you want to monitor content of your website on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

After you have saved this schedule, iCheckWebsite will automatically execute all the checks checks you defined for your website at the time (And day / date for weekly and monthly schedule) given by you.

After test execution is over, you will get an email with the notification or results. You will get results for every page of your website or set of URLs depending on your options.

So after finishing this one time activity of adding your website, defining checks and setting up schedule, you can relax and focus on fixing issues reported by iCheckWebsite and let iCheckWebsite monitor content of your website in an easy and affordable way.