When you first went online, you probably learned very quickly that you could bookmark websites that you wanted to return to in the future. If you're like many users, it probably didn't take long before your list of Favorites or Bookmarks went all the way down the screen, and although you continue to add to them, you rarely use them, because it's too hard to find what you are looking for. Rather than deleting them all and starting over, there are steps you can take to organize your Favorites in a way that you can easily locate the information you need at any given time.

To start with, you will want to make sure that all those links are still active, especially if you've been saving them for quite a while. Websites come and go, and even those that remain online may delete pages or move them around, so if you have bookmarked specific pages within a site, your links may no longer work. Checking each link individually can be very time-consuming, but you can download software to perform this task for you, such as AM-DeadLink. AM-DeadLink checks for dead links and duplicates, and if a Bookmark has become unavailable you can verify it in the internal preview and delete it from your browser, whether you are using Internet Explorer, Opera, or Firefox. It doesn't catch everything - for example, if a page redirects to an error page it may not recognize it as an intactive link - and you may want to verify that a website isn't temporarily offline before deleting a Bookmark, but overall, AM-DeadLink is a great time-saving tool, and as it's freeware, you can't beat the price!

Once you have removed your dead links, you are ready to start organizing! In Internet Explorer, they tell you to do this by clicking on "Favorites - Organize Favorites" but this can be quite a cumbersome procedure, especially if you have a lot of links. It is much more efficient to right-click anywhere in your Favorites list and to select "Explore." This opens your Favorites in Windows Explorer, allowing you to easily create new folders and to drag and drop multiple selections at will. Mozilla Firefox simplifies the process - you need only click on "Bookmarks - Manage Bookmarks" to access a similar screen.

The best way to do organize your Favorites or Bookmarks is to imagine each link as a document, think of how you would file them in your filing cabinet, and place them in appropriately named folders. To find links more easily, avoid broad categories such as "Business" or "Personal" and choose more specific categories such as "Affiliate Programs," "Article Directories, " and so on. You may, if you wish, create Subcategories within your Categories to keep your folder list from getting too long and to keep similar items together. For example, under the main category called "Travel" you may have several subcategories called "Cottages," "Europe," and "New York City." Because it's so simple to create new categories and to drag and drop files, it's very easy to change things around if you find that you have too many links within a folder.

If you use multiple computers, you may find it more convenient to use an online bookmark service, which you can access from anywhere. Yahoo! is one of many sites that allow you to do this, and if you use the Yahoo! Toolbar, you don't need to go to their website to use your bookmarks, and you can easily add a link to the appropriate category with a single click. Because your Bookmarks are associated with your Yahoo! ID, they are not visible to other users. If you would like to make your bookmarks available to others, you can use a service such as IKeepBookmarks.com, which offers a choice of making them public or keeping them private, and displays your links by category on a web page. You may even want to consider putting a link to your IKeepBookmarks.com page on your website as an easy way to provide a well-organized links page for your website visitors.

Just as it is necessary to purge your paper files from time to time, you should occasionally purge your Internet links. Storing your Bookmarks in an orderly fashion will not only make it easier to locate the information you need, it will allow you to quickly delete all the links related to a particular topic when they are no longer needed, such as when you have finished a project.