You can also check out the first post in this series over here.
If you want to get the feel of a LIVE website while doing SEO work from outside of your hosting company’s server, here’s what you do:
Keep the whole thing (files, images, sub folders, etc.) tucked in a single main folder (that you can name any way you want) on your computer and treat that folder like a live domain’s root directory.
Link to different pages of your website without using the actual entire domain URL, i.e https://www.yoursite.com (which won’t work since you’re still outside that domain).
When linking together two or more pages residing in the same directory, just refer to their filenames, e.g. index.html, page2.html.
When linking towards files contained within a sub directory, all you have to do is name that directory or folder, e.g. “folder/file.html”, without using the domain url. No matter how deep your website sub levels are, simply use e.g. f0lder1/folder2/file.html.
And for linking “file.html” towards files outside its directory, you add two dots, i.e. “..“, just before the forward slashes, for every folder it’s jumping out of to get to the file it’s linking to, i.e. “../../index.html“.
This way, you can be able to navigate around the actual site while you’re building and/or optimizing it. You can even work offline!. And, most importantly, you can be sure to upload to the internet a perfectly finished website when you say you’re done.
