There are many occasions when you wish to display your URL in the
form yourdomain/display.html but would like, instead, to direct
visitors to another URL, say
some-other-domain/best-mouse-trap.html.
For example, you are promoting an affiliate program with URL
your-merchant-URL/sales-page/your-affiliate-code, and you think
that the URL is too long, or you want to hide the fact that it is
an affiliate link, or you want to prevent people from stealing
your affiliate commission, you could use this technique. You
could even check how many people have clicked on your affiliate
link, by checking the number of clicks of the displayed URL
before it is redirected, from your Web site log.
Here is another example. You are using a tracking software, or a
tracking company, to track your advertisement. Usually, the
tracking URL will be of the form
your-tracking-URL/.../tracking-?blah-blah or
tracking-company-URL/.../tracking-?blah-blah. You want to use
your own domain name or you do not want others know that you are
tracking the ad. You could use the URL
your-URL/your-sales-description which redirects visitors to the
tracking URL.
Knowledge of technique of redirecting URL will give you a lot of,
among other benefits, flexibility. Here is how to do it with META
tag...
Create the page, "display.html," with the following META tag
between the HEAD and /HEAD tags in the HTML codes...
< meta http-equiv = "refresh" content = "0; URL =
some-other-URL/best-mouse-trap.html"> without any other content
(if you wish, you could include the title "World's Best Mouse
Trap" between the < title> and < /title> tags, to show that this
page is about mouse trap).
Note: please remove the space between the < and the rest of the
tag contents it is place here only so the code would appear
correct regardless of how or where this story was printed.
Upload the page "display.html" to the root directory of your Web
site. With that, when visitors click on the link
your-URL/display.html, they will be redirected to
some-other-URL/best-mouse-trap.html.
Please note that for the URL some-other-URL/best-mouse-trap.html
in the above META tag, and other URLs through out the rest of the
article, you should include the "http" protocol which have been
omitted.
The following variation of the above method will give you a
neater way of displaying your URL, namely, without using the
".html" extension in your displayed URL...
First create a sub-directory, say "best-mouse-trap" in the root
directory at your Web site. Instead of naming the Web page
created above as display.html, name it as index.html. Upload this
"index.html" file into the sub-directory "best-mouse-trap". Then,
when your visitors click on the URL your-URL/best-mouse-trap they
will be redirected to some-other-URL/best-mouse-trap.html.
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About the Author:
Ben Gordon currently writes at several web coding/development
forums and lists, including one he co-owns with other members of
a web development team at http://webxpertz.net/forums . He is
presently promoting a new reprint article directory
http://articles.webxpertz.net/content/ to assist webmasters with
the difficult task of finding fresh content for their websites.