The meta tag and the art of redirection

The meta tag and the art of redirection



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.