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.
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.