Better Conversion Tip #5 – Create Redirect Links
If you’re promoting a product on your site, and your site is a database-driven shopping cart e-commerce system, then you probably have links like the following for each product page:
http://www.mysite.com/store/products.php?id=28475&desc=product%20description%20here&cat=980&refer=477840
Often times when sending a link out like that in an email, it gets chopped up. Then when the reader clicks on the link, they get a page not found error. Not a good thing to happen!
Or, if you have the link in an article or ezine, you could face similar problems.
Plus the link is just not intuitive enough.
It would be much, much better to have a link like this:
http://www.mysite.com/productname
Well, you can have this when you use server-side redirects.
Here’s how it works (if your site uses PHP):
Create a folder on your root HTML directory. For this example, we’ll call it productname.
Inside that folder, create a file called index.php, and in that file, include the following text:
<?
Header (“Location: http://www.mysite.com/store/products.php?id=28475&desc=product%20description%20here&cat=980&refer=477840“);
?>
Of course you would substitute the location with the actual location of your product page.
Now when a visitor goes to http://www.mysite.com/productname, they’ll be redirected to the right page.
Other websites besides those that use PHP will have their own redirect methods, but your webmaster should be able to help with that, should you have any confusion.
Now you can promote your individual products using the shorter, more meaningful link.
Remember, though. If the long link should ever change, be sure to update the redirect to match.