How Do You Redirect A Web Visitor To Another Site?

Well, this one has a couple of different answers, depending on exactly what you want to do. Want to see a video I created using method three? Just visit my Video site, and click on the Tech Stuff category, or just follow this quick link to How Do Affiliates Mask Their Links?

Method One

If it’s important to you that the visitor know he/she is being redirected, you can provide a command to the “browser” to refresh the page within X seconds, and upon completion, redirect the browser to another page.

< meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="3;URL=http://www.NewWebsiteToVisit.com" />

Include the line shown above in your HTML code for the web page between the HEAD tags. Notice the “content=”3;URL=http://www.NewWebsiteToVisit.com” part of the code. That tells the browser to wait 3 seconds, and then refresh the contents of the browser with the new web address. If you are waiting more than a split second (content=0.1), then you want to make sure you page displays something that let’s them know they are about to be redirected. This is a good method to use when you move a website from one place to another. You can use the original page to notify them they need to update bookmarks or call Aunt Sue and let her know as well.

Method Two

Exactly like method one, with one exception. Use a content=0.1 value, which will cause the browser to redirect the visitor immediately. One note though. You should make sure your title on the page that contains the redirect code matches the title on the page they are being taken to.

Method Three

I like this one the best. It’s called an IFrame Redirect. Basically, with the code shown below, you display the contents of a different web page, on yours! Your domain name, address and URL visible to the web visitor all stay the same, but the contents are read from another site. Possible applications for this type of redirect would be if you are marketing an affiliate product and want to display the capture page of the product, but you want to give out a professional domain name or web address. For example, let’s say you are promoting a product as an affiliate, and they give you a link to promote. The link (I made this up, do don’t try to go there) http://www.MyCoolSoftware.com/pr/e/go/?id=7732fg

Now, who in their right mind is gonna remember that, tell their friends or type all that in? If however, you purchased a domain name like www.HereYaGo.com and you are recommending (promoting) a product called CoolMusicPlayer, then you could create a directory called CoolMusicPlayer on the HereYaGo.com domain and send people to a link that looks like this (again, this is made up, don’t try it) http://www.HereYaGo.com/CoolMusicPlayer

Easier to remember, but it still displays the webpage for the product.

< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
< html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
< head>
< meta http-equiv="Refresh" content=".1;URL=http://www.MyCoolSoftware.com/pr/e/go/?id=7732fg" />
< body>
< /body>
< /html>

Please note: I had to put spaces after the angle brackets because the post keep trying to send a visitor to that page! Just remove the spaces.

Okay, as you can see from the code above, that ugly affiliate link is being used to display the actual content of the page. It’s just a short piece of code and it doesn’t help you much when it comes to Google loving your page. You need a title, some keywords, and a description and that can get a little tedious.

Like any good programmer when presented with a repetitive task, I automated it. I created a piece of software to let me enter the title, URL, keywords and description, and have it build my iFrame redirect PHP file. Once build, I just upload the new index.php file to the directory of my choice, and viola! Done.

Want that?

Here ya go. http://www.videos.bycenay.com/iFrameGen.htm — and click the download button. It’s all yours. Enjoy.