Throwback - Ep 52 - How A Great About Page Can Attract Design Clients

Page Redirects. I know. Sound boring, right? I mean, how much can one talk about page redirects? After all, as the name implies, they redirect one web page to another—end of the story.

Not so fast.

Yes, Page redirects do redirect one web page to another. But there’s a lot more power to them that you may not have thought of.

When used correctly, page redirects can help attract clients. They can show authority. They can strengthen a website. They can even steal visitors from the competition.

Yes, there’s much more to the lowly page redirect than what it lets on. And maybe you can use one of these ideas for yourself.

1) Redirect alternate domain extensions.

A page redirect is used to redirect one web page to another. Those two pages don’t have to be on the same domain. Page redirects can be used to redirect one domain to another. The best use of this is with domain extensions.

For example. I live in Canada, and many businesses use the .ca extension for their domain. It’s highly encouraged, especially for companies that deal exclusively in Canada.

But we all know that .com is the most popular domain extension. When in doubt, most people try the .com first. That’s why I always recommend my clients purchase multiple domains, including the .ca and .com.

Then, using a redirect, they can send people who type in the .com domain to the website with the .ca extension. Or vice-versa, depending on which extension they want to use.

This also prevents someone else from registering and competing with the other domain extensions.

2) Redirect alternate spellings or misspellings.

Alternate spellings or misspellings are also excellent for page or site redirects.

For example, a food truck business called 2 Brothers In A Food Truck wants a website. Due to the possibility of mistyping their name, they may want to register multiple domains,

• 2brothersinafoodtruck.com
• twobrothersinafoodtruck.com
• toobrothersinafoodtruck.com

They can then pick the one they want to use and redirect the others.

Here’s another example. Let’s say your name is Shawn Johnston. And you start a business called Shawn Johnston Consulting. While talking to people, you tell people to visit your website at shawnjohnstonconsulting.com.

But how do you spell that? Is Shawn spelled S-H-A-W-N, or is it S-E-A-N? What about Johnston, is that Johnson without a T or Johnston with a T?

You can spell it out every time you say it. But there’s no guarantee that someone else will spell it out when referring to you. A better option is to register the multiple spellings and redirect them to the correctly spelled domain.

• shawnjohnsonconsulting.com > shawnjohnstonconsulting.com
• seanjohnsonconsulting.com > shawnjohnstonconsulting.com
• seanjohnstonconsulting.com > shawnjohnstonconsulting.com

3) Redirect an old site to a new site.

Redirects are extremely useful when building a new website either under the same or a different domain.

Every website will accumulate what we in the industry call “Google Juice” over time. Google Juice is a way to measure the SEO power of a webpage.

When building a new website or changing a website’s domain, you don’t want to lose that accumulated Google Juice and start from scratch.

If you’re changing a page’s URL, you want to create a 301 redirect that tells the search engines that the old page is no more, and they should now assign its Google Juice to this new page.

For example, Franklin & Barton Law office may have the URL franklinandbartonlaw.com.

Beth Barton gets married and changes her name to Beth Jackson. She wants to change the company’s name to Franklin & Jackson Law office and the URL to franklinandjacksonlaw.com.

Changing the domain on a website is fairly easy. But if they don’t want to lose their current search engine rankings, they need to redirect every page URL from the old site to the new one.

• franklinandbartonlaw.com redirects to franklinandjacksonlaw.com
• franklinandbartonlaw.com/about redirects to franklinandjacksonlaw.com/about
• franklinandbartonlaw.com/service redirects to franklinandjacksonlaw.com/service
• franklinandbartonlaw.com/contact redirects to franklinandjacksonlaw.com/contact

And so on for every page on the original website. This ensures the new domain retains the power of the old domain.

4) Redirect to shorten a URL.

We all know that the shorter something is, the easier it is to remember. Let alone tell someone else about it.

The show notes for this podcast episode can be found at the difficult-to-remember URL https://resourcefuldesigner.com/8-Uses-For-Page-Redirects-rd312. That’s why I use a redirect and tell you the show notes can be found at https://resourcefuldesign...