Setting up an htaccess redirect for your site shouldn't take an advanced degree in computer science. This stuff should be fast and simple, right?

But when I was desperately trying to set up an htaccess redirect for one of my new websites, the online tutorials I found about url redirects, page redirects, htaccess, and mod_rewrite gave me headaches. They were needlessly complicated, hard to understand, and sometimes even completely wrong! So when I followed their directions for setting up an htaccess redirect on my site, my site got totally screwed up.  Not much help at all.

I'm sure that if you're here and you've found this website,  then you've been running into this and getting confused like I was.  And aren't you finding that the information posted online frequently contradicts itself, making you wonder why the whole thing has to be so darned hard? Why does this stuff have to be so frustrating?  It's like there's some secret club you have to belong to to learn about htaccess.

Why Does Something Simple Take a Whole Week to Figure Out?

Personally, I hate it when super smart "geeks" hold information over people. There's too much arrogance in the geek community. If I want to know how to do something simple with a website and it involves a little code like htaccess does, just show me the damned code and tell me, in simple language, exactly what to do with it.  Sounds simple, right?

So WHY DOES NOBODY DO THIS ?

I looked everywhere for this information when I was working on a new site recently. It took me AN ENTIRE WEEK OF MY LIFE to get this information straightened out. During that week, I read tons of articles and tutorials about using htaccess on various websites and forums, and they ALL contradicted themselves or left out important parts of the equation. A lot of the information was inaccurate, too. At the same time, I was going back and forth with my hosting provider, submitting support ticket after support ticket and talking to three different "experts," two of whom also gave me the wrong information. 

After going through all of that, I realized I wanted that week of my life back again! After all, time is money, and I was wasting WAY too much time trying to discover the truth about using htaccess and setting up redirects. I would have happily paid for a guide or Ebook that would simply have shown me exactly what to do.  Especially since having this information is so important for SEO purposes. Every webmaster really needs to learn about this stuff. 

One of the most important forms of redirect is the http:// to www or the www to http:// htaccess redirect, which you really need to set up before you launch your site. This is when you either redirect the http://yourdomain.com version of your site permanently to http://www.yoursite.com or vice versa. If you don't do this, Google is likely to index your site the wrong way, or even show your site as being TWO sites, and all of your SEO work or search engine optimization will go to waste! So it's really crucial stuff to get set up correctly.

But to my shock and amazement, no guide on this existed. It was like the whole thing was hidden away somewhere and you had to be a third degree witch at Hogwarts to know the secret. Crazy!

So, I decided to turn my stress into your gain, my tears into your smiles. And I wrote a book about setting up htaccess redirects just for you.

The reality is that htaccess redirects aren't too complicated, but you need to understand a few important things that aren't often taught in order to get your redirects to work properly. There are also several different KINDS of redirects, and they each need to be handled in their own way.

Here Are Some of the Ways You Can Use An Htaccess Redirect

1) Setting up a permanent domain redirect from one domain to another. For example, I have a website and a trademark called Lipstick Mystic, but I found that a lot of people who would type my brand name into Google spelled it wrong. A lot of people spelled it Lipstick Mystick instead of Lipstick Mystic.

I wanted to make sure I was capturing all of that traffic, including visits from people who typed the misspelled version of the name into Google. So I set up a domain named LipstickMystick.com (the misspelled version) and I set that site up to permanently redirect to my real site, LipstickMystic.com.  This way I get the traffic from people who spell the name wrong. They're just sent to my main site. If you have registered domains with several misspellings of your main domain name, you can do the same thing. Set the misspelled names to redirect to your main site, and you can make sure you don't miss that traffic.

You might also want to set up a permanent redirect if you have decided to move a site and set it up fresh with a different domain name. So let's say you have a domain name like MyWritingServices.com where you sell your article writing services.  Over time you realize that a lot of people searching for you and wanting to hire you are typing your real name into Google. You could set up a new domain name with your real name, like PaulSmith.com, and take all the traffic from MyWritingServices.com and redirect it to PaulSmith.com. As businesses change and evolve, sometimes you'll want to change the way people locate you on the Net. Setting up a domain name redirect can be a great way to point existing traffic from an older domain to a new destination.

2) Redirecting the http:// version of a site to the http://www version of the site, or vice versa. Did you know that many websites are suffering from low ranking and low trust in the search engines because the search engines have indexed the site the wrong way?  This is a very common problem and it's called a canonical issue. It can be fixed with a little bit of effort at your hosting provider, but you will have to get "behind the controls" of your website and do a few very specific things in a careful way to fix this problem.

It's a serious problem that isn't talked about that much, but if you've been building backlinks to http://yoursite.com, and Google sees your site as http://www.yoursite.com, your site's ranking and traffic can really get screwed up. You won't see the sort of traffic that your site really deserves because the search engine basically sees you as having TWO sites instead of one. So you have to carefully tell the search engines exactly which version of your site you want to have indexed to fix this problem. Ideally, you would set up your htaccess redirect WHEN YOU LAUNCH YOUR SITE so it is indexed properly from day one. This saves confusion and hassle later on. You CAN decide to fix this later if you have to, but sometimes the changes take a while to show up in the search engines.

3) Sometimes you just want to redirect a single page on your website somewhere else. For instance, if you are selling something as an affiliate marketer, you might want to create a redirect page on your site. So when someone clicks on one of your affiliate links, instead of the link showing as a nasty, complicated address like http://www.somevendor.com/$89lklfh.mttik58&84.html, you can show something nicer by redirecting that link to a simply named page on your website like: http://www.mysite.com/coolproduct.html.  It looks nicer if the page link that comes up in a surfer's browser window is something cleaner and professional.

Another type of redirect is for when you are moving things around on your site and you are taking content that used to be on an old page and putting it on a new one. You might have lots of backlinks pointing to the old page, and you don't want to lose traffic coming to that old page, so you could set up a redirect from the old page to the new page. This keeps the page rank intact and the authority of your page won't be as affected as it would be if you completely deleted the old page.

4) Another form of redirect is when you want to take clunky-looking, unwieldy links like you'd find in Wordpress for your pages and streamline them into tidy, keyword-optimized, page names.

There are some serious problems people run into sometimes when they try to set up redirects without getting the right guidance about how to do it. Some of these problems include:

1) You set up a page redirect but don't realize that the code you are using has been overused by spammers, and Google will instantly derank that page or punish your entire site if you use that form of redirect.

2) You set up the redirect incorrectly, and your site goes into what's called an "infinite redirect loop" and will never resolve properly. Nobody's going to be visiting your site if they can't find it!

3) You edit the htaccess file wrong, or maybe you can't even locate the htaccess file on your site since its default is set to "invisible file." It's hard to fix redirect problems when you're flying blind and can't monitor the results yourself. It's important to make sure you're using the right type of redirect code in your htaccess file.

Let a Non Geek Come To Your Rescue: Check Out Htaccess Redirects Made Super Simple

 

If you've been running into problems trying to set up a redirect or you're getting confused about using htaccess, you'll want to check out the super simple guide I've written. It's called Htaccess Redirects Made Super Simple: A Non Geek Guide. I'm a non-geek, so I keep my explanations super simple. Basically I take you by the hand and show you exactly what redirects can do, how to set them up, and how to learn the super secret stuff that the geeks conveniently "forget" to warn you about redirects.

Htaccess Redirects Made Super Simple is available as an instant download, and it's in PDF file format which can be read on any computer using Adobe's free Acrobat Reader program. I've made it available in this format because I have screenshots in it and these don't render so well if you're looking at them on an Ebook reader like a Kindle or a Nook. 

This guide shows you all about redirects, teaches you how to troubleshoot if you run into problems using htaccess, and also explains the critical importance of using redirects from the moment you launch your website if you want your site to have maximum SEO power and rank nicely in the search engines. It's no nonsense and detailed and will answer ALL your questions about using htaccess and redirects.

Click here to purchase Htaccess Redirects Made Super Simple - a Non Geek Guide.

I know this simple guide will help you sort through those htaccess redirect problems so you can improve your site's performance, get more traffic, and make more money!