As the worlds of search, social media and business websites mesh into one big mess, the challenge of keeping track of links to various websites becomes a daunting task.

While sites like Facebook and Twitter provide a handy shortened link to direct you to your business, when it comes to pages you have set-up on Google Plus (also commonly referred to as GPlus and Google+), your company page link is one long, scrambled list of numbers like this:

https://plus.google.com/b/106279564484719217800/106279564484719217800/posts#106279564484719217800/posts

Fortunately – as long as your website is an “Apache” hosted website (which most are) – there is a relatively simple way you can get control of this link, as well as all of the other social media links for your business, using a simple technique known as a 301 redirect.

The 301 redirect is set-up in a special file called the .htaccess file on your website. This is a very important file and needs to be set-up carefully. Web developers use this file to do a number of things, one of which is the management of links on your website.

First, a word of caution. You must treat this file carefully, if you are worried about accidentally deleting lines of code or messing up the syntax, have a web professional that you trust handle my recommended steps, as either error could cause your site to go down.

Understanding the 301 redirect

The 301 redirect is a powerful command that tells the server to deliver an alternate page to the one that was requested. For example, you might have originally had a simple website with a page promoting your services called services.html. Then you upgrade your website and move that page to the folder: services/index.html.

You can use a 301 redirect to send anyone trying to reach the old link (services.html) to the new link (services/ or services/index.html) without them doing anything. The process is done automatically because the server will first check the .htaccess file for a redirect before delivering up the file.

(Aside: If your website runs on an ASP/.NET platform, there is a way to do a redirect, although it is more complicated than the Apache redirect and is beyond the scope of this article.)

Using 301 redirects as a social media marketing tool

Search engine optimization experts are heavy users of 301 redirects, because they help maintain “link equity” from incoming links to pages on a website.

They can be a powerful tool to help us market our social media links as well.

Take the example of the Google Plus page CanadaOne from above. We can create a 301 redirect to make a much easier to remember shortcut from the CanadaOne website to our Google Plus page. The entry looks like this:

1. The command: the phrase “redirect 301” in your .htaccess files signals the server that it needs to be ready to deliver up a different page for the sitelink you specify.
2. The sitelink: this is the page that should be redirected to a new page. You will notice that it does not have www.canadaone.com/ in front of the link, but instead you just use /pagename. That is because many sites have more than one domain (for example canadaone.com and canadaone.ca) acting as the same site, so this command will work for all of those set-up in your .htaccess file.
3. The external address: this can be an address on your website or on another site; in our case we want to link to the convoluted Google Plus page link.

• It is very important that you do not accidentally redirect a real page on your site to another page. While unlikely in the case of /gplus, it is quite possible that if you start using redirects more regularly that one will overlap with a real page.
• Be aware that if you want to go beyond standard characters (letters and numbers), you may not be able to set-up the redirect without getting into fancy character conversions. When you reach that point, it is probably time to involve your web developer.
• It is also important that you test your site after doing a redirect. We once accidentally took the CanadaOne website down for a few minutes after adding in a redirect from a strange link we found in Google Webmaster Tools back to the homepage!

You do not have to limit your redirects to just complicated links like the long Google Plus address. On CanadaOne we have set-up redirects for our most popular social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, YouTube and even Pinterest.

So clicking on each of the following link will take you to the associated social media site

Here is what each of those links looks like in our .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /fb http://www.facebook.com/CanadaOne
redirect 301 /youtube http://www.youtube.com/canadaone
redirect 301 /tw https://twitter.com/canadaone
redirect 301 /ln http://www.linkedin.com/company/canadaone.com
redirect 301 /pin http://pinterest.com/canadaone/

Creating your own 301 redirects is actually quite simple and they make sense, because then you are in charge of your own branding and links. Who knows, maybe one day these links to popular social media websites will become a de facto web standard!