Finding ways to creatively market your horses for sale,  stallions,  farm,  equine professional practice,  or anything horse related, is important in your search for prospects. One of the best techniques that can be used is URL Rewriting. I will explain more about this and what it is in a moment. For now, let me set the stage for you. Let’s say that you have a horse for sale on your farm website. We will name the horse Johnny Be Good and your farm name is Meadow Horse Farm. For someone to visit the page that is for Johnny Be Good, they would go to www.meadowhorsefarm.com/johnny_be_good.php. This link might be hard for someone to remember, and for marketing purpose can look a little sloppy. Now we will clean up the link so that it looks better for marketing purposes and is easy to remember. For online and offline marketing we want to use the URL www.meadowhorsefarm.com/johnny. This is going to make it easier for someone to remember your sale horse and clean up the look of your ad. How do we do this? We do it by writing code into our .htaccess file. Let’s go through the steps of getting it done.

Steps for URL Rewriting

How easy it is to set up making memorable links will be determined by the software that is running on your server. Some web hosting companies offer you a control panel that will give you access to your .htaccess file and URL rewriting. We do offer this in our control panel so that you can easily handle doing something like this without having to do the following hard coding.

Step 1: Alter your .htaccess file

If there is already a .htaccess file on your server you should be able to find it in your root folder. If you do not find it you can open a text editor to create the file. Once you have your .htaccess file open you will want to add the following code:

RewriteEngine On    # Turn on the rewriting engine<code>
RewriteRule    ^johnny/?$ johnny_be_good.php    [NC,L]    # Handle the request for Johnny
</code>

Here is the explanation of what has just been entered.

• RewriteRule – Tells Apache that this like refers to a single RewriteRule.
• ^/johnny/?$ – The “pattern”. The server will check the URL of every request to the site to see if this pattern matches. If it does, then Apache will swap the URL of the request for the “substitution” section that follows.
• johnny_be_good.php – The “substitution”. If the pattern above matches the request, Apache uses this URL instead of the requested URL.
• [NC,L] – “Flags”, that tell Apache how to apply the rule. In this case, we’re using two flags. “NC”, tells Apache that this rule should be case-insensitive, and “L” tells Apache not to process any more rules if this one is used.
• # Handle the request for Johnny – Comment explaining what the rule does (optional but recommended)

Now you can save the file as .htaccess. If you are using a text editor make sure you save as “All Files” and not “.txt”. Then you can upload the file to your root folder.

Now you can open your pages and change your links to www.meadowhorsefarm.com/johnny. If you are doing offline advertising you can simply use the same URL, www.meadowhorsefarm.com/johhny for example, to help make your link memorable.

Please note that the .htaccess file is very sensitive as is URL rewriting. If you are unsure about these steps you can check out Apache URL Rewriting Guide.

If you can get the hang of rewriting you will start to get creative in the way you link to your pages. This will help with making your links attractive in online and offline marketing, and help in search engine optimization. For example, let’s say we have the same website, www.meadowhorsefarm.com. We also have a folder for salehorses and a page for Johnny Be Good. Keeping search engine optimization in mind you can create a rewriting rule that would change www.meadowhorsefarm.com/salehorses/johnny_be_good.php to www.meadhorsefarm.com/western-pleasure-sale-horse/johnny/. Seeing that search engines have a high criteria on picking up keywords in the URL, this would help if Johnny Be Good is a western pleasure sale horse.

The above example is a basic example. There are other ways to create patterns for more dynamic websites. You can go as high as your imagination will take you. You can even go to the point to where the link will read www.meadowhorsefarm.com/horses-for-sale/quarter-horse/western-pleasure-sale-horse/johnny/. You can see from this link that there are numerous keywords that have been added to the URL. Great for search engine spiders that come to your site.

There are millions of ways to improve your links and your search engine optimization with URL rewriting, and all it takes is some practice and a good imagination. Please note one more time that you have to be careful with the rewriting of the links and the .htaccess file. Any incorrect code will result in fatal errors.

If you would like more information on this please let me know. I can give you some tips by email, with the discussion below, or you can hire me to re-do your website and the way the links are shown. Have fun and I hope this is helpful in your online and offline marketing.

Rob

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