It boggles my mind at times just how irresponsibly some business owners are with their marketing dollars. I have a perfect example. We subscribe to a monthly glass art magazine which includes many advertisements.

I quite often browse the advertisements and then go online to check out their listed websites. We have purchased many art supplies from new vendors in this way, so those ads do work…at least with us.

One ad caught my eye this month. It was for a kiln heat sensing device. The ad listed a URL where I could go online for more information. I’ll show the URL here, but use a fictitious domain name:

http://www.badlinkexample.com/Blog/index.php

Wow, where do I even begin with something like that!

First off, anytime a domain is shown in print, it should be made more reader friendly:

Instead of www.badlinkexample.com it should read www.BadLinkExample.com

See how better that reads! Always capitalize the first letter of words in the domain name! Caps in domain names do not matter. Caps or no caps lead to the same domain.

Next, they added /Blog.

It’s bad enough to make someone have to type that out….but for all folder/file names AFTER the domain name, caps DO matter! If someone typed /blog instead of /Blog, they would get a 404 page not found error.

Next, they included /index.php

WHY would they do that? There was no need to add it at all.

www.badlinkexample.com/Blog/index.php and www.badlinkexample.com/Blog BOTH go the same place. The browser automatically shows the index file of the folder if no other file is specified. There was no need to make the user type it all out.

How SHOULD they have done this?

They no doubt spent hundreds of dollars on the ad. Why would they not spend just $10 more to buy a simple and keyword rich domain name which they could have redirected easily to that long path?

For example, in this case, they should have purchased a domain name related to the product…such as www.KilnHeatWatcher.com ( I just made that up as an example)…something like that would have worked great. Then, in their domain account they could have forwarded that domain to the long and ugly URL without forcing the user to deal with it.

Why didn’t they do it? I’m sure it was just ignorance. They didn’t know any better. It’s pretty sad really. They probably could have tripled or quadrupled the response to the ad with a cool domain redirect like that.