Website owners can get distracted easily while promoting things on their websites and often times due to the massive amounts of products, services and data throughout thousands of pages can make stuff hard to find for users.
The no brainer thing to have is a search function that people can used based on keywords the user enters. The problem, these functions do not always work that great.
One thing that can make it harder for people to find specific items on your site is in print advertising. We all get use to "Links" from search engines, Twitter and emails but this does not work in print ads.
Stores depend on weekly flier ads in papers that often show a great deal of products that are on sale, new items and so on. Many of these companies also heavily promote their websites in the very same ads but fail to connect the product TO the website.
I noticed one company that did a great job recently at connecting the items in the ad TO their website.
Code Names!
In the product description after the price of the item, they had a short code name by the product.
Once the user visited the businesses website, there was a easy to find (on home page) Code Name Box. The user entered in the Code Name into the box that appears by the item in the print ad, which brought them directly to the item once clicking Go!
Seems pretty simple right? IT IS!
These are often weekly ads, which also allow site owners to keep the code names pretty short and simple as the code names really only need to stay valid for about a month.
Using code names like Red1 or Best1 or Hot1 are easy to remember and your customers can also easily find what you are promoting to them! It’s a win-win.
Code Names can really be used in just about any print ad, weekly or monthly newsletters, company newsletters or just about anything printed that refers to something on a web page that may not be easily found.
The "Code Name Box" is similar to what Yahoo often uses with companies when they say to "search keyword X".
Domain name forwarding (301 redirection) is often another way a company uses a "name" to easily be able to send people to an exact page on a website they want customers to land on.
Code Names can work the exact same way domain forwarding works. Simply set up the matching Code Name to the matching URL page of the item you are wanting people to land on.
Available Domains
Thanks for sharing the code name method.