Have you tried http://www.geoedge.com/ they even offer some free proxies in multiple locations.

In our PR agency, we find that it is true to say the top-tier guys rarely pick up news from a press release site, but it does happen sometimes (albeit rarely). For the top-tier we always send the release directly to the targeted journo/blogger/influencer and follow up.

We do get take up from mid-level blog and news sites from issuing releases via a wire service though (we like PRWeb and PR NewsWire - different services seem to work better in different territories) - those are a bonus and they usually give a link worth having.

I found somewhere a tip to put some code in the head.php file of your template (sorry can't find it at the mo, but I'm sure some Googling will discover it for you).

I ended up putting this in my head.php  (which I found here: templates/[MY TEMPLATE NAME]/blocks/head.php) BTW I didn't want the trailing slash in my URL - you'd need to tweak this if you do want it.

But you could probably get away with something simpler, there's some discussion about it here: http://www.brucerick.com/joomlas-sh404sef-and-canonical-links/

Oh and feel free to improve my php/regex...I'm no expert

In answer to 'will it bring traffic' I'm not so sure...not done any testing, but (as far as I can recall) I've never seen twitter results in serps where the twitter handle corresponds to the keyword I'm searching for.

All things being equal, I'd be inclined to go for brand name, social media is about engagement and people like to know who they're talking to.

Having said that, if you can get a nice keyword name that doesn't feel 'forced' then that would be good. For example, in the pr industry there's @ThePRCoach which is nice and doesn't feel like someone is squeezing a keyword unnaturally into the name (as it happens his site is called ThePRCoach too, but hopefully you get my meaning!)

A relatively painless way (if .htaccess is too hard for your contact to implement) is to use rel canonical to point to the url you want since Google and Bing will (eventually) notice your canonical tag.

So, for http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm you could add a tag like the one below into your index.htm file in the head section:

You should also make sure that any links to the home page refer to http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com rather than http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm

See http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394 for more info on rel canonical

Having said that, a 301 redirect is probably the best way to solve the problem.

BTW, I'm assuming it is an Apache server and so uses .htaccess - IIS can be a bit more tricky (see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-every-seo-should-know-about-iis#chaining for IIS redirects)

You could use something like this in the .htaccess file (always make a backup copy of the .htaccess file before saving it in case something goes wrong - typos etc.):

BACKUP EXISTING .htaccess FIRST!!!

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

may need to uncomment the next line depending on host

#Options +FollowSymlinks

add www for non www pages - you may not need these two lines

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^cascadevillagehotel.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/$1 [L,R=301]

The following redirect is the one for index.htm assumes the default page is /

redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/