Link Shorteners & SEO

What are link shorteners used for?

Well the original purpose of a link shortener was to simply take a huge long URL, and shorten it up.  The use of them exploded once the social media website “Twitter” came to market. When you’re only able to use 140 characters, sharing a long link limited you to only a few characters to explain the link your posting – pretty useless.

What does a shortened link look like?

Here is our normal blog URL: https://strongcoffeemarketing.com/blog

Here is the shortened URL:
http://bit.ly/958Ht3

Which link shortener do we use?

There are tons of choices out there, but Bit.ly is one our favorites and here’s why.  Bit.ly allows for you to do a couple of cool things:

1.     Customizable links – after you shorten your long link, bit.ly gives you an option to customize your link.  In the example above, “958Ht3” can be anything you want (as long as it’s not already taken). I highly suggest you take advantage of this. Pick some small words that relate to the content in your link.  These keywords can be picked up by the search engines and can help big-time with your rankings. Furthermore, it gives some context to your readers as to what the link is about.

2. Tracking – Bit.ly offers immediate, up-to-date stats on any link you shorten.  Make an account, and start shortening links.  Through this you can track visitors on your website, click-throughs on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and so much more. An awesome tool!

By utilizing the link shorteners ability to track click-though you get a pretty good idea of what works, and what doesn’t.  If you don’t use them already, it’s time.