Dance With Strangers

URL shortening tools are a godsend for those of us who have been curtailed to a 140 character limit in life, saving valuable space on Twitter and other social networks. Size, however, is really not the most important element of the URL shortening tool, especially not for B2B marketers. Instead you need to be looking at it’s impact on your search engine optimization (SEO) and it’s level of analytics for measurement purposes. Ultimately you can use short URLs to boost your SEO and measure lead generation, the key is in the features provided and knowing what to look for out of your URL tool.

URL Shortening and SEO
Effective B2B SEO must be a passion and the way in which you dictate your URLs can go a long way in helping you optimize your key word. Check out what I can do when using BudURL:

Custom URL

In this case I’m minimizing a URL from the BreakingPoint blog and attaching our most important keyword to the short URL. Now whenever this URL is shared it will attach itself to our keyword and redirect to a page that has been optimized for that keyword. Although this is a win for SEO, it also helps you tell people more quickly where your short URL is going to take them if they click. This is becoming more important as we see malicious activity around short URLs. Use descriptive words to customize your URL in order to give you a SEO boost and help the people you are trying to reach.

Additionally in the realm of SEO and short URLs the choice to perform a 301 permanent redirect (versus the more typical 307 temporary redirect) can be very helpful. Again, BudURL:

301 redirects are better for SEO and actually Page Rank because search engines will assume that the destination URL will not be altered and they may actually cache the URL. On the negative side however it may also be cached by proxy servers and end up messing with your overall analytics, specifically click counts. The nice thing about BudURL is that they allow me to choose 301 or 307. Most of the time I use 301 redirects, since the page is not going to change and SEO is critical. However, I do use 307 once in a while for special campaigns that I know are for a limited time and therefore I want more accurate data around click counts. The key is to have the option and choose what is right for you, rather than simply using a generic service that offers you no choice.

Short URLs and the Power of Measurment
The beauty of services like BudURL is that they provide a plethora of data around click-through, IP address, browsers and more. Combine that with your web analytics and back-end it with your CRM system and you have a very powerful tool. Recently one of the web analytics packages we use, GetClicky, launched their own URL shortening service. The company even joked on their blog that this seemed a bit crazy since there are hundreds of options out there already. However, using a Clicky.me URL I not only get the custom URL option as before, it integrates completely into my web analysis dashboard and I can dive into individual short URLs:

Now I can see not only how many folks clicked on the link, but how much time they spent on the site, average actions, what search term they used to find the link, what site referred them and more. When you scroll down you also see each individual IP address AND all the action those folks took on the site, including if they reached any of your business goals. Ultimately we have back ended the process into SalesForce.com and can track the success of short URLs on our business.

They may be tiny, but short URLs are a highly powerful B2B marketing tool when you know what to look for out of your service.