Danny Dover gave a great tip about bit.ly in the talk “Make SEO Tools Work for You” at the SEOmoz 2009 PRO Training Series.

You may already know what bit.ly is, but for those of you who don’t, it is a great, free tool that you can use to shorten URLs. A shortened URL can be very convenient especially for social media sites. For example, Twitter only allows 140 characters on a tweet, so if you want to add a link to a different site a shortened URL will take up less character space.

For example O’Rourke recently wrote an article, which we posted on our blog, called “Don’t Hide from TripAdvisor Reviews!” We wanted to put a link to this article on Twitter so we entered the URL in bit.ly and they automatically shortened it for us. Below are some screenshots of this very easy process.

1) First we entered our long URL which is: http://blog.orourkehospitality.com/2009/08/don%e2%80%99t-hide-from-tripadvisor-reviews/

2) Then bit.ly generated a shorter URL which we used in Twitter to link to our article.

3) Now for Danny’s tip. If you want to see how many people clicked on your link, type in the URL and add a plus sign (+) at the end of it.

4) Then bit.ly will give you a report that looks like this:

That is a great tip. Thanks Danny! You can see the stats on your own bit.ly URLs but also those of others. Try it for yourself!

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