Short URLs and friendly URLs are not quite related but short URLs are friendly and friendly URLs could be short. Hence, the reason for this post. Continue reading about these two topics and see how you could better inform your readers and viewers about your website pages/resources.
Short URLs
Short URLs have become quite popular these days. Short URL is an alias to a long-not-easy-to-type-remember long URLs. Short URLs take less space while including in emails, other web pages, while sharing on social media. Services like bit.ly and tinyurl.com take a long url and make it a short URL. Short URLs are used on the popular microblogging service Twitter.com as the tweets are limited only to 140 characters and any saving in letters in including website links (urls) is a good thing.
- For example, a long URL from the DMOZ directory to the WordPress software is given by…
http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/Tools/Publishers/WordPress/
and with the use of bit.ly we can shorten it and the short url is:
http://bit.ly/9cOjOX
bit.ly service not only shortens a long URL it allows you to customize the short URL name to something of your choice. If you sign up for bit.ly service you could even track the clicks of the short URLs and get realtime stats for that short URL.
Friendly URLs
Friendly URLs on the other hand are useful to make a meaningful URL name to the site visitors and to the search engines. For example, the URL of this blog post is “http://www.nenewmedia.com/blog/services/short-friendly-urls/”. The two words right after the domain name indicate that the page is under the blog under the category services. This kind of grouping is very easy for users to follow and remember. But, the biggest advantages are in the areas of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, bing, value this kind of grouping and better index the sites and show the results to the users.
Almost all of the content management systems, whether open-source or commercial, support the friendly url feature and the website developer needs to enable it and configure it for various website pages and blog entries. Even for a static brochure site that does not change much it is a good idea to group the pages to a specified structure and create meaningful and friendly URLs. For the New England New Media blog we use WordPress and it offers a lot of control in how we create short/friendly URLs.
There are many URL shortner services and Search Engine Land has an exhaustive article on this topic. If you are looking to learn more about this topic and understand about any dangers or pitfalls in using URL shortners then you should read this article from Joshua Schacter’s Blog.
Hope this information is helpful. We would like to hear back from you, our readers, about this post and our blog.
NENM Team
bob
1 year ago
Thanks. I really enjoyed this article.