When it was announced that bit.ly landed some investment money, the peanut gallery came alive.

As is my custom, I began to research URL shorteners (because I enjoy improving upon new ideas). I quickly realized how easy it is to create a URL shortener. I may have even created one myself, who knows. But more to the point, taking a long URL, and shortening it is a rather straightforward concept. Create a random 3 character hash that is tagged to the original long URL in a database with an auto incrementing id, and boom, you have a URL shortener. If you’re running apache, a simple rewrite rule will achieve the redirection.

As you can see, in a manner of a single day you can create a rather robust service that is now in high demand due to the popularity of Twitter which is now mainstream thanks to @Oprah.

When there is no barrier to entry, you can expect competition to grow like a wildfire. Which is exactly what has happened. I counted over 90 active URL shorteners in my research.

It was only a matter of time before a few of them stepped out from the crowd with additional features. Which is exactly what cli.gs, bit.ly, tr.im, and my favorite, digg.com, have done.  I like all of the url shorteners listed, but digg was the first to truly release an innovative feature, which was the digg bar.  Everything else lacks differentiation.

A majority of SEO gurus and webmasters have expressed concern over URL shorteners due to them essentially adding a step in the peer to peer relationship of a user posting a link, and a visitor clicking the link. Furthermore, because you have shortened the link, the visitor can no longer mouse-over the link to see where it points to.  I used to live by a strict code of ethics on the Internet.  If I couldn’t tell where a link was pointing, I wouldn’t click on it.  I have been forced to adapt because the only links you find on Twitter are the shortened ones.  The risk is clicking a link that has some sort of malicious intent.  The last thing I need is a hijacked computer due to some new super-virus.

Once you get past the fear of not knowing where the link will take you and accept that the relationship you have with the creator of the shortened URL is reliable, you can begin to enjoy all of the resources Twitter can bring to you (with the right followers).

Speaking of which, I saw @aplusk on @Oprah, and I was thoroughly impressed with how he explained his relationship with Twitter. I am probably one of the few people that would ever quote a celebrity, but if I feel it is warranted, I will. And when Ashton spoke of how he has a direct relationship with his followers which allows him to communicate with them directly, I saw an instant connection there. If we analyze this connection, it is a relationship of sharing pieces of information. By limiting yourself to 140 characters, it forces you to get to the point of what you would like to say.

I am following a number of people on my twitter account @JoshuaOdmark, many of which I enjoy reading what they have to say.  @mattcutts generally posts extremely valuable information on his tweets that include an outbound link.  The majority of the time I am bookmarking or adding things to my google account based on these links.  Social media seems to be an extension of the same power blogs bestowed upon the blogger.  It creates a direct relationship which completely solves the age old problem expressed best in the “Telephone Game”.  Create a chain of 10 people, whisper something from one end of the line to the other, and it will not be the same, guaranteed.

Now that we can see the value of a direct relationship, EVEN if it is one-sided, meaning, I can see @mattcutts Twitter updates, but he cannot see mine, is irrelevant to my point, the actual relationship of his authority on a webmaster topic and my desire to obtain that knowledge, creates an invaluable exchange.

Imagine if you will, if the medium in which we communicate, in this example, Twitter, has the capability of managing these relationships in such a way as to bring this authoritative information to the masses. They are involved from start to finish, all it takes is a little imagination and innovation to see a bigger picture.

URL shorteners are no different.

A grand innovation will occur in this market, you can bet on it.

After experiencing the pain of manually managing over 800 unique DRTV URLs for an Education campaign I came to the conclusion that there must be a better way. There wasn’t, so we built one. We now have the ability to manage, track and SEO optimize hundreds of unique urls with our specialized software. It allows the marketer to not only build these sites easily but also push updates and manage all the pieces end to end without much technical knowledge. Best of all it helps drive highly targeted search visitors to your offer to they convert.

Has anyone else found helpful tools for the convergence of DRTV with online media?

I have been reviewing some tools for an SEO project we are working on and thought I would share some of my initial findings. Our current need for this project is a tool that allows you to pull keywords via an API. A lot of my personal experience has been working with tools more along the lines of Hitwise (closer to Enterprise solution and $70K/yr last time I checked). In this case we don’t have that type of budget, who does nowadays?

Let’s start with the free tools first:

Here are some general SEO resource sites you should take a look at-

Name: UITEST

Purpose: End to end help in building and optimizing your website.

URL: http://uitest.com/en/analysis

When to use: Well it is a robust enough list that you can use these tools form the site planning stages all the way through to optimization and marketing, really the full life-cycle.

Price: Free

Keyword research tools-

Name: SEOBOOK

Purpose: This keyword suggestion tool is good for finding related search results to terms you want to target. It also provides semantically related phrases and has a handy CSV export option. Of course it’s bid prices are very useful if you want to target either high paying terms for targeting traffic or which terms you want to bid on in your ppc campaign.

URL: http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook

When to use: Useful when launching a new site or when you just need some new ideas for targeting new keywords in order to optimize and existing site.

Price: Free

Name: WordTracker

Purpose: Find 100 related keywords to your search term of interest and get an estimate of their daily traffic volume.

URL: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

When to use: Anytime you need some quick info about related search terms.

Price: Free

Name: SEOCHAT

Purpose: Keyword suggestion tool for Google. Helps find relevant and popular related terms. Seems to be having some problems lately based on a Google Algorithm change.

URL: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-suggestions-google

When to use: When you need a quick tool to find Google related results.

Price: Free

Name: Trellian

Purpose: Keyword discovery and multi-search engine benchmarking during keyword list build. Useful for building out multi-search engine lists and industry lists.

URL: www.keyworddiscovery.com

When to use: Useful for a new site during the first month of optimization, nice to have for 2 months (ongoing support)

Price: $69.95/month or $599.40/year

Name: Keyword Country

Purpose: Keyword discovery and competition benchmarking during site review of existing sites. This is a good tool for those people focused more on content development and who need help on how to choose anchor text. It is also useful for finding keywords with high Click Though Rates to predict results for Key Performance Indicators. The tool provides the ability to review competitor keywords and search engines that they competition is using. Keyword Country also shows number of pages on competitor’s sites using certain keywords so you can target content for future development.

URL: www.keywordcountry.com

When to use: Nice to have for content suggestions component during first 90 days. If you are a content heavy site then you may want this ongoing.

Price: $99 for 3 month

Name: WORDZe

Purpose: You may want to use this during keyword discovery phase when building a target keyword list as well as during link building strategy development. This tool can be useful to compare how your keyword optimization strategies might work across countries. Provides information on how hard it is to rank in top 10 for particular keywords as well as demographic data on users searching for top keywords (relevancy) . Also provides link rankings and suggested authority sites to submit links to as well as city by city breakdowns and industry analysis. This tool is helpful for seasonality review and optimization adjustments by time of year.

URL: www.wordze.com

When to use: Critical for first month, nice to have for remainder (ongoing support)

Price: $45/month

Name: Keyword Domination

Purpose: Useful for keyword discovery while building a target keyword list and comparing that list across languages. This resource has an enhanced international suggestion tool. This tool is useful for keyword suggestions that are imbedded in content and long-tail keywords that might not show up in other tools.

URL: www.keyworddomination.com

When to use: Nice to have for international component during first 30 days of an internationally relevant project.

Price: $97/month

I hope this is useful. Please let me know if you have any keyword building or targeting tool favorites of your own. Oh, and if you find a good tool that has an API for keyword suggestions and/or one that provides bid prices on Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask.com please let me know.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/27/look-yahoo-we-just-cant-afford-a-monopoly-in-search-advertising/

Who will decide if the Google Yahoo! convergence is good or bad? Well the consumers will vote with their searches.

If Yahoo! and Google continue in this direction people will get tired of using different methods to get to the same sponsored results. My thinking is they will probably look for new ways to get guidance and answers to their questions. Perhaps asking through their social network or services like Yelp or possibly relying more heavily on their favorite media tagging sites like Digg and Del.icio.us or new content aggregation products still in the making. Simply Ideas recently spun-off an internal project into MicroGravity Media to help the consumer find highly targeted content all in one place. More to come…