URL SHORTENED USING
BIT.LY
Everyone hates long URLS specially the ones with a lot
of cryptic url parameters. It’s long, nondescriptive, and
difficult to remember. You’ll also have a hard time
posting these long urls on social sites with “character
limits” as it will surely eat all of your character
bandwidth before you can even post your actual
content.
This is where services called URL Shorteners comes
into play and it was developed with one sole purpose –
to shorten your long URLS. Now, you might be asking
“Isn’t it using services like this will have a negative
impact on my SEO?”. If we’re talking about 5 years ago,
yes, but today, URL shorteners have evolved and it’s
actually quite mandatory to have it if you care a lot
about your online exposure and SEO. How? It’s by
customizing your shortened urls using your own brand.
In this guide, we’re going to use one of the most popular
URL shorteners service called bit.ly. If you haven’t
already, open your favorite browser and visit
https://bitly.com/. Feel free to read about its features. This
guide assumes you already have a bit.ly account, so before
continuing, make sure to sign up and login. After logging
in, you will be redirected to your bit.ly dashboard.
Your bit.ly dashboard shows all of your created bit.ly links.
In case you’re already using bit.ly, you’ll notice that your
links are formatted like this http://bit.ly/1iidA9N. This is
the default formatting and url naming of bit.ly and most of
the time, it’s enough for the majority of users. But this is
not what we want! We want our links to standout among
the rest!
On the top right of your dashboard, click the MENU icon.
This will show you your account menu list. What you want
to click here is the SETTINGS button which is under the
options menu.
Upon clicking the settings button, another window will
popup with 3 options. What we want here is
the ADVANCED SETTINGS button
The advanced settings menu is where we can find the
option to customize our bit.ly links called Brand Short
Domain. Upon clicking this link, it will show us the
necessary steps to customize our default bit.ly generated
links.
The steps involved sounds scary at first, but it’s actually
pretty simple. It basically involves buying a domain name
and setting up the necessary DNS records on your domain
name so that it points to bit.ly servers.
There are a lot of domain registrars available and it’s up to
you which ones to use. For the purpose of this guide, I’ll be
showing you how to set up your your domain’s DNS servers
to point to bit.ly servers (assuming that your domain was
purchased from Namecheap). If you haven’t purchased a
custom domain yet, go ahead and purchase one first.
.
Upon signing up and purchasing your custom domain from
name cheap, you are now able to view all of your purchased
domain names on your dashboard. Click on the manage
button to setup your custom domain. This is where we will
assign the necessary DNS servers so that bit.ly can start
using it.
On the manage page, find the
NAMESERVERS settings uption and change
it from Namecheap BasicDNS to Custom DNS.
Input the DNS servers listed on your bit.ly branded
domains settings page. It will then propagate to bit.ly
servers and sometimes it takes 2448 hours to be fully
setup. To verify if your custom domain is now usable, head
over to your bit.ly dashboard and under SETTINGS >
ADVANCED SETTINGS > BRANDED DOMAINS, enter
your own custom domain on the field provided and click
VERIFY DOMAIN.
Once verified, you will see something similar
above. Congratulations! You can now start using
your branded bit.ly links!
Created by:
KIKA Marketing and Communications
