Pretty Link’s Marketing and SEO Benefits
There are many WordPress plugins that are nice to have, but very few are essential. This is where Pretty Link is different. If you are serious about tracking the performance of your adds, internal and external links or even downloads then Pretty Link is definitely worth looking at. According to the author, Pretty Link can…
Shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website
…and what’s more, the shortened URL is prefixed with your website’s domain name. This blows tinyurl.com and bit.ly out of the water and has obvious SEO benefits to boot. Pretty Link was originally borne from the need to neaten up those ugly affiliate links that often scare off would-be purchasers. With Pretty Link, you can make a URL that looks like this http://www.shareasale.com/m-pr.cfm?merchantID=16526&userID=363159&productID=466062304 into one that looks like this http://beginnerchess.org/chesshouse-22.
Once a link has been “prettisized” (I’m sure this is not a real word), it can also be tracked as per the screenshot below. This allows you to tell how often your links are clicked and which links work better at attracting potential buyers than others. This is an extremely powerful tool for all Internet marketers. What’s more, Pretty Links with different names can point to the same actual link. This is useful for example if you want to track whether people are clicking on your left side banner add or the link in your article. With this sort of tracking information you can determine which add copy attracts the clicks and which products people are generally interested it. You can then adjust the add copy that doesn’t work and rotate out the products that nobody wants.
Pretty Link couldn’t be simpler to use. Once installed and activated, expand the Pretty Link Settings group and select Add New. Put the messy URL in the Target URL section and a nice human readable slug (a tag that contains no spaces, but can contain a dash) in the Pretty Link text box. If your messy URL contains a question mark (a ? denotes the start of URL parameters) then you must ensure that you select the Standard Parameter Forwarding radio selection in the Link Options section. To use the new Pretty Link, you simply use the Pretty Link instead of the original link. For example, if you click on either of the two affiliate links given in the introduction you will notice that both take you to the same destination.
Another great feature of Pretty Link is that it allows you to update the target URL without modify the Pretty Link slug. This is useful if you want to modify your affiliate link without updating your article or add copy. This may be the case if you have found a cheaper or better product for example.
Pretty Link’s SEO benefits include an option to nofollow your Pretty Link which is useful if the linked URL is not optimized for your keyword. Another benefit is that you can chose the name of your Pretty Link slug, allowing you to add more keywords to your page in the form of links.
Search engine optimization starts with keyword analysis. Keyword analysis means finding search phrases with high volume search and low competition. Competition evaluation is a difficult task. You need to check many parameters for top ranking websites in order to estimate their “strength”. All the operations can be done manually–with tools freely available on the web. A much better solution is to use specialized tools like Market Samurai. This is a dedicated keyword research and SEO tool with modular design
Interesting post. You have a rather familiar web layout that I just can’t quite put my finger on. I’ve learned a lot from this post. Thanks.