This article has been provided by Brave Media internet Marketing Vancouver

While TinyURL has been around since 2002, it’s only since the increase in the popularity of Twitter that URL shorteners like TinyURL and bit.ly have seen their use rapidly increase. With its character limit, Twitter has made the service of taking a longer URL and transforming it into a manageable link quite valuable.

Other than Twitter there are other reasons why URL shorteners are useful. For SEO purposes search engines consider the keywords used in the URL. However links that are too long and wordy are not easily categorized and hard to share with friends in emails and social media sites. URL shorteners make it easier to share links and some services like tinyarro.ws actually lets users choose their own keywords.

Bit.ly has received a lot of positive attention lately because of its ability to track and compile link data. This comprehensive information is invaluable, as knowing your customers’ interests and what other sites they are visiting can allow you to create more targeted content resulting in higher conversion rates. (Click here for more info on SEO optimization)

All in all the best thing about URL shorteners is their ability to promote sharing. With the increased use of texting, smartphones and Twitter, URL shorteners allow for more content to fit in less space, which makes sharing web content that much easier.

Mashable talks about the top five best reasons why URL shorteners are useful including the fact that they promote sharing, that they can provide users useful feautures, that they can be transformed into social media services, that they can track and compile click data and of course that they make links more manageable. Take a look at the complete list at http://mashable.com/2009/04/05/url-shorteners/