Want to know how you can have your own short link service like bit.ly, tr.IM or tinyurl, built in to your own WordPress posted website? I have spoken before about the importance of links to help build your online business presence.

If you have a WordPress site then read on to find out about the power you have in your hand.

What is a link shortening service?

Many links to your website, your articles might be very long. Not that suitable for advertising, or for use in Twitter or Facebook either. A link shortening service is used to reduce the length of the link, but still when someone clicks on it, it goes to the same place you orginally wanted.

The trouble is the search engines rank the short link and the user who's going to click on the link doesn't really know where it's going to go.

How to improve this situation?

Why not have a short link service that uses your own domain name. Now admittedly this isn't going to work so well if you have a long domain name, but if you have short one, it's a great opportunity for you to keep your website address visible to everyone including the search engines. While some sites like Twitter have the “nofollow” attribute set on links, at least your domain name will appear in the search engine rankings, but also in the eyes of the tweeps = twitter followers. This is a great bonus. I have been using this technique on a number of websites and it's showing great results.

To manage this service you just need to install the pretty link plugin. Configure it, there are plenty of tutorials on this, then use it.

This plugin has a free and paid for version, but for this simple task, the free version is enough.

If you would like assistance in setting this up then contact me!

Working on this wordpress blog has taught me a great lesson. Not heeding this lesson might cause you untold problems, wasted hours and lost productivity.

Some moment between going to lunch and returning from it saw a pack of malicious byte devils enter my site and gobble up a file. One simple little 18 line file, INDEX.PHP

I went and typed in the website address and saw nothing except a file and diectory list. My heart sank while beating just a little faster.

“I have a backup. It will be fine”. Only to find the backup wasn’t what I thought it was…essentially useless. “Ok, so what next? Where to get another copy of an index.php?”

Fortunately for me I had another wordpress blog site I could look at, so I copied the file across and re-entered my site URL and fortunately all was fixed. I had been VERY lucky.

My next step, I made a complete backup of my site. Better late than never right!

Backups are important, but only when you need them. Until then they are an administrative PITA. My advice to myself is make them regularly. My suggestion to you is to follow my advice. Not doing so maybe at your peril.