As you can see from the image above, this can become a serious problem. Fortunately there is a very simple solution to this problem. All you have to do is to utilize one of the URL shortening services that are freely available on the Web. There are many to choose from, but the one I recommend is bit.ly which has several other features once you create a free account including the ability to view click statistics over time.

So lets head on over to http://bit.ly and create an account. Once you’ve done that, log in to your account and paste in the long URL you want to share. This site is also useful for sharing links in other forms as well, for example link sharing in your e-mails and blogs. It’s especially useful for Twitter though because of the above-mentioned character count limitations.

Once you enter the URL, bit.ly gives you a cool shortened version to share with others. In truth you don’t even need to register an account, but then you will have no way of tracking the statistics of how many people clicked on the link and some other useful features that are only available to registered users of the site.

You’ll end up with a cool abbreviated version of the URL as you can see in the image above. This URL can be used in your Twitter tweets. It will not only save valuable character real-estate, but you’ll also be able to get invaluable statistics such as the ones shown below:

Nice and simple and you get the extra benefits on top of the core URL shortening feature.

The key factors to consider when analyzing your traffic are:

• How many people are coming to your site?
• Where are they coming from?
• How long do they stay on your site?
• Are they finding what they are looking for?
• How active are they on the site?
• How often are they coming back?

Google Analytics will answer all of these questions for you in a simple and efficient manner. You can see detailed statistics as well as a visual representation of the data. Most importantly you can play with date ranges and see the trends over time.

Setting up Google Analytics is a breeze. You will be up and running in a matter of minutes and all of the hard work will be done for you.

If you are serious about your website you must employ good Analytics software. Google Analytics is the best free solution out there. Get started today by visiting analytics.google.com

In other articles I will discuss how to configure Google Analytics and how to dissect the numbers for optimal gains.