Get 25 Facebook Fans to Register a Short URL For Your Facebook Page

For the past two months millions of Facebook users and Page owners have been able to register short URLs, like facebook.com/yourcompany. From the start Facebook has stated that once registered, the URL can't be changed. However, recently the rules have been updated and now users can change their short URLs. This only applies to profiles. Pages have to settle with the URL they have already grabbed.
Currently you need more than 25 Fans to qualify for a short URL. But the limit might be raised soon. Originally it was at 1000 fans for several weeks... Then suddenly lowered to 0... then 25... and within hours it was raised to 100 fans where it stayed for two months. In the beginning of September it was lowered to 25 fans. But there's no telling how long this will last. Facebook is still testing the most profitable number, at which Page owners are most willing to pay for ads to get visitors.
So you better hurry up to register your special URL before the minimum requirement goes back to 100 fans.
How to register a short Facebook URL
Once you have acquired 26 fans, you can register a short URL at facebook.com/username. By default there are some suggestions for a username according to the name of your Page. If you administer many Pages you can choose a username for every one of them. Username is the name Facebook has given to these short URLs. Some call them Vanity URLs. To create a username you must use alphanumeric characters a-z, 0-9 or a period(.). Minimum length is 5 characters. Some words like screw are censored and can't be used. Also you can't register generic words like "pizza."
You should get an URL that is closely related to your brand name. If you don't, it might be reclaimed later. Some trademark owners have prevented their name from being used. If you manage to get a trademarked URL, it can be taken away at any time by the real owner.
In order to register the URL you need to verify your account with a code that will be sent to your cell phone. If you have many Pages you only need one cell phone and one verification.
If you want to change your already registered URL to something else, then go to Settings... Account Settings... and click to change the username. If a user changes his short URL, the old one will instantly become available for anyone to register. If on the other hand your account is deleted, the old username will not become available. Unlike profiles, Pages can't change their short URLs. Hopefully this will be allowed in the future.
If you are an application developer, you can register a short URL for your application, too. But instead of the URL being apps.Facebook.com/application, it is Facebook.com/application.
If a Page or application profile has many administrators, the first one to register gets to choose it and after that it can't be changed. So make sure your team is on the "same page" with your thoughts.

Free URL Redirection - Features

Well, there are a large number of features that each Free Url Redirection service can theoretically provide. But in practice, Free Short Url services usually don't provide them all, but provide only some of them.
I'd like to tell you about the most important features of free url redirection services. So, the more features from the list below a free url service can provide, the better it is..
- No ads at all is a very important feature and it means that the Free Url Redirection service provider does not implement any forced ads into users websites. Don't confuse it with "No banner and popup ads", as there are many other kinds of ads that are neither banners, nor pop-ups.. e.g. pop-under or exit ads.. Be careful here :) Some service providers may place a very small frame at the bottom of the page with a link back to their site. This is perfectly acceptable, as they have to be able to get new members!
- Free Domain Name - it means the free url provided looks very professional, like a real paid domain name.
- Free Url Cloaking also known as free url masking - is used to mask your real website address with the Free short url provided. So, your short url will always be in the location bar of your website visitors, and nobody ever knows you are using an url redirection.
- Free Email Forwarding means you get a branded email address with your free short url, like webmaster@yourshort.url, and the emails sent to this email address are automatically redirected to the email address you choose, e.g. to your_name@yahoo.com
- Free Path Forwarding is the feature that allows you to hide that you are using short url service even more. With path forwarding turned ON you can access the files and subdirectories of your website using your free short url, e.g. www.yourshort.url/forums/ will be in the location bar of your website visitors and will actually point to your real, long address.
- Free Subdomains feature allows you to create subdomains like forums.yourshort.url and point them to different websites and/or to different folders of your hosting account (in other words, you are allowed to create subdomain path forwards of your free short url)
- Meta Tags Support. Meta Tags are the tags located in the head of HTML pages. The most important are Title, Description and Keywords tags, and they are very important for your website to be indexed by search engines
- Free Website Statistics. Some Free Url Redirection services provide website statistics for free - number of visitors, referrals, webpage hits, etc. In this case you will not have to use the 3rd party statistics service (counter) to monitor your website visitors
- Dynamic IP support. This feature is useful if would like to run a webserver from their home computer, but unfortunately, have a dynamic IP address
- Full DNS Support is a very rare feature provided by Free Url Redirection service providers and it means that it is allowed to modify all DNS records (A, NS, MX) for the free short urls provided.
There are also a lot of different not very important features provided by Free Url Redirection providers, like ability to use your free short url with & without WWW, support for other less important meta tags, etc. Plus some very rare features like POP3 boxes, included guestbooks, chats, etc.

The Power of Search Engine Friendly URLs

I recently invested quite some time into generating search engine friendly URLs for several of my websites to increase my ranking and to have more pages indexed. I can highly recommend to look into this if your own website does not have se-friendly URLs. Especially Google (the most important search engine nowadays) can be very picky in regards to URLs that are not se-friendly.
Example (the 2 URLs below bring you to exactly the same page):
URL: example.com/ShowCategory.php?CategoryID=13 -> this URL is not se-friendly and search engines will eventually ignore any page behind it or rank it much lower in search results. Visitors will have difficulties to remember this URL. These kind of URLs often come from dynamic database driven websites. Each page is dynamically created when requested. Look at the forums URL this moment, too. It is dynamically created and not very friendly to search engines or the visitor. You get the idea.
URL: example.com/kabob-recipe-category-13.html -> this URL is se-friendly and search engines will spider the page behind it easily. It is keyword enriched to increase search engine ranking. Overall - this URL is easy to be spidered and easy to remember by a visitor.
For one of my own sites I was able to increase the number of pages indexed from 36 to over 150 pages - just by making the URLs search engine friendly. The additional pages were ignored by the search engines because they could not read the URLs properly. The domain used in my example went from 20 pages to 80 within 2 weeks and should go to over 120 pages indexed (by Google) with the next Google update.
How do you make your URLs search engine friendly?
Your web host/web server needs to support the Apache Web Server module "mod_rewrite". This module allows to rewrite URLs a certain way. By using a ".htaccess" file you can give the web server the necessary commands to work with se-friendly URLs.
How does this now really works?
In general - you are faking the nice clean looking URLs and fool search engines and visitors to believe that the URLs of your website are se-friendly.
SE-friendly URLs work in 2 steps. 1) Your site needs to display the se-friendly URLs. 2) mod_rewrite and htaccess 'translate' the se-friendly URL and redirect the traffic to the ugly looking se-unfriendly URL in the background (invisible to anyone). You will need to setup the htaccess file with the command how you would like the URL to look like and what does it translate to (a certain ugly looking dynamic URL).
The code that generates the URLs dynamically needs to be adjusted to match the rules from your .htaccess file. You upload the code changes and the htaccess and off you go.
Can every website be modified?
Most websites with dynamic URLs can be modified if the server environment meets the requirements. Each website needs to be looked at separately to get the best results.
The learning curve on creating se-friendly URLs can be quite challenging. Spend the time and resources on creating se-friendly URLs. The results can be overwhelming.

Chris Puetz is a successful small business owner (Net Services USA LLC) and international author.