The Short URL redirection services are ideal if you want to replace your long website address (or even particular URL to the certain post) with an address that is short and easy to remember. You can create such a short and easy to remember website address (URL) and afterwards use it to browse to your website. In practice, this means that you choose a new sub-domain and thereby create a new website address. When your visitors click on your new Short URL they will automatically be redirected to the website addressed by your original URL.

There are several additional advantages of having short URL:

• Some long and complicated addresses might break up in the email text, and therefore become unclickable. User has to copy and past the URL to the browser to make it work.
• If you want to hide your referral ID in the address to avoid reader’s perception that you might benefit from his click on the link, this is a good solution.
• If you need to give the address by phone or SMS and do not want to mess up with long strings.
• If you want to check the profitability and effectiveness of different marketing channels, you can, among other methods, assign different short URLs to each channel to evaluate.
• Not that I am fan of the “black hat” sites promotion techniques, but having multiple redirection URLs for your site might be handy.

I am sure, that there are more reasons to have a free, nice, and easy solution of having an extra (new) site address. For your convenience, I have created rating list of the 20 top free services with brief description, rating, and access links at my favorite rating site RateItAll. To illustrate the concept, the main Rating List address is:

http://www.rateitall.com/t-26841-free-short-url-redirection-services.aspx

As you see, it is quite long. The following addresses would be much shorter:

http://linkslash.com/makeshortURL

http://tinyurl.com/makeshortURL

http://shurl.org/makeshortURL