CyberOpteryx: Internet Marketing Strategist & Web Developer From Brampton Ontario

by Horace Hibbert on October 22nd, 2009

Simply put URL Shorteners reduce long URLs into tiny strings. The URL compression uses an algorithm of set of characters which can number anywhere for 2 to 6 characters in length. It is quite evident at least for now, that these URL Shortening services are here to stay as new ones arrive on a daily basis. The method of compressing URLs is commonly used on micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, Facebook and sites alike. Some Shorteners that I have used are: bit.ly, tr.im, ow.ly, vb.ly, and tinyurl.com. I found them to be quite useful especially on twitter where the number of characters matter.

For all the good that these URL Shorteners provide, one cannot overlook the dangers that present themselves when using these services: You don’t have any idea where you will be taken once you click on the compressed URL. You simply have to trust that you will not end-up on a malicious website. URL shortening services should strongly look into a way to filter their links so web surfers can be more confident when clicking their URLs; I know from personal experience I sometimes get a little nervous clicking on these links.

With so many URL Shorteners on the internet, how do you know which one to use? There are many factors to consider when selecting a URL shortening service: the number of characters in a given URL when compressed, does the service have custom URL capability, tracking statistics, stability, and 3rd party client support i.e. TweetDeck, Twitterfeed. When it comes to stability, there is nothing more annoying than clicking on one of these shortened URLs and arriving at a Link Is Not Working page. You also have to keep in mind, that as frequently as new URL Shorteners arrives, it very possible they can disappear just as fast. You should choose a URL shortening service that either have a strong revenue model behind it or have the financial banking to sustain the service. As recently as two month ago, I was surprised when I saw a message on tr.im stating that they were going shut down it service as of December 31, 2009. The thought of my links vanishing into an abyss was not pleasant and would hurt my search engine ranking. This scare made me think about creating my very own private URL Shortener (str.bz which I recently made publicly available) so I could at least guarantee that my compressed URLs would stay online. Tr.im has since retracted and promised to keep the service running for now.

Are URL Shorteners feasible? Tinyurl.com has been around since 2002, which implies they are doing something right. We can assume that the revenue model they have in place is working for them to be in the game this long. Without a proper infrastructure and an adequate revenue model, it is my opinion that is improbable that a URL shortening service can survive. In order for Shorteners to be monetized, they will have to be very creative in their approach. We could see some of these services go in the direction of being more audience focused.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the future of URL Shorteners – Feel free to leave your comments.

Share and Enjoy:

No Comments »

The Benefits of Customizing Your Twitter Profile Background

by Horace Hibbert on September 19th, 2009

The Social Media Community is growing exponentially and doesn’t look like it is going to slow down anytime soon. As these communities grow in size the more difficult it will be for you or your brand to get noticed or discovered. Twitter allows its members to customize their profile backgrounds to give them their sense and style. There are some who would argue that a customized twitter profile background is nothing more than a glorified wallpaper: Reason being that measuring the usefulness of a custom Twitter background cannot be done using metrics such as measuring the Click-through rate (CTR).

Twitter profile background customizations should be viewed as prime real estate no different than billboard ad that is positioned on the side of the busiest highway. During a given week many people will pass that billboard each day on their way to and from work. There will a percentage of those people who will have that advertisement branded in their minds. When this happen, the billboard advertisement has served its purposed and those people affected are likely to buy that particular service or product. Your Twitter profile background can be thought of in the same light. The question you will have ask yourself, “Is one extra sale per month worth pimping up your twitter profile?” The simple answer is yes.

The advantages of customizing your Twitter background strongly outweigh any negatives. A custom profile background will enhance the look and feel of your brand and/or profile. The enhanced background will allow you to add more information about you or your brand that you could not otherwise fit into the 160 characters allowed in your Bio. Custom Twitter backgrounds will attract more visitors and impress your followers. Improving the look and feel of your profile on Twitter will bring more awareness to your brand and set you apart from the crowd. As a business trying to promote your brand, the last thing you want to do is to get left behind by your competition.

Going back to the metrics issue, there is a tool called ClickableNow that enables the hyperlinks on your customized Twitter background to become clickable. This service is offered by SHIFT communications and Whitley Media and it is free for everyone to use. You can read more about this service in an article found on Mashable, “ClickableNow: Add Links to Your Twitter Background“.

If you are going set yourself apart from the rest on Twitter, a key strategy is to get your profile background customized. Capturing the attention of a visitor will increase the possibility of them deciding to become a new follower. When your brand is branded in the mind of someone who comes across your twitter profile, the likelihood of them becoming a potential client or customer will increase. The cost of having your Twitter background customized is marginal at best compared to the ROI you will receive down the road. Don’t wait till it is too late, go and get your custom Twitter background today.

Share and Enjoy:

No Comments »

CyberOpteryx Now Offering Custom twitter Background Designs

by admin on September 18th, 2009

CyberOpteryx is pleased to announced it is now offering custom twitter background designs as a new service. Having a professional custom twitter background design can set your Brand a part from the crowd: Don’t get left behind in the dust, pimp up your twitter profile today.

Share and Enjoy:

Comments Off

Focusing On Organic Search Engine Optimization for Better SERP Results

by Horace Hibbert on September 16th, 2009

Organic Search Engine Optimization is a process that is used to drive traffic to your website by improving the site’s ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP’s) naturally – Naturally implies optimizing your website using SEO techniques. This will trigger the search engine algorithms to rank your page higher on the results pages based on your website’s relevancy to that particular search term or phrase. Building your website organically is usually based on three key factors: Site Structure, Content, and Links. Improving your SERP’s on major search engines such as Yahoo, Bing and Google will improve your website and total sales as quality traffic will result in a better ROI. If your website has been online for 6 months or more and you are not receiving traffic or very little – It is safe to say that your site is not optimized for the search engines. Hiring a SEO consultant might be your next step: An SEO expert is not going to come cheap. If you are strap for cash, you can optimize your website on your own by learning about Search Engine Optimization. Some of these principles and practices will be covered in this article to help you get started.

Site Structure

Just like building a house, a great website that is SEO optimized is built on a solid foundation so that search engine crawlers can crawl every section of your website and will do so on a regular basis. There are some keys things that you should consider when building your website structure: Page titles, URL links, Text links, Page load time and Header Tags. One of the first things that will help get a website SEO optimized is having a very good page title with keywords relevant to what your site is offering. This is very important, especially to search engines like Google. It is important that you do not try to stuff your page titles with every keyword that you can think of. It is virtually impossible to try and optimize your home page for every keyword. Majority of search engines will only index about 60 characters from your website page titles. You are better off optimizing each page on your website with different keywords that are relevant to your website. Quite a few website online today use image links but they forget to accompany them with text links. Text links allow search engine spiders to navigate through your website from page to page – This is something you want to happen as search engine spiders do follow image links. Using friendly URL links is another good practice to implement. While search engines spiders have gotten better at reading query string URL’s such as “http://domain.com/page.php?id=5&item=redshirt”. It is much better to have a URL in the form of “http://domain.com/red-shirt”: This is more pleasant to the human eye and also has more relevance to search engines. Slow And Steady Wins The Race: This is one of the few times that this does apply, having a webpage that takes too long to load does go well with search engines. Search engines hate slow loading pages. You want make you take every step to optimize your web pages so that they load quickly. Furthermore, another key practice to implement in your website structure is to use Header tags to let the search engines know that the page is relevant and should be weighted heavily with importance. In most cases many pages will have more than one headline. Additional headings should bolded to look the way they do.

Content

Time and time again the phrase, “Content is King” has been mentioned in world of Search Engine Optimization. It is a well known fact by SEO experts that good quality content will always bring high quality traffic back to your website. You are more likely to get sales and a better ROI from good quality traffic. A good practice to have is to update and add new content to your website on a regular basis. One method of creating new content for your site is to add a blog. Search engines love new content and especially good content that is relevant. How often you add new content to your site will depend on how often your other competitors are adding new content. The content on your website should not make your site sound phony or boring. Your customers will appreciate good content and quality will make them more willing to do business with you. Also, when writing content for your website you should think about writing for your customers and the search engines: Use relevant keywords in your website content. A common practice is to repeat keywords in your content that already exist in your page titles and H1 tags. Having good quality and relevant content on your website will surely improve your site’s ranking in the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages).

Links

It seems that having relevant backlinks (or inbound links) linking back to your website is very important and even more so today. These backlinks count as votes for your website. Part of the search engines ranking system is to check who is voting (linking back) for you. When it comes to inbound links, it is not about the quantity, it is about having quality pages and site’s linking back to your website. You can 40 sites linking to your website, but if they a poor quality sites or websites that have been penalized – Your site is at risked of also getting penalized just by having that association. An easy way of building up the number of back-links for your website is to write and submit good quality articles to article directories. Good quality articles have a better chance of getting republished by other websites and Ezines. The more times your article gets republished, the inbound links to your site will also increase.

If you have made it this far, you should now realize how important search engine optimization is when it comes to getting traffic to your website. This article has only covered a small section of SEO practices. If you would like learn more about Search Engine Optimization, a good start would be at Search Commander: You can start by reading SEO-101. Whether or not you decide to use an SEO consultant or decide to optimize your website on your own, it is going to take time to get your page up to par in the SERP’s.

Share and Enjoy:

No Comments »

New Website Launched!

by admin on September 10th, 2009

CyberOpteryx is proud to announce the launch of its new website. There is a saying Out With The Old and In With The New: This is exactly what was done with our website and company philosophy. The evolution of web 2.0 was the turning point for CyberOpteryx to change and adapt to new technologies. Founder Horace Hibbert recognized the new trends and developments with web technologies and Internet Marketing in today’s web industry. He wanted make sure all this knowledge was obtained would be redistributed and repackaged for our clients websites and projects. We hope you will enjoy the new look and feel of our new website while taking advantage of the services we offer.

Share and Enjoy:

1 Comment »

The Twitter Experience – Getting Started

by Horace Hibbert on September 9th, 2009

Everyone by now has heard about twitter and many are using it on a daily basis like an addiction. There are many uses for twitter: Both for business and socializing. When you combine business with socializing you end up with Social Media Marketing. The focus of this article will be learning how to get started using twitter to market your brand. twitter can be viewed as one of the best forms of direct marketing today. My account on twitter was created just over a week ago and I have already seen how powerful and useful it can be if you use correctly: I have seen many people making mistakes when using twitter to promote their business. What many fail to realize is that, this is Social Media Marketing – You need to be sociable to make it work for you.

Speaking from experience and I am sure some of you are going through this or will go through it if you have not created your twitter account as yet. At first, like most, I was extremely excited and pumped to be finally getting my twitter account. When I created my account, I realized that I had no one following me. I saw many accounts having thousands of followers and reaching those numbers seemed unreachable at a glance. In beginning, it can be very discouraging because you are all alone and you do not know where to start to get followers – Do not give up, it just take a little time to get use to and understand how twitter works. Once you get the knowledge on how the site works, you will begin to attract followers and your list will grow.

In the first few days I only had a couple of followers and most of them were spam. As a result, I started to look around and do some research on how I can get people to follow me on twitter. The first thing I learned is that I need to post tweets as often as I can, so others who are searching for that subject matter or looking at recent tweets will know I exist. After doing this, I started to a get some followers, but I wanted more. To grow my list more, it made sense I should start following others who shared similar interests and in return they would follow you back which is the purpose of twitter: Making connections. Still my list of followers was growing slowly, when I met a follower, Nathaniel Johnson who goes by @socialnate on the site. He directed me to few resources that helped me to understand how to get more followers at a much faster rate. The first resource was a post on his blog, “Easy Secret to Get You More Followers,” which the title is self explanatory. He simplified the techniques he used: Mainly the @reply and RT (re-tweets) features that twitter offers. Nathaniel Johnson also, mentioned a site called Twitter Counter, where you able to find and follow other users on twitter. However, he specifically showed how to use a trick on twitter Counter to boost your followers rapidly by following the top 100 accounts on twitter – Emphasizing the rinse and repeat method. By following the top 100 on Twitter Counter, naturally others following those top 100 will see you on their list of followers and start following you as well. One downside of this technique is that you will also have to deal with quite a few spammers following you.

Now that you have some information to get you started on twitter, there are some simple rules you can follow to make sure you have a good twitter experience and be successful marketing yourself and/or your brand. Remember to be sociable and keep tweeting – After all it is Social Media Marketing. Support your followers and they will return the favor. Manage your followers, do not just follow anyone. Try to follow other users with similar interests. Don’t forget to use the @reply and RT (re-tweets) features, they will do wonders for you.

Share and Enjoy:

No Comments »

What Type Of Web Hosting Do I Need For My Website?

by Horace Hibbert on September 5th, 2009

In the past I have made a few blunders when I have purchased Web Hosting accounts for my websites. So, I am going to give you the heads up, so those who are new to this can avoid similar pitfalls. Before, deciding on what type hosting you will require, you need research on finding a good hosting company that will ensure your website will be up and running at all times within the 99.9% efficiency. One thing the web has no shortage of is web hosting companies. You will have to consider your budget, and the type of service you are looking for: Self managed or fully managed. If you are simply planning to design a personal website of about 5 pages, your requirements will be pretty simple, where as if you are planning to build an e-commerce website with secure payment capabilities and shopping cart, your requirements will be quite substantial.

What’s Your Budget?

The bottom line, the web hosting service you choose will be determined by how much you can spend and the type of features you end up with. There are web hosting accounts out there ranging from as little as $3.99 per month all the way into paying into the 100’s of dollar per month bracket. While working with your budget, there is couple of things to consider: Are you planning to make a profit from your website? If you creating a website for family and friends. The obvious answer is no. On the other hand, if you planning to make a profit, you will want to secure a web hosting service that comes with all the tools you will need to managed your website at full capacity with no or minimal interruptions – Speed, security and reliability are very important to the success of any online business. This will sure affect the cost of your web hosting account. Trying to cheap your way out of this by purchasing a lesser account not capable of handling your website needs, can and will result in some costly downtime for your business. I have made this mistake in the past and paid for it, where only half of my visitors were able to get to my website and the majority of my emails were not reaching its destination. I lost $1000’s of dollars of potential business over those few months and that was a painful learning experience to be frank.

Free Web Space

There are quite a few free web hosting services available on the internet. However, they do come with some annoyances. Most are pretty restricted: Small amount of disk space, no server-side scripting, very little bandwidth transfer allowance, and no guaranteed uptime. In addition to that, many times these free web hosting companies used your hosting account to deliver advertisements from their advertisers. My advice, only use these services if you are not creating a professional website intended for use by your customers – Perfect for a personal website.

Shared Web Hosting

Shared-Hosting also known as Virtual Hosting by far is the most inexpensive form of web hosting you can purchase. You can find some of these hosting plans for as low as $3.99 per month: More than suitable for small website intended to give your business a web presence. This type of hosting account is very reliable with only a few drawbacks – On some of these servers, shared-hosting accounts can contain many other websites that share the same resources as your website. Too many sites on one server can put quite a load on the server, resulting in a slow site at peak times. Furthermore, you don’t have much control over the server should you need install any special software for more complex web applications. Lastly, all it takes is to have one shared-hosting account compromised and all other sites can or will be compromised as well. This security risk is one to avoid if you are dealing with secure transactions and database management.

Virtual Private Server Hosting

Virtual Private Server (VPS) also known a Virtual Dedicated Server is a perfect go between Shared-Hosting and Dedicated Server Hosting in terms of power and price. Each VPS functions like a standalone PC and is completely isolated from the other virtual private servers running on the same physical server. Having each VPS isolated creates a more secure environment than a regular shared-hosting plan but at much lower cost than a Dedicated Hosting Server. You are able to install any software you wish and thinker with all the bells and whistles, but this means you are managing the server yourself. A scary thought when you have to be installing security updates, fixing problems, and so on – Which requires some degree of server administration skills. There are some companies who offer the best of both worlds: Managed Virtual Private Servers is where the hosting company looks after system updates and fixes, but you still have full control over your server. This option is more expensive than the regular Virtual Private Server.

Dedicated Server Hosting

A Dedicated Server is a standalone Web Server machine that you rent from a hosting company. A Dedicated Server Hosting account gives you full super-user access that gives you full control and the ability install any software, updates and changes you want and need. Dedicated Servers is a step up from the VPS’s and you do not need to worry about any security issues from other servers operating on the same machines. These types of servers are designed to host a high-traffic site or a group of sites, and give full control over the exact configuration of your Web server and its installed applications. Like the Virtual Private Server, you’re responsible for keeping the machine up to date with security patches, as well as installing software and troubleshooting problems with the server.

Managed Server Hosting

A Managed Server also known as a Managed Dedicated Server is managed by your hosting company, however, you maintain full control. No need to worry about installing any upgrades, security patches, or troubleshooting and fixing problems with the server. Managed Dedicated Servers are more expensive than Dedicated Servers since you are paying for the support staff and server costs. This is a perfect solution for running a high-traffic website and without having to worry about the headaches that come with maintaining and keeping a web server up and running.

What type Architecture to Use?

The type of architecture you decide to use on your web server is dependent on the Operating system installed. If you are running a Linux-Based web server, you are likely to use a combination of PHP & MySQL for the application backend and if your operating is Windows, you are more than likely going to use ASP .NET and SQL.

Domain Name Hosting

Your domain name can be hosted at different location than your web hosting account – You just have to point your domain name to the correct DNS addresses associated with your web hosting account. If you do not own a domain name, then you’ll need to find a registrar to register your domain name with. Some well known domain registrars include GoDaddy (I am sure you have seen commercials), Network Solutions, and Yahoo. Once you register your domain name, all you have to do is add the correct DNS addresses which points to your web server.

Share and Enjoy:

1 Comment »

Can I Trick Search Engines Into Coming to My Website?

by Horace Hibbert on September 4th, 2009

To answer the question: Yes. But is this something that you really want to do? There are many Internet Marketers and website owners out there who use Black-Hat SEO Tactics to improve their search engine ranking. These tactics are not legitimate “tactics”. While some may work in the short term, eventually search engines such as Google catch on to you. And when they do, they will penalized your website and sometimes even ban your site. While talking about these tactics, in no way am I promoting or encouraging anyone to use and practice these tactics. You will have to ask yourself, is the short-term gain you might achieve worth getting banned or penalized by these search engines?

Webmasters may attempt to trick search engines into getting a better website ranking with Black-Hat SEO also known as Spamdexing. It is clearly stated in many of the search engines terms and conditions that this method is strictly prohibited. Violators use methods such as doorway pages, invisible text, interlinking, keyword spamming and a few other methods. Believe it or not, the websites that use these methods fall out of the top rankings as fast as they climb and sometimes they never reach the top positions. So if one was to analyze this rationally, Black-Hat SEO is very inefficient and time consuming. Due to nature of the countless amounts of tactics used, only a selected few will be focused on in this posting.

Invisible text

This used to be one of the top methods in the early days. Invisible text is created by setting your text the same color as the background or a color very close to it. One of the first things I learned while learning to create websites was to never put white text on a white background. In fact, you don’t want to even use colors that are closely related such as light yellow background and white text. Search Engines are not dumb, they will figure out that there is no contrast between the two colors. While major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, can easily detect hidden text set to the same color as a background: Some webmasters attempt to get around this by creating an image file the same color as the text and setting the image file as the background. This Black-Hat SEO trick is undetectable at the moment. Using it is considered spam. And be careful, if one of your competitor’s were to see you using this, they may report you – This has the potential to get you blacklisted.

Cloaking

Cloaking refers to showing one page to the search engine and another to the human visitor on your website. There are way too many methods of cloaking to list them all and some still work and are not detectable by search engines.

Keyword Stuffing

Going back to the early days on the web, this tactic was used quite often. Search Engines were not as smart back then as they are now. A webmaster or website owner would simple fill a page with as many relevant keywords as they could and it would result in a good search engine ranking. Surprisingly, this is still one the most common methods used today to spam search engines. This is also a technique that is closely associated with the hidden text Black-Hat SEO technique.

Doorway pages

A page without any real value to it visitors, doorway pages are created specifically for the purpose of ranking well in the search engines by targeting a specific keyword phrase or phrases. The goal of these pages is to hope that once a visitor lands there, they will go to the homepage and continue on from there. Doorway pages are still a popular choice for some SEO firms, even though major search engines such as Google has been cracking down these websites. To reiterate, as mentioned in the above tactics, using a method such as this one will more than likely land you in hot water with the search engines and eventually get penalized and/or banned!

Interlinking

This is a tactic I am fully aware of from visiting many forums and reading what was being discussed by webmasters, Internet Marketers and other website owners. The value of incoming links has become more important over the last few years. The practice of building multiple websites and linking them together to build their overall link popularity is now a common practice by many who try to cheat their way to the top in the search engines. When done correctly, this approach is more difficult to detect than any of the previously mentioned Black-Hat SEO methods. While this tactic is still undetectable, it is still spam and eventually they will get exposed and if your website or websites is linked to this practice you will get penalized.

Over the years I have made a conscious effort to learn how to properly optimize my websites using the proper and acceptable methods of SEO. I have seen the benefits as my sites have relatively maintained their rankings over the years – Even the ones I have not updated.

Share and Enjoy:

No Comments »

Can You Make My Website similar To My Competitor’s?

by Horace Hibbert on September 2nd, 2009

This is a question that I have gotten in the past and still received today from clients and people looking to have a website created. Just having your website created to look like your competitor’s website does not imply you will generate any kind of success. I have found that quite a few clients and people who are about to create a website for the first time tend to have this frame of mind. While it is ok to take a few ideas from competitors, simply copying a competitor’s website will not guarantee your desired results. There are many factors you should consider before you blindly decide to have your new website designed as a carbon copy of your competitor. Some factors to consider for new website owners:

Ask yourself: Are your competitor’s generating any business from their websites?
Are their website’s receiving a lot of traffic?
Are their site’s content optimize for search engines?
Are you aware of the types of marketing efforts your competitors are using to market their websites?
Are your competitors reaching the proper target market?

Those are just a few things you can ask yourself before falling into the trap. More times than not your competitors were clueless when they created their website. Having the wrong content on your website will not convert many sales for your business. If your competitors are not converting, and you follow the same formula, then you are following them into the abyss of nothing.

Before you have your website developed, take some time and do some research. Study your competitors, and understand what you want your website to accomplish before you begin the development process. If you want to learn more about how you can make your website convert and generate sales, you should read this blog post by Mark Ijlal – It should give you something to think about before your create your website.

Share and Enjoy:

No Comments »

Web 2.0 A Term So Widely Used, What Is It?

by Horace Hibbert on September 1st, 2009

Web 2.0 is term that is closely related to Tim O’reily because of the O’reily media web 2.0 Conference in 2004. Web 2.0 according to Wikipedia refers to web development and web design that facilitates interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and mashups. The term all though implying that there is a new World Wide Web, it merely relates to the changes in how software developers and end-users the web. Previously the typical website interact with its users by simply providing information for them to view, where as in today’s Web 2.0 arena website users are interacting with others users and sometimes able to change the website’s content.

While many have taken to the term Web 2.0, there are many opponents of the term. Some claim that Web 2.0 is a trend that is building steadily, while some argue Web 2.0 is just old technologies being used under a new name. The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee has challenged the definition and called the term a “piece of jargon”. Defining characteristics of Web 2.0 such as users collaborating with each other on Social Networking sites was originally intended for the internet he argued. Websites such as Amazon was already implementing user-generated content in the form of book reviews before the term Web 2.0 was coined – We are just at a later stage of Web 1.0.

One of the prominent figures on the pro-side of Web 2.0, O’reily has acknowledged that there are some sufficient exceptions to Web 2.0, such as Amazon to suggesting that less than a full generation shift had occurred. He outlined the details that differentiate Web 2.0 from Web 2.0 in 2005. You can read about the differences in this article.

Whether Web 2.0 is new technology or old technology, the way that web applications are being implemented today has changed the way we use the World Wide Web. With the wide spread of information between end-users on the web, people are being educated on various topics at much faster rate than before. Seeing how website users collaborate and communicate with ease via these so called Web 2.0 apps, Social Networking sites and other tools, businesses have began to take advantage of this new medium to market their brands. Social Media Marketing or Social Influence Marketing is the fastest growing form online advertising today.

Share and Enjoy:

No Comments »