Just a warning to anyone researching Titanize online data backup service by Opelin, Inc. — DO NOT give them your business, your money or your good faith.

They have you prepay for one year by PayPal, which I’ve found out means that when their software quits working and they won’t answer your emails or calls for support, you’re screwed, since PayPal won’t help you either.

I’m pasting below a copy of the dispute I tried to file with PayPal, but they said didn’t meet the eligibility for dispute. Basically, I’m out my money, Titanize by Opelin, Inc. has it, and they care nothing about their customers. Thank God I know a thing or two about SEO and can hopefully get this warning posted out on the internet to be found by their potential customers.
== My Dispute Attempt Via PayPal ==

I have called and left messages at the (408) 404 - 9470 number on your website. I’ve sent emails to your support address  support@Titanize.com. The software quit working a couple of weeks ago and will not track my watched files or does not even realize that I already have almost 5 GB uploaded. My account settings shows I’m using this space, but the software will not show the files or retain watched file locations. I uninstalled, redownloaded the software and reinstalled, and it did not help. Nothing in your help files addresses this.

This obviously makes the software USELESS. It did this before and then started working after a few days, and the email I sent support back then was not answered for a couple of weeks. The nature of needing file backup REQUIRES dependable connection, which your product does not supply. Furthermore, I cannot get support at all. You had me prepay one year for a software that DOES NOT WORK. I want a refund, prorated is fine, but I want my money back for the rest of the year’s prepayment. I don’t even want support, as I have ZERO faith in your product or your ability to offer any kind of support.

A client who we are doing some search engine optimization work for was wondering why, despite the fact that we have been working on SEO for his site for 3 months and have dramatically increased his traffic - why he was not getting any inquiries. His complaint was that he was paying us, but not getting a return on that investment.

My answer to him was the same as it had been the first time we spoke on the phone, the day I drove over to his office to meet with him, and pretty much every time I have been in contact with him since. His site (which we did not build) was absolutely NOT built to get conversions, meaning getting the site visitor to TAKE ACTION, to contact this business.

It’s not enough to get traffic, you’ve gotta get that traffic to DO SOMETHING that will give you the lead!

Despite the fact that our client specificially did not hire us to perform the revamp of his website that would help his conversion, I’m a nice person. And I truly want him to see - and GET - the great value we’re providing. So, I added some simple contact forms to his site.

BOOM! Overnight, leads started pouring into his inbox, and in the two weeks since we added the forms, he’s trending up. We have already reached his goal of how many leads he wanted from his site daily, but we still have a few weeks to go on our retainer, and will be seeing more and more as we continue to bring in more traffic.

What did we do? Simply found great, highly targeted keywords, optimized his site extremely well on page, started building links, and added a few forms. He went from a “useless” website to one that delivers very high quality leads right to his inbox. That’s fun!

(In case you’re wondering, I’m not going to reveal this site because of the competition that we are battling for search placement. I don’t want my good marketing techniques getting ripped off by the other sites in this space!)

Folks in my close circle that spend a lot of time with me know that one of my heroes is a cheeky Aussie web design company owner, marathon runner, family man, Scout troop president, and all around great fellow - Brendon Sinclair of Tailored Consulting.

Well, Brendon loves to state the fact that he ranks number one in Google for the search term “World’s Best Web Designer” and in fact, he ranks number one AND two for that term. Good on you Brendon!

So, in honor of Brendon, I’m making this little ‘ole post to see if I can at least rate 2nd best in the whole wide world behind him. Let’s see if this post propells me into have the prestige of being named the World’s Second Best Web Designer! I’ll have to keep an eye on it…

Awhile back we had the pleasure to do some work for Ed Dale, customizing his WordPress blog. He and Frank Kern had a loyal group of “undies” that were student’s of their Underachiever Life method of marketing. We gave their blog a great branded look and tricked it out with things to make their blogging easier and more fun.

Well, things change, and the blog has morphed into Ed’s own blog, where he shares his life and insights with the world. Last week Ed contacted me and asked for a revamp of the site. I was thrilled to oblige, and set out giving the blog a new look. We also performed some pretty hard core advanced search engine optimization work on the code, ensuring that Ed’s blog will make an even bigger splash for him on Google and beyond.

Cheers, Ed, thanks for your business! We love you!

Oh, here’s what it looks like. Take a look and post your comments if you’re so inclined.

There’s an incredible video on YouTube.com that shows the power of subliminal marketing. Watch is closely, it will blow your mind. Just goes to show that really and truly everything we do matters!

Ha Ha! It’s been six days and voi la! This blog is number one and two for the search term I targeted: “Roketa Bermuda MC-11 150cc Scooter.”

What a great experiment!

Tonight John Reese asked some SEO questions regarding blogging and Beers Design founder Lisa Beers commented her answers. Below is a synopsis, but click here to read John’s original post and all the comments he got.

–Lisa’s Answers–

I think there are other SEO issues that are more critical to bloggers than these, in terms of title and meta tags and avoiding duplicate content primarily. I actually don’t use plugins for these issues, as I’ve never found any that were totally satisfactory. We do some code adjustments that work much better.

1. My opinion is that URL structure is a non-issue. Google will waif about on this type of thing. One thing is best, then another. Filenames containing keywords used to be very helpful. Now not so much, in blogs or otherwise. It’s not worth spinning around on. All other factors being 100% the same, it will help. But that really never happens. And if all else where the indeed the same, I wouldn’t try to beat them on URLs…2. Shorter URLs are best. Back in the day with Alta Vista and then Yahoo, now with Google. Closer to root has always been best. But bots are smarter now, so you can have a reasonable 3+ level site if the architecture is good and see no detriment. IF the architecture is good….

3. Tags… ah…. tags. They’re wonderful in the blogosphere, not that important out of it. They’re a “blogosphere” child and will help bring traffic through Technorati and other such sites, but not all that valuable elsewhere. I know many will disagree on this, but it’s the cold data of dozens of sites we work on speaking here. We add on such an easy way to tag (that actually also helps client clarify their key phrases per post to help with other ‘layman’ SEO) that it’s totally worth doing for what benefit it brings.

4. He He, pagerank and nofollow - well, this is a BROAD and quite technical topic indeed! FIRST, you do need to be quite certain of what you’re doing in the overall sense of your site before trying to use “nofollow” in your site to push PR. Using nofollow can certain help a site with well thought out SEO architecture. As for blogs, there are loads of considerations with the way that content is dynamically generated that have to be addressed. Honestly, on a blog, I believe it’s more trouble than it’s worth to try to do extensive IA (information architecture) on them. I believe their power is in the ‘common man’ of the posts. And I think that’s part of why they are currently in favor with the engines.

You can certainly ‘nofollow’ certain blog pages, and even write the php to ‘nofollow’ more extensively, but my question is, why do that in the age of the long tail? I like to take a “traditional” website and do extensive IA on it with ‘nofollow’ and such, and then set up a blog for the “free for all long tail” factor and do traffic pushing.

I’m doing a little test tonight simply to see the outcome of ranking for the keyword phrase “Roketa Bermuda MC-11 150cc Scooter.” I’ll have to set my Outlook to remind me to come back to those search results in a few days and see how it goes!

Actually, the reason I’m looking at this is that my hubby is considering getting scooter to go back and forth to work on since gas prices are so high and we all just tired to being subjegated to the oil companies!

Hum… I’m very curious to see how this goes…

While article submission isn’t anything shockingly new to the world of SEO, many people STILL don’t do it… and for good reason. It takes so incredibly long to do manually.

I’ll admit, I had tried article submission at one point, but after I finally found a few article dircetories to submit my articles to, and then after manually copying and pasting my information into the required textboxes on each submission site, I quickly realized that my time could be better spent doing something else.

Then I came across a free program created by Brad Callen and Bryxen Software, Inc. that allows you to automatically submit your articles to hundreds of article directories with a few mouse clicks. Basically all I had to do was input my article criteria into the software, ONCE! Then, the program would automatically fill in all of the required data at each of the submission websites. Pretty incredible if you ask me.

The only part I didn’t understand was why the program is free… but I can’t argue with that I suppose.

The software currently contains around 700 article directories, all free to submit your articles to. It is the most straightforward program that we’ve come across, in that all you need to do is:

1. Input your article details (i.e. title, article body, bio, etc.) into the software

2. Click on the directory you want to submit to

And then the program will automatically fill in your article details. Then, you simply click the submit button and your article is instantly submitted to the directory. Then, you can move to the next directory, go through the list, and by the time you’re finished you’ll have roughly 700 one way links pointing to your website.

I can’t think of an easier way to get links. Of course, if you’re going to get links this quickly, it’s important to submit different variations of your articles, to make things look more natural to the search engines.

You can do this very easily via Article Submitter when you create your project in the beginning.

The software is constantly being updated and their is an incredible community of users established that all work together to make the software better and better, so you know you’re getting great value for the money.

To check out the software, click this link.

This relates to the recent post about Adwords quality scoring that Google started rolling out last summer. It’s all about providing the best search to regular folks out there searching for stuff online. And Google doesn’t want just great regular search results, but also great Adwords results.

Frequently I hear advertisers comment that they just can’t believe that Google would turn away their money if Google doesn’t love what they’re doing. Yeap, they sure will. Here’s an except from a NY Daily Post article from a couple of days ago. Click through and read the whole thing.

By HOLLY M. SANDERS

The search giant has notified a number of Web publishers in the last few days that they will be dropped from its popular “AdSense” program starting June 1.

Keep reading article…