Recently I've been experimenting with creating open link wheels to help boost some pages.  I came across www.harizdesign.com and decided to try their $80 12 property service which sounds pretty good including creation of unique content.

WARNING - DO NOT USE USE THIS COMPANY!!

I had an email from Srihari at Hariz Design saying that he'd send the report after I chased to find out what was going on.  Since I have not had any report and he has not responded to any emails.

Hariz Designs is a blatant rip off and should be avoided at all costs.

Hopefully anyone else finding this will stay well clear of Srihari at Hariz Design.

I've just started to use Sharepoint 2007 and must say it's a powerful product but on first attempts at customisation etc it's quite painful, hopefully this will ease!

Using WSPBuilder is an absolute must to to get you back into Visual Studio.  Anyway today I got stuck with a WSPBuilder "Could not load type" error whilst viewing the deployed webpart in Sharepoint.

This is quite simple to fix:

- Make sure you are using the latest version of WSPBuilder, the older versions have some problems in this area
- Check you have the right assembly name in the aspx file or use the fully qualified name and check the PublicKeyToken!

<%@ Assembly Name="Funky.Sharepoint.Webparts.PageLinksUI, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=72a1fe2990079bf8"%>

The other day I really needed to get to the "Mail" icon in the control panel on my vista desktop.  That's easy you might be thinking!

After spending 5 minutes hunting around switching from classic view then back to normal view and then back to classic etc etc I thought this is damn right stupid the email icon must be there somewhere so after a quick Google I found that you need to do the following in 64bit Vista:

- In control panel switch to classic view
- Click "View 32bit Control Panel Items"
- There it is the email icon, why did Microsoft make it so hard!!

Need to find the month name by its number?

Easy!

CultureInfo.CurrentCulture.DateTimeFormat.GetMonthName(i)

It's important as a business to market yourself in the right places and one good free marketing activity is placing yourself in the "Local Business Listings".  When done correctly this can have fantastic results because your listing can be displayed at the top of Google, absolutely free!

Take my case study:  I'm working on doing SEO and advertising for a new makeup artist website that I created.

One of the activities that I have completed is registering the business in the major search engines local business listings.  You can see the result below when searching for makeup lessons kent:

Although the keywords used to show this listing are not highly competitive it shows how well this technique works by taking up a lot of "real estate" at the top of Google.  I'm also using adwords which can be seen above and  not in the screen shot she also appears a bit further down the page taking up 3 slots on the first page for the tageted keywords.  Within 1 week my client is taking bookings.

Submitting Your Site to Google, Bing and Yahoo Local Listings

- http://Google.com/LocalBusinessCenter

- http://yahoo.infoservegroup.com/business-owner-form.html

- For Bing you need to fill in http://www.marketlocation.com/changereq/

Tips For Completing Your Listing

1. Use an email address associated with your domain
2. Put keyword in business title
3. Select one category that exists from the list
4. Add you own keyword categorys
5. Add as much information as you can including picture, opening hours etc

Hope this helps!

I came across this video today which sounds really useful, I'm going to try this on a couple of small sites and measure the results.

http://www.inlineseo.com/tactics/authority-tagging/

Let me know if you try this and get any good results.

I often visit SEOMoz for good information and now they've published their 2009 SEO roundup which is well worth the read:

Search Ranking Factors

I needed to install Metastorm BPM on my fresh new blazing fast Windows 7 installation this week (why didn't Bill Gates get Vista right the first time!?).

Anyway it's not as bad installing Metastorm as it used to be years ago.

Metastorm BPM 7.6 Installation Notes

1. Install Visual C++ redistributable
   http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=32BC1BEE-A3F9-4C13-9C99-220B62A191EE&displaylang=en
   
2. This part is important: Make sure you have installed the following windows features otherwise the engine will not start and give unhelpful event log messages.
   
   The following Windows features (accessible via Control Panel --> Programs and Features --> Turn Windows features on or off) are required for configuring and installing the Metastorm Web Extensions:                                               
   • Web management tools: All (including IIS 6.0 compatibility)                                                        
   • Application Development features: ASP.NET (which also turns on .NET extensibility, ISAPI Extensions, ISAPI filters)
   • Common HTTP features: Static content, default documentation.
3. Install Metastorm 7.6
4. Make sure you run the following script against your database:
   %programfiles%\Metastorm BPM\Engine\Database\SQL scripts\eWorkProcedures2005SpecificEnhancements.sql

Once you have the base installation tested and working installing SR2 is easy after this.

We've all seen it, you end up on a blog and you'll be reading the nice helpful comments and then suddenly "cash loans - Nice post mate!".  (I get them on here a lot as well...delete, no thank you Mr Spammer).

Google has recently posted an entry on the Web Master Tools Blog about its stance on blog spammers:
hard facts about comment spam.

It's an interesting read about comment spamming but it's also interesting to read the comments and opinions of others which is quite natural.  On the subject of natural, link building needs to look natural and we all know the best type of links are links with the same theme as your site and from a good authority domain.

You can find numerous cheap Indian companies that offer "300 backlinks" for say $250 but these bad companies just comment spam every blog possible regardless of theme creating lots of devalued links that doesn't help anyone.

Considering the above people should not stop commenting and if you like reading blogs and leaving useful comments on the same theme as your site whilst building links naturally (they may or may not have much value) then you can find blogs that don't have NOFOLLOW by using search engines to find known blog commenting systems that will actually create a back link.

NOTE: I personally use this technique for experimenting with new sites to actually measure the effect of the aforementioned blog commenting and other SEO tactics.  The community is full of different opinions on the subject so I find it best just to try it myself and monitor the results.

Blog Comment Finder

• http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver/
  Just type your keywords into the search box!
  
  
• http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_en-GBGB341GB341&q=%22blog+comments+powered+by+DISQUS%22+%2Bmakeup&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=
  Google search for blogs powered by disqus and enter your keywords on the end (makeup in this example)
  
  
• http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUK354&q=%22powered+by:+BlogEngine.NET+%22+%2Bwedding&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=
  Another Google search like above but for blogengine.net blogs and keywords

If you've been trying out Asp.Net MVC 2 you might come across this error:

This request has been blocked because sensitive information could be disclosed to third party web sites when this is used in a GET request.

But it worked in MVC 1.0!  There is a security vulnerability using JQuery AJAX GET requests (JSON Hijacking) and in MVC 2 get requests  are blocked by default.  You can get around the problem and leave the security problem by adding JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet when you return the JSON result:

   1: public JsonResult FindByCoordinates(string latitude, string longitude)

   2: {

   3:     IList<Object> records = new List<Object>

   4:         {

   5:             new 

   6:                 {

   7:                     Lat = "0.1122",

   8:                     Long = "51.12212"

   9:                 }

  10:         };

  11:  

  12:     return new JsonResult { Data = (records), JsonRequestBehavior = JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet };

  13: }

The better approach is to avoid the possibility of JSON hijacking and use JQuery post instead:

   1: $.ajax({

   2:     type: "POST",

   3:     contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",

   4:     url: "/Home/FindEscortsByCoordinates",

   5: ....

   6: ....

Hope this helps anyone that comes across this.