Google is already complaining about the potential sale of Yahoo to Microsoft. Can’t blame them for giving it a go though really - any attempt at holding off potentially major competition is understandably a good thing in their eyes.

Will it work? Well Microsoft have had a bad history of getting into trouble for anti-trust and anti-competition laws. Whilst these recent events don’t fall under the same category of industry, the bare rules still stand. I do believe it will take a significant amount of investigation to consider the negative potential of this Internet portal monopoly. This is even more true when you consider the number of services associated with these two companies, including instant messaging and E-mail.

It’s the foundation of almost all online businesses. Getting traffic to your website is essential as visitors can then be turned into paying customers.

There are two factors involved in website traffic. The number of visitors and the quality of traffic. Numbers are important for the obvious reason – the more people who see what you have to offer, the more customers you are likely to get.

Target quality of traffic is also vitally important and sometimes overlooked. The more targeted your traffic is, the larger number of sales you will receive in a given number of visitors – it increases your conversion rate.

I’ve recently been posting on various marketing forums and I’ve been alerted to something some people still don’t seem to be sure about.

When optimizing your website for the search engines, backlinks are an integral part of achieving good rankings. The more good, relevant backlinks you have, the more important your website appears to Google and other search engines.

GOOD is the critical word here. The quality of backlinks is very important when building them. An acceptable balance must be reached but quality should always be taken instead of quantity. You’re better off spending more time adding to quality directories instead of many cheap, low PR directories - for example.