Ever since Google stopped showing accurate backlink (aka incoming link) counts to websites webmasters and SEOs have been forced to turn to other, more accurate tools like Yahoo.

This hasn’t really been all that bad in my opinion but it is refreshing to hear that Google has finally launched a new backlinks analysis tool within Google Webmaster Central.

In case you haven’t noticed, social media optimization (SMO) is the new big search marketing term. I think you’ll be hearing a lot about it this year and thought I’d give you an easy tip to get started.

First think you need to know is what social media optimization is. Basically, it’s just getting exposure and traffic from social media sites like Digg, del.icio.us, MySpace and many others. For a more in depth explanation, check out the new rules for social media optimization.

If search engines are the next great marketing machines, then links are the fuel that drives the mechanism of search engine optimization and rankings. Obtaining quality inbound links might seem like a daunting task, but in actuality there is an effectively simple element to linkbaiting that is often taken for granted.

After Shuman Ghosemajumder posted a pair of blog entries attacking the click fraud assessments and methodologies of companies like Click Forensics, that company’s CEO Tom Cuthbert and a couple of other executives took to the blogosphere to respond.

Believe it or not (and you might not believe it), Cuthbert and Ghosemajumder are not strangers peeking over the tops of opposing trenches, tossing mustard gas and grenades at each other in a virtual sense.

Over the years, I’ve used a lot of third-party components and self built control libraries. It an easy way to add functionality to your code projects – just reference the dll file and that’s it. This encapsulated functionality comes in most cases at a high cost. Imaging that you have an assembly of your homemade ASP.NET controls that you wish to use in your new website. In there you have a custom version of the GridView control that does something smart. On your new website this is exactly what you need, but you need it to behave a little different in a certain situation.

Why is it so hard to make a decision in business? Business requires that people make decisions, and every decision is a risk in some form or another, yet as we deal with business risk management, it seems that management has become more paralyzed by managing risk to such a point that decisions often go unmade.

Project managers dealing with this kind of problem often have to go to great lengths and burn work cycles just to get someone to commit either for or against a project or work.