I came across a great article the other day and thought I would share it with you.

Many of you may already know Tom Peters. If you don't he is one of the most recognised and respected management consultant around.

The article is about "The To-Do List" and sheds new light on how this small piece of paper (or however you write it) can make or break you day and your career.

You can read the article by clicking here.

Elite Business Solutions is pleased to announce it has gained Google's Qualified Advertising Professional status.

This means we have met Google's requirements in terms of our Adwords knowledge and experience to provide a professional and profitable service to our clients.

If you would like to advertise your business online, contact us today.

UK consumers bought GBP8.2bn of goods online last year - up 28.9% on 2004, spending an extra GBP1.8bn online last year.

Online competition
25% of all UK shoppers buy goods over the internet, with the online shopping community growing by 25.5% to 14.6 million people between 2004 and 2005.

Online competition had a significant impact on some traditional stores, with UK retail sales growing by just 1.5% in 2005 - the slowest rate since the early 1960s.

Seasonal boom
One of the biggest growth sectors in online shopping is among the over-55s, spending an average of GBP458 per head, up 46.7%, while shoppers aged 35 to 44 are the biggest spenders, accounting for £3 in every GBP10 of retail sales.

Internet shopping among UK consumers soared almost 50% in the 10 weeks before Christmas, spending GBP4.98bn online during the period.

We are very pleased to announce that we have been awarded Accredited Supplier status for the Business Link Catalyst Grant Scheme.

The scheme is designed to help companies use their on line presence to really help their business prosper and grow. The grant is paid to qualified companies to aid them with their website development and provide additional on line functionality.

Please get in touch with us and we will be glad to discuss how this grant can help you and your business.

Even the big guys get things wrong with dire consequences for their business. Recently BMW's German site was removed from Google for breaching its guidelines. BMW admitted using "doorway pages" to boost its search rankings.

BMW used text-heavy pages liberally sprinkled with keywords to attract the attention of Google's indexing system. However, once a user clicked on the link displayed in Google's results window, they were redirected to a regular BMW Germany page, which contained far fewer of the keywords.

The penalty for breaching Google's guidelines is a ban from all Google's listings for that site(s).

Google's quality guidelines require websites to be designed for users, not for search engines. "Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as 'cloaking'," Google says.

Google confirmed that BMW.de had been removed from search results, adding that it would not tolerate any attempts to manipulate searches. "The quality of our index and search results is of the utmost importance to Google," the company said in a statement.

The moral behind this story is that if you are considering resorting to so called black hat SEO techniques - don't! It could seriously damage your business.