Todays guest at MikeShakin.com - Gerald Weber, president of Search Engine Marketing Group in Houston, TX. You can also follow him on Twitter - @the_gman. I appreciate that Gerald took time to answer my questions.

Gerald, please give our readers a bit of your professional background. How did you get into Search Engine Marketing?

I started out working for a local search marketing company doing sales. I was actually doing a pretty good job at selling SEO/SEM services to business owners, but the company I was working for kept changing the commision structure every time I started to hit the goals. In other words, they were trying to make sure I didn’t get too much money so they could keep their own wallets nice and fat. In December of 2005, I had enough of this treatment and decided to hang my own shingle and here we are today.This is the point I decided it was time to learn SEO

How many hours do you work daily and what are your daily tasks?

Well this varies really, but generally speaking, I try to keep my work day in the normal business hours range i.e. 9am to 5pm CST(about 8 hours). However, it’s certainly not uncommon that I find myself doing work at very odd hours. That’s the life of an entrepreneur, and I like it that way.

The way I keep myself on track is by making daily to do lists. I write out all of my tasks the day before, and then I just go through and check off each task as it’s completed. This keeps me focused and meeting my daily goals. Too many entrepreneurs overlook the importance of getting organized. Being disorganized can kill your business, no matter how good you are at what you do.

My daily tasks generally consist a large percentage of link building, Adwords management and communicating with my staff to ensure that other tasks are completed in a timely manner.

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Long-tail keywords are extremely useful for SEO. Basically long-tail keywords are opposite to head (or popular) keywords that more frequently searched by users. For example, “real estate” is a head term, but “affordable real estate in Brooklyn” is a long-tail keyword.

Long-tail keywords are especially effective in large ecommerce sites, where thousands of pages are indexed by Google and other search engines.

If you optimize your website pages for long-tail keywords, you should very quickly begin to see results from it in sales and traffic because this strategy is good for selling products. The important thing about long-tail that many niche products have a potential to generate a huge volume of sales. The long-tail keywords help to realize this potential for website owner.

Just take a look at Amazon or eBay. According to Chris Anderson’s research, Amazon.com makes 57% of sales from keywords outside of “head” terms. Search for some niche products and you will figure out that long tail keywords are really helpful for selling.

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Today’s guest at MikeShakin.com is Dave Olson, Community Director of HootSuite Media, Inc. Hootsuite is my favorite Twitter tool. I appreciate that Dave took time to answer my questions. I also appreciate help of Mike Abasov, Marketing Ambassador, HootSuite Media Inc., to organize this interview.

Thanks for talking with us, Dave. Let’s start with what Hootsuite is. In a world of Twitter clients, what does the new and improved Hootsuite offer that is different or better than any of the competing tools available?

HootSuite is designed for social media managers and agencies who need to manage multiple accounts collaboratively with teams. We also aim to make a tool which allows you to manage all aspects of a social media powered campaign in one dashboard. This means you can broadcast messages across networks, monitor conversations with searches, understand audience behaviour, analyze click stats and much more - all from one tool. In other words, it’s specifically designed for professionals using social media to power outreach efforts.

How long did it take to get Hootsuite from brainstorming to final product? What was the hardest part of work?

The product is never “final” per se, and it was only a few months from idea to first version. We iterate rapidly with new versions almost monthly and frequent releases of apps and platforms.

A few months after the first release, came HootSuite 2.0 which added the columns layout among other tools. This year, we’ve released team collaboration tools, a new HTML 5 version and too many tools (including influence measuring, Google Analytics integration and customer insights) to list. We’ve also started on a crowd-sourced translation project to add more languages. So we’re never done, and the hardest part is wanting to go faster, faster, faster…

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Google Chrome is an excellent tool for SEO. It’s fast and simple. You can use it in your everyday SEO routine - there are many different SEO extensions for Google Chrome.

The main thing is not to install all of them. Just try few of them and choose the best extension that will fit your needs and use it for your daily SEO tasks.

Here are the best Google Chrome SEO extensions that I found.

1. SeoQuake

SeoQuake download page.

I think that this one is number one. SeoQuake is a SEO extension (toolbar) for Google Chrome, it shows PR, Alexa rank, Yahoo Backlinks and other of SEO parameters, also works right in search engine result page.

Here is a full list of SeoQuake: Google PageRank, Google Index, Yahoo links, Yahoo linkdomain, Bing index, Alexa Rank, Webarchive age, Delicious index, Whois link, Page source, SEMRush rank, Nofollow links.

2. SeoQuake Lite

If you need light version of SeoQuake, you can download SeoQuake Lite here, it’s fast and simple.

Display the Google PageRank and Alexa rank of any webpages, in your browser (right-bottom).
It’s similar the SearchStatus for FireFox but it works in Chrome.

3. Chrome SEO

You can download Chrome SEO here.

This extension is one my favorite. Chrome SEO can help you with Competitive Analysis, Keyword Research, Backlink Checks, PageRank Checks and other daily SEO tasks.

More than 100,000 webmasters and SEO specialists use Chrome SEO.

Google Chrome SEO is an extension for the webmaster interested in SEO. It has huge list of features: Keyword Research Tool, Highlight NoFollow links, The number of Pages Indexed, The number of Backlinks, Current Traffic and Rankings, Social Bookmark counts, Cached Versions of the page, Domain Details like DNS, IP, Whois, Server Location.

Chrome SEO works with the following sources: Archive.org, Alexa Rank, Compete Rank, CoralCDN, Ask, Baidu, Bing, Delicious, Digg, Dmoz, Google PageRank, MajesticSEO, Open Site Explorer, Quantcast, SEMRush, SEOmoz, Linkscape, StumbleUpon, Technorati, WebCite, Yandex Quotation Index, Yahoo.

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