SEO is constantly changing but some basic things are always the same. Here is my list of basic search optimization tips that always were effective for me.

1. Content is the most effective linkbuilding tool

Your posts should be interesting, useful and unique. You can get tons of quality backlinks from hundreds and thousands of sites absolutely for free only by writing posts. Otherwise your visitors will not subscribe to your RSS feed, Twitter or Facebook updates and they will never come back or even remember your site or blog. Writing useful texts takes a lot of time but it worth it.

2. Update your website on a regular basis

You can experiment with updating your blog and find which way works for you. For example I feel comfortable to write posts on my blogs about 2-3 times a week.

3. Write posts only when you are motivated

That’s my golden rule. I write blog posts only when a feel that motivation for doing that. If I don’t have motivation I don’t write anything. It’s much better to do something else - go for a walk, read websites or magazines, watch movie, listen to the music, etc.

4. Use relevant keyword in meta tags, title and first sentence of blog post

When writing a blog post always use relevant keywords in it’s first sentence and title. Also use it in meta tags such as title, description and keywords. That way your post will become relevant to your keywords and you’ll get better rankings in search engines.

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Everyone knows Twitter. Twitter is a popular social service for bloggers and webmasters. They use it to bring more traffic,  RSS subscribers and followers to their websites.

A retweet on Twitter allows you to share your posts with current followers and their friends. If your content gets a lot of retweets it goes far beyond your follower pool. In other words, if your blog posts gets a lot of retweets you can get a lot of visitors.

These tips will help you to get more retweets and bring more traffic to your site or blog. Here are my 10 tips to get more retweets.

1. Try to get more followers

One of the best ways to get more followers is to put icon with a link to your Twitter microblog on your website. If your visitors will like your blog posts they can easily follow you on Twitter. That will potentially increase the number of retweets.

2. Ask for a retweet

A small request for a retweet directly in the message will also increase the chances that your followers will retweet your message. This may look like this: RT please.

Do not use it in every message. It’s much better to ask for retweet only for your best posts.

3. Give something back

If you want to get many retweets do not forget to retweet interesting links from your followers. If you want to get something from your followers you should give something back.

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Everyone wants more Facebook fans. Do you have a Facebook page? If you want to gain even more fans, you should improve your Facebook page and then follow these 10 steps.

1. Update your Facebook page regularly. Updating it on a regular basis is the way to gain more visitors and achieve higher rankings in the search engines.

2. Your status updates should not be too long. Keep in mind that Facebook status update has 420 character limit. Try to make it not longer than 100-140. I suggest you to follow Twitter’s 140 rule to keep your updates short and digestible.

3. Organize Facebook activities for your fans. Run a couple of events to keep your Facebook fans active.

4. Create photo albums on your Facebook page. To do that go to the “Photos” tab on your Facebook profile and click the “Create a Photo Album”.

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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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