Using social media sites like Digg, Stumbleupon and Twitter is a great way to gain popularity and getting visitors to your web site.

I found these free online tools for monitoring your social media backlinks. You can also use them for analyzing social media backlinks of your competitors. This is very useful for discovering methods that another sites use for promoting in social media.

Socialscan.com - this free social media backlink checker is one of my favorite. This is a tool for checking a website link popularity among popular social sites like Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Myweb, Technorati, Shadows, Bloglines, Simpy, Blinklist, Diigo and Furl.

Socialmention.com - one of the best social media backlink tools around. You can sort mentions by date, source, postrank and filter results. Socialmention is a real time search platform. You can receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, marketing campaign, on a developing news story or a competitor. There is another great feature - you can display realtime social buzz on your site or blog.

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Today’s guest at MikeShakin.com is Loren Baker, Editor in Chief of world famous SEO resource Search Engine Journal. This interview was originally given for my Russian blog Shakin.ru but i decided to publish it’s English version on this blog. I appreciate that Loren took time to answer my questions.

Loren, thanks for the interview. When did you first get involved with search marketing?

Thanks for interviewing me. I first got involved with search marketing in 1999 when I was a university student. I was looking for an internship in advertising and marketing as I was majoring in both fields. A lot of students were taking jobs at large businesses, but I found an opportunity interning for a small online marketing consultant, and took a chance in a field which was it its infancy at the time, but I knew it would be a challenge and would result in a lot of opportunity.

Now, search marketing is a huge industry and almost all businesses use search to gain customers or sell products. It was a good choice.

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

I really do not clock my hours, but I would guess that I more or less work about 12 hours a day.

I usually wake up in the morning and check email, reply to tweets, check rankings, analytics and drink coffee for about an hour. then I review blog posts in draft mode on Search Engine Journal, moderate comments, track search news and view some forums for another hour or so.

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Twitter and Google’s Real-Time Search are this year’s main buzz and so far it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Google has announced it’s real time search feature on 7th of December, 2009.

Real time search brings a dynamic stream of real-time content to enhance regular search results. Google users can see a scrollable area on the Google results page.

I like the idea of real-time results in Google SERPs. I’m sure that new feature extends the usefulness of search engines.

What Google’s Real Time Search Means to SEO now and in the future?

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Twitter is getting more and more popular. It’s a great tool for learning SEO and tracking SEO industry news.

Twitter can be fantastic place for getting link building ideas and new search engine marketing tips. Many underground conversations go on within Twitter that never make it to the blogosphere and SEO blogs. Twitter conversations can be extremely useful for ranking high on search engine.

Here is my list of top 1o SEO gurus you should follow on Twitter.

@SEJournal -  Search Engine Journal - established in 2003 by Loren Baker, is a publication of Search & Social Media, LLC, which specializes in a community approach to the reporting of search engine news & the sharing of Search Engine Marketing knowledge & tactics.

@annsmarty - Ann is the Associate Editor of Search Engine Journal, a seasoned SEO blogger and manages guest bloggers on Search Engine Journal. Ann’s posts usually revolve around lists of SEO resources, SEO tool reviews and other technical SEO issues.

@sengineland - Search Engine Land, famous resource for SEO news and information about search engine marketing, optimization and how search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live.com and Ask.com work for searchers.

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