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BY SEO-SPECIALIST-LONDON: http://www.seo-specialist-london.com/blog/

SEO Interview Questions & Answers

22nd Sept, 2010

Technical / Tactics

Every SEO prefers certain tactics over others, but familiarity with many could indicate a deeper understanding of the industry. And while every SEO doesn't need to have a web developer background, having such skills can help set someone apart from the crowd.

Q. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.

Answer: My experience is mainly with my own site www.seo-specialist-london.co.uk and four other sites of my clients. So far, all these sites are doing well on the first page of Google and other major search engines. I am in the process of starting another three projects, which consists of dating sites and software development sites.

Q. Can you write HTML code by hand?

Answer: Yes as an Search Engine Optimizer we need to have HTML knowledge to write meta tags, creating site maps and hyper links. Also some times to redesign the structure of a site. I am well capable of to doing that. Besides that I also use FrontPage and Dreamweaver for site editing.

Q. Could you briefly explain the PageRank algorithm?

Answer: PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determine a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

In simple terms, Google uses the gross number of inbound links to a page to determine how important the page is. This "pagerank" has little to do with actual search results but can make a difference on user behaviour.

Q. How you created any SEO tools either from scratch or pieced together from others?

Not so far, but I do make use of many tools already available on the internet.

Q. What do you think of PageRank?

Answer: Well PageRank is a way in which Google gives different values to sites from 0 to 10 numbers that depends on various factors like inbound links, age of the site, and quality of content.

In relation to SEO projects, it is relatively unimportant but can give an indication of how much work needs to be done in gaining inbound links.

Q. What do you think of using XML sitemaps?

Answer: XML Sitemaps are very useful way of introducing searching engines about all the pages on your site which sometimes cannot be discovered by crawlers. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a capital S—is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process. There is no requirement for any sitemap, your pages will get indexed without them if you pay close attention to navigation within your site.

Q. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?

Answer: Web 2.0 technologies has changed all the trends and also helped allot internet users as you know in web 2.0 there are so many features like blogging, RSS-Generated syndication, social bookmarking, mash-ups, wikis and other collaborative applications, Google Base and other free Web services , interactive encyclopaedias and dictionaries these all features are very help full for SEO. AS we can use these all feature for web promotions so I think its an advantage to have this technologies as an SEO.

Q. What SEO tools do you regularly use?

Answer: There is a very long list of all Free SEO Tools which we are available online. Here is a small list of SEO Tools that I mostly use.

Google adwords keyword tool; Google has built this tool to choose the right keywords for a website. This tool is very effective in quality keyword research.

WEBCeo; One of the best tool I ever came across, Its all in one tool and its free

SEOBook Tools: SEOBOOK present a collection of Free and Featured SEO Tools which are very helpful for SEO Service Provider. Inspite of SEO Tools they provide SEO Tutorials for learner and for Experience SEO Professionals.

SEOChat Tools: This is another site which provide a List of SEO Tools and SEO Tutorial for the use of all SEO Community.

RSS Feed Creator: This is a Free Tool for creating RSS in XML file which can be used to syndicate site content.

XMLSitemap Generator Tool, Backlink checking tool, HTML code validation tools and others.

Q. Under what circumstances would you look to exclude pages from search engines using robots.txt vs meta robots tag?

Answer: Usually I would use the robots.txt to keep a search engine from indexing an entire directory on a site. This would often be directories dealing with admin functions or directories that only contain script or image libraries and payment gateways.

Q. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?

Answer: T ext on page! Search engines utilize text and only text in providing search results. That text is found in many place including the URLs, title tags, description tags, headers and footers of your pages, and also content of the pages.

Q. Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?

Answer: I have good experience in "copywriting" I have done it to my own site as well as to my client sites. Also I have a blog too, all of these sites are doing good so far in all major search engines.

Q. Have you ever had something you've written reach the front-page of Digg? Sphinn? Or be Stumbled?

Answer: Not yet! I am not particularly worried about it but I will try to write in such a way that others would be noticed to submit my articles.

Q. Explain to me what META tags matter in today's world.

Answer: The most important META tag for SEO is your page description. Search engines do make use of this tag but it does not outweigh the title or visible text. The META keywords tag is not much of a factor in the major search engines but should not be overlooked.

Q. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?

Answer:

1. Get to know the purpose and goals of the website.
2. Run a website analytics report.
3. Analyze what needs to be done on a priority basis.
4. Check the content relevancy of the site.
5. Perform a keyword analysis to find best performing keywords that suits the business.
6. Examine site navigation
7. Check the existence of robots.txt and sitemap and examine those for effectiveness.
8. Make recommendations for changes needed for the site and each individual page.

Q. If the company whose site you've been working for has decided to move all of its content to a new domain, what steps would you take?

Answer: I would update the old site with permanent redirects using 301 code to new domain for every page. Then I would attempt to remove old content from the major search engines to avoid duplicate content issues.

Q. Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important "on page" elements

Answer: #1 Page Content being relevant to expected search terms and keywords.
    # 2 would then be page titles and descriptions.
    # 3 navigation within the site is easy to understand for the search engines.
    # 4 would be "alt" attributes for images and other media presented on pages and Sitemaps

Q. What do you think about link buying?

Answer: I discourage the practice for the most part. There are more effective means of paid marketing. One exception would be purchasing listings in highly reputable directories such as Yahoo directory.

Q. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI Indexing)?

Answer: LSI/LSA stands for Latent semantic indexing/Latent semantic analysis, is used by Google primarily to detect spam, in respect of excessive repetition of keywords in order to fool the search engines into providing a high listing for that keyword. There was a time when smart people could indeed achieve this simply by writing a meaningless template with rotating synonyms into which any keyword could be multiply inserted by means of software. Thousands of pages could be generated in minutes, each targeting a different keyword. Some were making $thousands daily from Adsense using this method.

Q. What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?

Answer: In regards to search results, it is a method that search engines such as google use to determine relevance of a page based on phrases acutally used in a document. For example, if you have a page instructing people on wildlife photography, the search engine would reasonably expect to see terms and phrases such as "selecting a camera", "appraoching wildlife", and "low light photo conditions". Related phrases will add to the relevance of a page where unrelated phrases will reduce the relevance of a page. This is one technique that Google is using to weed out "spam" sites.

Q. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

Answer: SEO is Search Engine Optimization and is the process you use in getting better search engine ranking results for your pages. Typical SEO activities may include optimising the HTML and other content of your website for relevant, targeted key phrases in order to attain higher organic listings than competing websites.

SEM is Search Engine Marketing and involves purchasing advertising space on search engine result pages like Sponsored listings (that you see at the top in a Google Search Engine Results Page). You generally use SEM via Paid Inclusion into a search engine/directory, Traditional Ads on SERP's and via Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising (Google Adwords, Yahoo Ad Campaign etc).

Both are related in a way that both work towards increasing traffic to your site. Nevertheless, SEO must be your first step in promoting your site as Good SEO would avoid you to spend additional money on advertising and paid placement.

Q. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks?

Answer: I check the competitors backlinks to find hightly relevant sites and request a link from them. If reciprocal linking is required, I may be able to place a link back to them in a relevant portion of a page on the site but if not, I will state so and may not gain that link. Another method I use is to submit press releases, articles, and blogs to relevant media.

Q. What role does social media play in an SEO strategy?

Answer: Social media such as social networking sites and news sites can provide viral marketing. Viral marketing has proven to be powerful if the content of a site is appealing. It can bring good amount of traffic if done properly.

Q. What things wouldn't you do to increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?

Answer: I would avoid blackhat techniques such as invisible texts, automated directory submissions, circulating spamming email campaigns, unethical site re-directions.

Q. What's the difference bewtween PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?

Answer: Pagerank is very difficult algorithm. In short the more websites are linking to your domain the higher pagerank will your site get. This is real pagerank. It is updated in real time so if you get a few links pointing to your web today your real pagerank will be increased as soon as the spider will find these links.

If you install Google toolbar you will see the toolbar pagerank value. It is good tool for webmasters to get an idea how important is the visited website. Toolbar pagerank is updated only a few times a year. For this reason it may happen that new website has no toolbar pagerank but ranks well.

People are sometimes confused why they dont rank better in SERPs when their toolbar pagerank increases. You should keep in mind that these values has really nothing to do with your website ranking. Only real pagerank has impact on the SERPs.

Q. Why might you want to use nofollow on an internal link?

Answer: The sites that have shopping carts, member login, logout links, payment gateways, photo galleries and any administrative functions, these pages do not play any role in SEO ranking; it has nothing to contribute to the site content. Hence search engines do not need to index those pages.

Analysis

A big part of SEO involves assessing the effectiveness of a campaign both relative to past performance as well as to competing sites.

Q. Are you familiar with web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?

Answer: Yes I am and the tool I use most frequently is Google's analytics tools. I also use Pears Analytics tool and Yahoo hosting tools for my own sites. To check source of the traffic coming from, the amount of time they are spending on each page, conversion rates, bouncing rates, also to check which keywords visitors are using the most.

Q. From an analytics perspective, what is different between a user from organic search results vs. a type-in user?

Answer:  A user coming into your site from an organic search usually has never visited your site before or is performing a general search for a specific product or topic. These visitors are trying to find the site that most suits their needs. A "type-in" user is specifically interested in your website. They may have found your URL in print advertising or from a friend. Often, these users are familiar with what you are offering and are coming back to your site as a repeat visitor.

Q. How do you distinguish the results of your search optimization work from a seasonal change in traffic patterns?

Answer: Search patterns naturally change throughout the year. To capture relevant traffic yearlong, consider adding seasonal keywords. By creating separate ad groups or campaigns for seasonal keywords and associated ads, you can target seasonal searches at the right time.

For example, a chocolate company might want to create campaigns for events like Easter and Mother's Day that only run in the lead-up to these times of year. These seasonal campaigns should contain keywords that directly relate to that seasonal theme such as buy Easter eggs or Mother's Day chocolates .

Q. How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?

Most people have a plan and most people have some sort of metric for judging success. In our internal SEO training class, I have pointed out that more than one metric can be contrived for measuring success or failure in a search optimization campaign. Here are a few examples:

• Number of estimated monthly visitors
• Number of New visitors
• Number of re-visitors
• Number of conversions
• Number of top ten rankings you achieve
• Number of page views
• Time spending on the each page
• Number of search referrals

Q. What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?

Answer: Competitive analysis means taking a close look at your top competitors websites and compare those sites to the one you are optimizing. Have a close look at what methods they employed that are working them are a valuable source for ideas.

Q. If you've done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven't been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?

Answer: I will treat the website as an entirely new project, again I will start from site analysis, re-checking the density of keywords and phrases that I have applied, I would look into modification in major areas such as page content, page titles and description, If the site is not yet indexed or has been dropped from an index, there are major problems and the site may require a total re-work and re-submission.

Q. How many target keywords should a site have?

Answer: I advise not more than three or four well related keyword phrases. This allows for more effective optimization.

Q. How do *you* help a customer decide how to their budget between organic SEO and pay-per-click SEM?

Q. You hear a rumour that Google is weighting the HTML LAYER tag very heavily in ranking the relevance of its results - how does this affect your work?

Answer: I Think its just a rumour for now, I have not noticed anything as such so far, but never mind necessity is the mother of invention so we might come up with some solution for that soon if it is to be true.

Q. Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?

Answer: Wikipedia is an established authority! As such, it is referenced by huge numbers of topics, people, organizations and other documents with links back to Wikipedia.

Industry Involvement

Is SEO just a job to pay the bills? Nothing wrong with that, but some senior positions can benefit from more enthusiasm and interest that can be measured by work done outside of the office.

Q. How do you get SEO Projects?

Answer: Some ways I took towards SEO Consultancy are;

• Become a member of various freelance websites like elance, odesk, allfreelance.com, getafreelancer.com, project4hire.com etc.
• Besides online freelancer sites as mentioned above, participate in various SEO Forums like Sitepoint, Digitalpoint etc and offer your valuable inputs on various threads.
• You can also offer/advertise your services on various webmaster forums like sitepoint, warrior forums, digitalpoint etc.
• Lastly, visit some small websites and analyze their website Meta tags in order to determine if they have already hired someone. If not, get back to them saying you would perform minimal SEO for free and if they are happy you can do Advanced SEO and link Building etc for a low price and increase their Web Traffic an Online Presence.

Q. Are you a SEO certified professional?

Answer: I have seen many companies offering SEO Certification , but I personally think it's not required. A certification might help a new comer prove his knowledge of SEO skills to a potential client, but in the long run what matters is showing proven results to your clients and getting appreciated via testimonials or any other means.

None of my clients have asked me, if I had any certification and I wouldn't do it to impress my clients. “All they care about is, will they be in the top 10 or not.”

I would rather perform SEO on some of my own sites and maintain case studies for the same. Also I would look on enhancing my seo experience by regularly visiting webmaster forums (Sitepoint, digitalpoint etc).

Q. If salary and location were not an issue, who would you work for?

Answer: I will be more than happy to run my own compay.

Q. In Google Lore - what are 'Hilltop', 'Florida' and 'Big Daddy'?

Answer: Hilltop: An old and often contested algorithm that calculates PageRank based on expert documents and topical relevancy. The theory behind it was to decrease the possibility of manipulation from buying high PR links from off topic pages. This was implemented during the Florida update, which is our next topic.


Florida: The highly controversial update implemented by Google in November of 2003, much to the chagrin of many seasonal retail properties. There were several theories as to what was included in this update; Over optimization filter, competitive term filter, and the Hilltop algorithm. This update had catastrophic results on many web merchants.


Big Daddy: A test data centre used by Google to preview algorithm changes. This information was made public around November of 2005 by Matt Cutts and allowed marketers to preview upcoming SERP's.

Q. What are some challenges facing the SEO industry?

Answers: I think the challenges that SEO industry is facing the most is competition in the market. Secondly, every search engine has their own theory, Every SEO has their own way of approach applying seo techniques. And finally, the search engines are often changing their algorithms.

Q. What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?

Answers: I follow SEOmoz.org, seobook.com, ezinearticles.com, mattcutts.com, seotechzone.com

Q. Who are the two key people - who started Google?

Answer: Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Stanford University, Invented Google in 1997.

Q. Who is Matt Cutts?

Answer: Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality group in Google , specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam. Cutts also advises the public on how to get better website visibility in Google.

Open-Ended

These questions are more about how an answer is given rather than the actual answer. They often scare interviewees, but with no wrong answer they're actually a good opportunity to shine.

Q. Tell me your biggest failure in an SEO project

As far as I remember everything has been smooth for me so far.

Q. What areas of SEO do you most enjoy?

I enjoy almost every area of the SEO, especially I feel very happy seeing improvements in my SERPs for my clients websites.

Q. In what areas of SEO are you strongest?

I think I am good in content writing, structure editing, meta tags, site maps, keyword research, and Link building.

Q. In what areas of SEO are you weakest?

I have not done much PPC campaigns. That's the only area I have to work a bit.

Q. How do you handle a client who does not implement your SEO recommendation

If possible I will sit with him and I will explain briefly about the importance of implements to take effect in SEO campaign. I will also show him some of my clients' website alterations and how they advanced in rankings after site implementations.

Q. Can you get “xyz†� company listed for the keyword “Google†� in the first page?

No, Google doesn't allow Google as a keyword.

Q. What do you think is different about working for an SEO agency vs. doing SEO in-house?

I think working for an SEO agency we can explore more in the industry, you get to work on different fields of websites and businesses. Where as In house SEO, you might have to work on one or two fields.

Q. Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?

For more information please contact us: info@seo-specialist-london.co.uk