SEO Interview question

2008-10-14T03:41:00.000-07:00

1) Give me a description of your general SEO experience.

2) Do you currently do SEO on your own sites and give me some examples. Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?

3) Where do you think the SEO industry is headed?

4) What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?

Ans: Site pro news, SEO chat, SEO Moz

5) Have you attended any search related conferences?

6) What SEO tools do you regularly use?
Ans: KEyword enhancer, google adwords, google & yahoo web analytics, register everyehere, IBP, iwebtools, webconf etc.

7) What SEO areas are you weak and strong in, and give examples of both.
Ans: Weak: ppc marketing, ad campainge
Stronge: Link baiting, Blog marketing, Content Writing, Reporting

8) What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
Ans: Strong content, back links from the strong history contain website

9) Do you have experience in copy writing and can you provide some writing samples?
Ans: j. Patel construction, xlntseo and many are the other blogs

10) What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks? What do you think about link buying, link bait, and other specific backlink strategies?

Ans: Link bait is content on your site to which other sites link because they want to, not because you ask them to.
However, the new twist in link baiting is in social bookmarking. Whether you use Digg or del.icio.us or you've got pictures (so you're using Flickr), you should tag any great content you have. Tags are no more than one-word bookmarks, just like the kind you have in Internet Explorer or Mozilla, but you put those bookmarks online, where others can share them. If your content is compelling and you've tagged it, more people are likely to see it, tag it and/or link to it (there's the link bait.) If you can, assign at least one tag to your content that is a "most popular" tag. All the services mentioned above show you what their most popular tags are.

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

Ans: Some Web 2.0 content management systems, such as blogs and wikis, are primed and relatively optimal for search engine visibility straight out of the box. Google, in particular, seems to adore blogs. Blogs and wikis have essentially replaced outdated forums, third-party product reviews, comments in guest books, and user groups because specific elements inherent to blogs and wikis are naturally search engine optimized. They're textually rich, extensively interlinked, frequently updated, and rooted in semantic markup.

If you haven't yet embraced corporate blogging or transformed your glossary of terms into a wiki, your Web site is behind the times. Blogs and wikis can help you expand your search channel to embrace and engage new users, as long as you're willing to let go of the wheel a bit to allow your prospects, clients, and customers to help drive your online business.

Unfortunately, many so-called Web 2.0 embellishments can choke the life out of your Web site's search channel. Interactive elements such as AJAX, widgets, Flash, podcasts, and video are inherently inhospitable to search engine spiders, rendering them dazed and confused. If you intend to embrace these Web 2.0 elements for increased conversions, improved usability, and greater customer interaction, be prepared to leverage XML, RSS, mirror sites, and syndication services to keep the search-referred traffic flowing.

To be certain, some search engines have rudimentary means of extracting content and links from a Shockwave Flash file (.swf). Nonetheless, any content or navigation embedded within a Flash file will at best rank poorly compared to a static, HTML-based counterpart and at worst won't make it into the search engine's index.
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625943

12) Are you familiar with any blackhat SEO techniques, search arbitrage, and affiliate marketing?

Ans: But what really is search arbitrage anyway? First, let's take a look at the definition of arbitrage. Arbitrage is defined as the nearly simultaneous purchase and sale of securities in different markets in order to profit from price discrepancies. Or put simply, buying something at a low price in one market and reselling it at a higher price in another market. Search Arbitrage is when a publisher makes a profit by earning more from hosting search ads from other advertisers than he does spending on search ads to attract traffic.

Where do publishers purchase these ads? The ads are bought through PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising suppliers, the two largest being Google and Yahoo. Google's program is called Ad words. Yahoo's program on the other hand is run by an acquired company called Overture. Other advertising sources are Espotting, GoClick, LookSmart, and a lot more.

13) Are you familiar with enterprise web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?

Ans: You cannot gauge how successful your website is unless you measure it. For this reason, web measurement and analytics is considered one of the fundamental cornerstones of any web venture.

benchmarks, churn, conversion, cookie tracking, cookies, drop out, KPI, log files, loyalty, metrics, page impressions, page tagging, segmentation, tracking, unique users, visits, web analytics, web analytics software, web analytics solutions, web measurement, web metrics, web stats

14) Are you familiar with A/B testing and multivariate testing?
Ans: A/B testing: Used in marketing as well as web optimization and analytics, this is a type of testing where traffic or audiences are split and exposed to variations on an item or content in order to determine aid in supporting decisions with quantified performance statistics.

Multivariate testing:In internet marketing, multivariate testing is a process by which more than one component of a website may be tested in a live environment. It can be thought of in simple terms as numerous split tests or A/B tests performed on one page at the same time. Split tests and A/B tests are usually performed to determine the better of two content variations, multivariate testing can theoretically test the effectiveness of limitless combinations. The only limits on the number of combinations and the number of variables in a multivariate test are the amount of time it will take to get a statistically valid sample of visitors and computational power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivariate_testing

15) Do you have experience in email marketing, banner advertising, other types of media buys and other forms of online advertising?

16) Are you experienced in managing PPC campaigns? To what extent and on what platforms?

17) Do you have experience in bid management tools, API tools, and click fraud issues?

18) Do you have experience in extensive competitive analysis and what techniques do you use?
Ans: Yes

We will develop detailed competitive monthly reporting on all of your top competitors.
We will identify, match or eliminate online competitor marketing advantages.
We will ensure a high level of search engine saturation.
We consistently deliver best in class competitive results, in terms of internet visibility, cost effectiveness, and bottom line occupancy success!

19) What technologies are you familiar with? (We primarily use HTML, CSS, ASP, .net, PHP, SQL, and JavaScript)
Ans:

20) Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?
Ans:

21) Do you know who Matt Cutts is?
Ans: Yes, Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues.

22) What is page segmentation? (ever heard of VIPS?)
Ans: A new web content structure analysis based on visual representation is proposed in this paper. Many web applications such as information retrieval, information extraction and automatic page adaptation can benefit from this structure. This paper presents an automatic top-down, tag-tree independent approach to detect web content structure. It simulates how a user understands web layout structure based on his visual perception. Comparing to other existing techniques, our approach is independent to underlying documentation representation such as HTML and works well even when the HTML structure is far different from layout structure. Experiments show satisfactory results.

Ever thought why contextual links was wighted more than non-contextual links. Well this is the reason which explains, why the contextual links are so effective. A search engine could define an algorithm that divides the page in blocks, giving priority to the part which has content. If a link is found with in the content then, it is supposed to be of some importance and given more value. Now, look the block which is on the sidebar, this has links to so many sites (advertisers, paid links) with little or no text. This is given low weight. I wonder where else could they use this algorithm.
http://seozealgroup.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/what-is-page-segmentation-ever-heard-of-vips

23) What’s the difference bewtween PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?
Ans: Page Rank

Google’s page rank, also known as link juice is the culmination of backlinks to a site. Over time the amount of page rank you have, grows, or subsequently falls due to various reasons. The higher your pagerank is the more pages google will crawl on your site and the increased frequency in which they will visit your site. The actual number of your page rank is only known by google, inside the googleplex. No one outside google knows what the exact Page rank of a given page is at any one point.

Toolbar Page Rank

This is the page rank displayed on your google toolbar. It is generally update by google once every 4 months. However we have not had a full update now for 6+ months and counting. Its value is vague and often irrelevant. It varies from datacenter to datacenter and is never in “real” time. A page could have a PR 6 score but show TBPR of only 2 because it has not been updated in months. TBPR is a vanity stat in today’s game and should not be relied on for any valuable meaning.

24) What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI - Indexing)?
Ans: Latent semantic indexing allows a search engine to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching search query text.

A page about Apple computers will likely naturally have terms such as iMac or iPod on it.

Latent semantic indexing adds an important step to the document indexing process. In addition to recording which keywords a document contains, the method examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant. This simple method correlates surprisingly well with how a human being, looking at content, might classify a document collection. Although the LSI algorithm doesn't understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem astonishingly intelligent.
http://www.seobook.com/archives/000657.shtml

25) What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
Ans: http://www.reliable-seo.com/knowledge-base/Technical-SEO/Phrase-Based-Indexing-and-Retrieval-2.html

26) In Google Lore - what are ‘Hilltop’ Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?

1. Can you write HTML code by hand?

2. Could you briefly explain the PageRank algorithm?

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

4. What do you think of Page Rank?

5. What do you think of using XML site maps?
Ans: Instant and faster crawling

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

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

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

9. Explain to me what META tags matter in today's world.
Ans: Title tag

10. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
Ans:

11. 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?
Ans: Redirects all clients in new domain

12. Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important "on page" elements
Ans:
1) Content quality
2) Title Tags
3) Keywords Tags
4) Description Tags
5) Use keyword phrase and title in page content
6) Use Keywords in anchor tags
7) Page navigation structure
8) Page Image optimization(size, alter text)
9) Insert XML Site map
10) Insert Robot.txt file

13. Review the code of past clients/company websites where SEO was performed.

14. What do you think about link buying?

15. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

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

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

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

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

Analysis

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

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

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

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

4. 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?

5. How many target keywords should a site have?

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

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

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

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.

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

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

3. Have you attended any search related conferences?

4. Google search on this candidates name, (if you cannot find them, that's a red flag).

5. Do you currently do SEO on your own sites? Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?

6. Of the well-known SEOs, who are you not likely to pay attention to?

7. What are some challenges facing the SEO industry?

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

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

10. Who is Matt Cutts?

11. If you were bidding on a contract, what competitor would you most worry about?

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.

1. Tell me your biggest failure in an SEO project

2. What areas of SEO do you most enjoy?

3. In what areas of SEO are you strongest?

4. In what areas of SEO are you weakest?

5. How do you handle a client who does not implement your SEO recommendations?

6. Can you get â€œxyzâ€� company listed for the keyword â€œGoogleâ€� in the first page?

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

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

Search engine optimization ideology laboratory

2008-09-26T02:02:00.000-07:00

Xlntseo offers functional, hypothetical, Graphical User friendly and Eye catching working outputs for investor clients with the help of web technology and search engine optimization. Our approach covers complete product/service study, position and deal for getting best appropriate value in market. Our implementing strategies are combination of following four basic process.

Fix up: The external and instant solution is just solving the customer problem but when we think little deeper we get a higher solution this way we barred the problem for ever happening again.

Deep Analysis: Before starting we study client’s products, understand their requirement, targeted customers, current market trends and competitor analyses.

Experience: From so many years of long time in this industry and actually selling products and services ourselves; we have to identify what works and what doesn't. You will have the luxury of knowing you are heading in the right direction from our experience.

Customer relationship: we evolving and enhancing your business procedures to improve your overall efficiency and build stronger customer relationships.

We begin Xlntseo to obtaining higher solution and satisfying the needs of our clients. We survey the market where thousands of company needs search engine optimization. The dedication of helping such company achieve higher ranking in search engines and directories through keyword research, optimization, and consultation, link building, social media optimization (SMO), content writing, article writing and submissions. Our team is very experienced in search engine optimization, internet marketing, pay per click (PPC) advertising, Email marketing, website development and java solution.

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SEO Interview question

Search engine optimization ideology laboratory