SEO Interview Questions

Going into an interview unprepared is foolish. And if you’re looking for an SEO position, the followings are some questions you must be familiar with before you head into it.

Technical

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.

1. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
2. Can you write HTML code by hand?
3. What do you think of PageRank?
4. What do you think of using XML sitemaps?
5. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
6. What SEO tools do you regularly use?
7. Under what circumstances would you look to exclude pages from search engines using robots.txt vs meta robots tag?
8. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
9. Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
10. Have you ever had something you’ve written reach the front-page of Digg? Sphinn? Or be stumbled?
11. Explain to me what META tags matter in today’s world.
12. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
13. 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?
14. Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important “on page” elements
15. Review the code of past clients/company websites where SEO was performed.
16. What do you think about link buying?
17. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
18. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks?
19. What role does a social medium play in an SEO strategy?
20. What things wouldn’t you to do increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?
21. What’s the difference between PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?
22. 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 competing sites.

1. Are you familiar with web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?
2. From an analytics perspective, what is different between users from organic search results vs. a type-in user?
3. How do you distinguish the results of your search optimization work from a seasonal change in traffic patterns?
4. What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?
5. 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?
6. How many target keywords should a site have?
7. How do *you* help a customer decide how to their budget between organic SEO and pay-per-click SEM?
8. 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?
9. 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 is ‘Big Daddy’? —à Google lore, company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin
3. 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?
4. What are some challenges facing the SEO industry?
5. What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
6. Who are the two key people - who started Google?
7. Who is Matt Cutts?
8. 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 “xyz” company listed for the keyword “Google” 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?

In my next post I will discuss the answers of these questions.

Advantage of Organic SEO over PPC

Despite the fact that both organic SEO and PPC are part of the same system (Search Engine Marketing), there are a few essential factors that distinguish organic SEO from PPC and make it much better. Some of the benefits organic SEO has over PPC are discussed below.

Provides Long Term Solutions

Organic search results might be slow in listing the websites, but its listing is a much more stable and helpful in long run. The search listing which appears through organic search is a more permanent one than PPC which generally runs for a specified time span after which it dissolves and disappears.

Higher CTR

Research proves that the end users to have a tendency of clicking on the organic results more than the paid listings that appear on the search engine result pages. This makes the click through rates (CTR) of organic SEO almost 70% higher than those of the paid search results.

Quality Traffic

Since the organic SEO are mostly dependent on keywords, that are selected after a proper research and survey on user tendency and demographics is conducted, it suggests that the traffic too will be saturated and of good quality too. The search engine techniques is entirely based on keywords, the end users type in a keyword relevant to their search and the search engines display results that match with their requirements. This makes an evident that the users will only type what they are looking for, and will land into your page only if it is relevant to their search. Therefore, the possibility of having low quality traffic is comparatively low here.

More Sources of Traffic

Unlike PPC campaigns that only depend on keyword bidding, the organic SEO also involves a number of other techniques of attracting traffic as well which makes it double effective than the PPC. The natural or organic search also includes article submission, blog posting, link building, directory submission and many more off page promotions to help enhance the traffic flow to a website.

Low Cost Marketing

The last and the most important difference between organic search and PPC is that the former is a no cost search promotion technique. Organic SEO does not require you to spend any many on marketing, unlike PPC where, one has to keep paying the search engines every time a click is generated.

I would say Organic SEO is the best way of optimizing websites. You bring in traffic by using content that works and also by adding value via interactivity and a great user experience.

SEO Techniques - Black Hat, White Hat and Grey Hat

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important aspect of any online business who wants to do well. Without SEO, your products and services may never reach the potential clients even if your products or services are the best among all others. If you are an SEO specialist then you must know about all the SEO techniques which are used for promotion of your site which include both ethical SEO techniques that is recommended by search engines, and also the unethical SEO techniques that are discouraged by the search engines.

White Hat SEO (The Recommended Way)
White hat SEO refers to the SEO techniques that goes with the guidelines laid down by search engines and are considered as ethical search engine optimization techniques. These include high quality and updated content, proper use of keywords and metadata, use of alt tags, descriptive file names, user friendly internal navigation structure, SEO link building including internal links, and other such SEO strategies which the search engines recommend. In white hat SEO techniques, the pages are built keeping the human visitors in mind. They do not try to deceive humans or the search engines. Implementing these natural search engine optimization techniques may take a little time and effort, but their results last a longer time and you don’t have to worry about having your site banned by search engines for use of deceptive practices.

Black Hat SEO (The Unethical Way)
Black hat SEO on the other hand refers to all the unethical search engine optimization techniques which the search engines discourage. These consist of keyword stuffing, hidden text, meta tag stuffing, doorway pages, hidden links, using link farms, cloaking, and other such search engine optimization techniques. The pages in black hat SEO are built not for humans but for the search engine spiders. They are designed to get better rankings on major search engines. The flip side is that they run the risk of being banned by the search engines once they are found out. The major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN believe that pages should be built for humans and provide them the information and data they are looking for. By using Black hat SEO techniques you build pages for the spiders to trick them and in turn give your visitors a bad experience.

Choosing Between the Two (The Grey Hat)
What SEO techniques you choose is entirely upon you. While white hat SEO will take you time and efforts, it will give long lasting results and can be helpful in long run. On the other hand, black hat SEO will probably give you much faster results, maybe even getting you in the top slot, but runs the risk of getting your site banned from the search engines. Standing in the middle, or using a mix of the two, can prove beneficial only if the amount of black hat SEO tactics incorporated in your search engine optimization strategy is the minimum basic.

As you increase your black hat tactics more, you increase your chances of being banned. On the other hand, using a few tactics to get quick results till your white hat SEO tactics start showing results may be okay if you are sure to remove the black hat techniques soon. But if you can, it would be best to avoid all the black hat techniques and stick to ethical search engine optimization. It would give you good results that last longer.

Needless to say, an ethical SEO company will follow only white hat methods and you can blindly rely upon them with their organic SEO services to keep your websites up on grounds of ethical search engine optimization.