SEO/SMO Interview Questions

SEO/SMO Interview Questions

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

Open-ended SEO questions

1. What is your favorite aspect of SEO?
2. What is the most difficult aspect of SEO for you?
3. What has been your biggest mistake in optimizing a website for search engines?
4. What has been you biggest success in SEO?
5. Do you have your own website(s)?  What are they?  What is their purpose? How effective have they been?
6. What business sectors have you previously worked in as a SEO?
7. What is the most competitive sector you have worked in as a SEO specialist?
8. Do you like Matt Cutt’s?! 

Knowledge of the SEO Industry / engagement in learning about SEO and engagement with the SEO Community

9. What is your favourite SEO website/blog, and why?
10. Who do you most respect in the SEO industry, and why?
11. Who do you least respect in the SEO industry, and why?
12. Which website do you go to learn something new every time?

Analytics

13. What Analytics packages have you used?
14. Talk me through the process of setting conversion goals?
15. Explain the process of advanced segmentation and an example of why you might use this?
16. If you could develop a new feature for an analytics package that is not currently/easily available what would it be?

Algorithms

17. Please explain the PageRank algorithm…
18. What is the most important aspect to you of the PageRank algorithm for link-building?
19. What is page segmentation?
20. What is LSI / LSA and its relevance to SEO?
21. Explain to me how phrase-base algorithms work?  Clustering?
22. Describe any perceived differences in the main search engines?
23. Have you noticed any algorithm changes lately that you believe to have affected your rankings?  How do you work to protect your online visibility?

Keywords

24. What process do you typically go through when researching keywords?
25. How could this process be improved?
26. How do you carry out competitive analysis of keywords/SERPs as part of the keyword research process?
27. When targeting keywords on-page, discuss some considerations you might make?

Accessibility

28. What factors hinder search engines access to a website’s content?
29. What is the most responsible way of using Flash?
30. Tell me how you might use the Robots.txt file?
31. What is the difference between an xml sitemap and an html sitemap?

On-page Ranking Factors

32. If you were reviewing a landing page, what on-page ranking factors would you consider?
33. How would you analyse the strength of that page as part of the site?
34. Are you competent with HTML and CSS?

Onsite Ranking Factors

35. Talk me through factors you would consider in building an optimised website. (Possible answers might include the discussion around information architecture, site structure, title tags, link structures, keyword relevance, etc).
36. What are onsite ranking factors for building a successful landing page strategy?
37. Please provide examples of blackhat SEO techniques?
38. What are your thoughts on blackhat SEO techniques?  What, if any, have you used, or tested?

Offsite Ranking Factors

39. What would the perfect inbound link look like?
40. What do you like and not like about link-building?
41. Explain to me your involvement in link-building in the past?
42. What approach to link-building have you had most success?

Linkbait Development and Marketing

43. Would you consider yourself as creative?
44. Have you ever successfully carried out a linkbait campaign for a client / in-house? What was the success?
45. Talk me through the process you might go through in developing a linkbait strategy?

Copywriting

46. Are you confident writing and publishing content online?
47. Please provide examples of the content that you have written. What was the purpose of this content and what keywords were you targeting?

SEO Tools

48. What keyword research tools do you use and why?
49. What is your favourite ‘SEO tool’? Why?
50. Do you think SEO tools are effective in competitive markets? Why?

Testing

51. Have you carried-out split-testing / multivariate testing of content?
52. What did you learn from this process?

Image Optimisation

53. What factors can you do to encourage the chance of ranking for images?
54. What is hotlinking? How can this be successfully optimised?

Video optimisation

55. Have you ever carried out video optimisation?
56. What are a few considerations of optimising video content?

Social Media Interview Questions

Open-ended Social Media Questions

57. Which social media sites do you most like?  Why?
58. Which social media sites do you most dislike?  Why?
59. What has been your biggest achievement in SMM?
60. Do you feel that you are well connected in Social media spheres?  Does your social media account carry influence?
61. Do you prefer to use the same pseudonym across your social media profiles? What are the pros and cons of doing this?
62. When did you get into social media (and marketing)?
63. What is your oldest social media profile?
64. Would you ever sell or buy social media profiles?
65. What has been the most effective social media marketing campaign you have been involved in?  How was it effective?  Metrics / exposure / links?
66. How do you effectively use social media to support SEO campaigns, or vice versa?

PPC Interview questions

67. Although not strictly SEO, the understanding of the cross-over of visibility in paid-listings can be very important for effective SEO campaigns.
68. Have you worked on/with PPC accounts?  How did it go?
69. How do you integrate PPC and SEO?
70. What considerations might you make when carrying out paid search competitive analysis?

Business Acumen and ROI

71. What are the key performance metrics you have previously reported to clients?
72. What are effective metrics for highlighting return on investment from SEO?
73. What would you like to change about the SEO reporting process?
74. What other areas of business present opportunities for organic search visibility?
75. If your SEO efforts aren’t getting the visibility you would hope, what would you do?

Pitching for Business

76. Have you prepared proposals for SEO clients?
77. Have you presented proposals to SEO clients? How did it go?
78. What was the biggest mistake you have made in a meeting with a client?
79. What is your greatest strength when presenting to prospective SEO clients?

Retaining Business

80. What do you think is the most important factor in retaining a client?
81. From the previous company that you worked for, what was one process that they could have improved in retaining and gaining clients?

Closing questions

82. Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?
83. What are you salary expectations?  Availability?  Etc, etc…
84. How did you feel the interview went?!

Source:www.justmeandmy.com

Happy Blogging !

Nitin Chauhan | nitin@maximumhit.com | www.maximumhit.com

Russian Plan For National Search Engine - How About YANDEX

Russian Government recently announce that they are looking to launch there own national search engine which can have better filtration of data and ensure the Safe access of Information.

The announcement bring some attention to Russian Search market.YANDEX hold approx 62% of the Search Market share of Russia. Some facts about YANDEX which definately bring attention is "Yandex is the world’s fastest growing search engine, with a massive 80% growth between December 09 and 10. Its popularity in Russia is mostly down to its in-depth and through knowledge of the “complexities and nuances of the Russian language”.

Yandex, like other ‘local’ search engines such as China’s Baidu, prefers sites hosted in Russia, with a Russian domain name i.e. .ru. In 2009 the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced its approval for the use of top level domain names i.e.com, .net, .ru, featuring non-Latin characters. This means that Russia’s most popular top level domain name can now be written in Cyrillic (‘.ru’ becomes ‘.рф’, which stands for ‘Rossiyskaya Federatsiya’ – Russian Federation). Yandex haven’t yet made it clear whether they are planning to hold preference to Cyrillic domain names, but if they do, it will have a huge effect on SEO practice in Russia.

Happy Blogging !

Nitin Chauhan | nitin@maximumhit.com | www.maximumhit.com

What can get you penalized by Google !

Unfortunately, it’s a sure thing that Google is not going to publish the criteria it uses for deciding who gets penalized. So we have to make an educated guess. In the SEO community, our opinions come from spending a lot of time–in some cases years–observing what does, and doesn’t get good results. As with just about any other aspect of SEO, most of what I’m about to say here will be met with cyber-cries of ‘but I disagree,’ or ‘I can prove otherwise,’ pr even expletives! That’s the nature of what we do–there’s always a lot of room for disagreement.
If you have been following SEO best-practices closely for some time, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll fall foul of the search engines to the degree that you get penalized. But sometimes as SEO warriors, we inherit a bad situation that someone else has created, and it’s not always obvious at first glance.

Google Sandbox or Penalty?

Before I continue, it’s worth mentioning that there’s a difference between a Google penalty and being flung in the Google sandbox. Actually people have questioned whether the sandbox even exists. But I think it’s fair to assume that it does. It is a common phenomenon that a new site will simply fail to show up: it won’t get indexed at all for weeks, or even months. It seems that until a new site or new pages earns its trust as far as Google is concerned, it sometimes don’t show up (are not even indexed) for a long period of time.

Penalized: Knowingly or Unknowingly!

Sometimes an unscrupulous marketer–and I don’t use the term SEO here because in my book, search engine optimization does not include underhanded tricks of any kind–will use a technique that he knows may have a backlash later on, in order to achieve short- term gains to impress site owners. He or she will do this on the assumption that by the time the penalty is served up by Google, he or she will be long gone and no one will know what happened (and maybe even call said marketer back and pay them more money to sort it out).
More often though, a penalty is served simply because someone did something unknowingly.
So whether you are a freelance SEO or an in-house SEO you will need to be aware of what it looks like when a site has been penalized so that you can do a little detective work to find out what the problem is and quickly get your site back into the search stream.
The most obvious sign that you’re being penalized is if you’re not showing up in a search for keywords that you’re clearly optimizing for.  But perhaps the first thing you’ll notice is a sudden, drastic falling-off of traffic. Be careful here though: a sudden decline in traffic doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve been penalized. It could just be that search trends have changed and the terms you were optimizing for are suddenly nowhere near as popular as they were. This does happen, and it’s one of the reasons why we recommend constant review of the search terms you use.
But there are other more subtle signs of search engine penalties.

The Specifics of Getting Penalized

• If you feel that a Google penalty may have been incurred for any reason, the place to start is Google Webmaster Tools. Here you will find complete check lists to help you detect a problem if there is one. Go through the list and make sure that you are complying with Google’s list of best practices.
• Compare your site’s Microsoft rank with Google. If you are on page 1 over at Bing and Yahoo, yet you’re not even showing on Google, then chances are you have been penalized.

Just to recap, although you can find this information all over the Web, here are items that Google WILL CERTAINLY  impose a penalty for:

• Keyword stuffing: putting the same two or three keywords over and over again throughout your page will trigger alarm bells over at Google.
• Cloaking: any form of disguising text is a huge no-no with Google.
• Obviously-commercial content, where a few sentences that are usually not useful to anyone are woven around a set of keywords, purely for the purposes of Adsense, will probably get you penalized.
• If you link to a website that is in a ‘bad neighborhood’ you could incur a penalty. Even sharing an IP address (as with shared hosting) can seriously damage your site if you have some notoriously bad sites on there. This is just one reason why it’s worth paying a bit extra to get the best shared web hosting: avoiding being associated with the spam and porn sites.
• You’re acquiring links too fast and it doesn’t look natural: Google may assume you’re buying them or doing something else unethical to attract attention.
• There has been disagreement lately over whether duplicate content will get you a penalty. I say it most definitely will (I’ve tested this one out many times myself). Even if, best case scenario, Google chooses to honor the most relevant version of the content, whether that be because it’s most relevant to the website, oldest (and therefore original) version, or for some other reason, who would want to take that chance if you can pick the option to have fresh, unique content on your website or blog?
• If all your pages have the exact same title tags, again you’re going to get penalized. Each title tag for every page of your site should be unique and carefully chosen.

Written By:Patricia Skinner

Happy Blogging !

Nitin Chauhan | nitin@maximumhit.com | www.maximumhit.com 

New Look's to BING Shopping

Microsoft has just updated Bing Shopping,  putting in some enhancements to product categories and navigation. Specifically, Bing Shopping now has a list of product categories on the left side of the homepage. This will enable you to drill down to specific items under the specific product categories. It will also help get started searching for products you want to buy. It’s like giving you a window shopping experience, only this time its done online.

In addition to the product category lists, Bing Shopping also now gives you a summary of all the information you need pertaining to a particular product. These information include – where to buy, user reviews, cashback percentage, and product specs.

Happy Blogging !

Nitin Chauhan | nitin@maximumhit.com | www.maximumhit.com

Today Google Threat CHINA tomorrow Can be You ?

Google China fight is going hotter day by day and no one ready to move back. If Google say he is the world largest search company than China is among the world largest user for same and not only to increase in Information Technology we all know from McDonald toys to your Lovable mobiles, electronics and lot more are given by China Itself. They are the world largest manufactures for our day to day use products.

"Google entered China by promising to follow the rule of the land, and it censored the search results to abide it. But when hackers tried to hack the Gmail accounts of human rights activist from inside China, Google lost its cool. They went ahead and decided to take on Chinese government head-on"

If Google ready to censored the search result way back when they are in need to catch china market, Now why Google not ready to do the same.Just because of some hackers ? How can a hacker problem will be combined with search result ?

See what Yahoo Japan head feels about Google. "Google takes law in their hands and most of their success has come from such steps. He said that in an interview not related to Google-China conflict"

In October 2009 we had discussed about "Google’s contribution to International politics" where Google mapsite user of China saw Arunachal Pradesh as a part of China and Google India user saw the same as part of India. Arunachal Pradesh has been and will always be a part of India.

Google China conflict will be definitely a Bonus to India, we are happy today about the fact and most favor Google over China reason being India is a democratic country where freedom and rights are defined by the democratic principles.

Today there is hardly any signs of Google doing wrong with Indian Government but who will give assurence for tomorrow. Google and facebook are so big in India that its not easy for Government to handle the same. As we had already seen in one of the example of Arunachal Pradesh.

The situation is even worse for India as Indian Tech companies are no where near Chinese (www.Baidu.com) that can take the charge in case of conflict. Indian big three companies — Indiatimes, Rediff and In.com are very small, and is no match to Google.

As of now there is no issue with Google in India,but let me remind you one of the issue witch recently happen in India (not related to Google) and hits million of users. PayPal the online money transfer giant did not care about fulfilling the Reserve Bank of India criteria and stopped all personal payment in India in a very short notice or i say with no notice.

GigaOM writes, "An unnamed analyst quoted by IDG News Service says that the changes may be related to new government rules in India that are intended to prevent or discourage money laundering. These rules, introduced last year, require financial intermediaries to verify the identity of clients carrying out international money transfers." The problem came when Paypal did not take serious note of Indian government body’s policy change on time, and just ignored the legal obligations it had with the country.

India, and all nations where Google is becoming powerful, needs to be cautiously of this Google’s dangerous move in China.

Happy Blogging !

Nitin Chauhan | nitin@maximumhit.com | www.maximumhit.com