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

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

Best PayPal Alternatives in India

PayPal is one of the most popular online payment service used in India but as we see in past few months the tiff between PayPal and Government of India has been a disaster for SMB's units in India. People in India unable to withdraw money via PayPal account till they get IEC code.

We had already discuss once about the alternative of PayPal "Use Xoom to Get your money from PayPal to your Local bank" but that too is not too much efective. Here are some best alternatives available for PayPal and can be consider for online payment processing.

www.moneybookers.com : It is free to join and is available for transaction in a lot of countries. It also provides bank transfers unlike PayPal, where the only option is to receive the money by check. It is fast, easy to use and very secure. Moneybookers enjoys tremendous popularity owing to these factors.

www.alertpay.com :AlertPay ensures the safe and speedy transactions by credit card, allows transactions from more than 190 countries, has provision to shop and sell securely, and permits flexible depositing and withdrawal options. The AlertPay online business account is designed to specifically help online businesses.

www.ikobo.com : iKobo has been helping people send money safely, quickly and easily since 2001. With iKobo you can send money anytime day or night and money can be picked up using the iKobo prepaid Visa card at over 1 million ATMs worldwide. The iKobo card can also be used to make purchases at the over 20 million stores that accept Visa

www.2checkout.com : This international online payment service has proved to be a secure reseller for thousands of tangible and digital products and services. Fast and easy to use, this service employs effective fraud detection mechanisms. The service also promises a 30 day money back guarantee in case of dissatisfaction.

www.epay.propay.com :ProPay has been instrumental in providing simple, safe credit card processing and electronic payment services. It also provides a suite of secure, end-to-end, enterprise payment solutions. This service helps businessmen to set up online accounts and accept payments without any long term investment or commitment. It also educates merchants on how to eliminate or reduce the risk of holding sensitive cardholder’s data.

Happy Blogging ! 
Nitin Chauhan | nitin@maximumhit.com | www.maximumhit.com
http://nitinmaximumhit.blogspot.com "We brand our clients to stand out from the competition."

FaceBook Shop In India

(Reuters) - Popular social-networking site Facebook will open an office in India, joining a long list of international firms that have looked to tap a skilled workforce that provides support services at relatively cheap wages.

The Indian social networking space which was ruled by Google owned Orkut till recently has now been replaced by Facebook. According to Alexa, Facebook is the fourth most visited site in India after Google.co.in, Google.com and Yahoo.com
As on FaceBook Blog :
As more and more people share and connect on Facebook, we are growing our operations and teams to support them around the world. Just last week, we announced plans to invest in a new Austin, Texas, office, and today in India we unveiled our intentions to open an office in Hyderabad.
Both of these offices will allow us to better serve the more than 400 million of you now using Facebook worldwide, as well as our growing number of advertisers and developers. We are now hiring people to join the online sales and operations teams that we’re forming in these new locations.
By having multiple support centers in a variety of time zones, we can provide better round-the-clock, multi-lingual support.
India is a large social media market and though Facebook has a a real firm position in country, there are even more possibilities that remain unexplored. The challenges and competition is on a rise with newer sites coming up. India has been a development base for most of the top tech players for a long time now. The availability of talent at affordable rates has lured many to have multiple offices at various parts of the country.

Happy Blogging ! 
Nitin Chauhan | nitin@maximumhit.com | www.maximumhit.com
http://nitinmaximumhit.blogspot.com "We brand our clients to stand out from the competition."

FaceBook new location feature coming next month

Facebook is growing with a great revenue stream and going to touch the $ 1 billion mark soon. Here is an another feather to Facebook success. Faceook’s location based services will turn live next month with lot more for the developers to relish.

Facebook Inc.is holding its yearly developer conference  f8 in April at San Francisco. This will mark the official unveiling of the new location feature along with the API’s for the developers. The feature will enable the users to share their location information with friends. The set of APIs on the other hand will give the outside developers an opportunity to offer their own location-based services to Facebook users.

Happy Blogging ! 
Nitin Chauhan | nitin@maximumhit.com | www.maximumhit.com
http://nitinmaximumhit.blogspot.com "We brand our clients to stand out from the competition."

Facebook prohibits ‘Free iPad’ Ads

Facebook announces that it will not approve ads individually. The ones which mention factors which apparently have nothing to do with the subject of the ad like age, sex, and feelings about Eddie Izzard in the case of a “free iPad” ad are banned and will be deleted as and when they’re found

Google Index FaceBook Pages

The new update from Giant "G" is to Index pages from FaceBook 

FaceBook pages are now come in Google real time search result. Facebook pages are not similar to individual profiles, those can be used for companies,organizations,celebrities, businesses etc.  

Google is also planning to Index Jaiku,Friendster and Identia.ca but this will take some time for "G".

Twitter is already twitting in google real time search.

Happy Blogging ! 
Nitin Chauhan | nitin@maximumhit.com | www.maximumhit.com
http://nitinmaximumhit.blogspot.com "We brand our clients to stand out from the competition."

Get IEC Code for Paypal Withdrawal in India

To  keep a track on the money coming to India via PayPal, Ministry of Commerce and Industry has introduced this criteria where individuals need to fill in this ten digit number(IEC Code) to get their money out of the PayPal account.

Let me tell you what’s the IEC is ?

IMPORTER EXPORTER CODE ( in short IEC ) is a ten digit number granted by Directorate General of Foreign Trade under Ministry of Commerce and Industry, to any bonafide person/ company for carrying out import/export.

Where to get an IEC from?

IEC can be obtained from any of the Zonal and Regional offices of Director General of Foreign Trade depending on area/region where the individual/company is located. You can find a list of offices here.

Application procedure

The application form can be downloaded from http://www.dgft.org

The documents that you need for filing the application:

For Proprietorship firms:

• Covering letter
• Date of Birth of individual
• Number of IECs held along with their details
• Bank Certificate from the bank on Bank letter head as per proforma

For Companies:

• Covering letter
• Bank Certificate from the bank on Bank letter head as per proforma
• Extract of Board of Resolution.
• MOA with Form 32 and ROC in case of change in Directors.

For Others:

• Covering letter
• Bank Certificate from the bank on Bank letter head as per proforma
• Notorised Partnership Deed showing date of formation.
• No Objection Certificate from other partners/HUF.

Guidelines for filling the application:

• Fill Part A, B & D of the application form.
• Self certified copy of Permanent Account Number (PAN) issued by income Tax Authorities.
• Two copies of passport size photographs of the applicant. The photograph pasted on the banker’s certificate must be attested by the banker with Seal and Signature of the applicant.
• The application must be submitted in Duplicate.
• Each individual page of the application must be signed by the applicant.
• Self addressed envelope stamped with Rs. 15 (Local Address) & for others Rs.20/-. These documents may be kept secured in a file cover.

Fees for Applying

Application fee is Rs. 250/- which can be paid through Demand Draft/ Pay Order from any designated bank in favour of Zonal Joint Director General of Foreign Trade  of that region/ area.

How to submit application

Application can be submitted in person/by Authorised Employee of the Company at the R & I counters in the office Or It can be sent by post/courier.

Processing of Application

The application can be submitted at the counter in person at the office or it can be sent through Post/Courier. An acknowledgement in form of a receipt having File Number is generated on receipt of application. The file number is used for any correspondence/query regarding the IEC application submitted to the office. The application is then sent to IEC section where it is processed. If the application is found complete in all aspects (as per requirements prescribed) an IEC is generated, or else a deficiency letter stating the nature of deficiency is prepared and sent to the applicant. Replies are awaited in cases where deficiency letter is issued and after due compliance by the applicant the IEC is allotted.

Issue and Despatch of IEC

IEC allotment letter is sent through post at the registered office mentioned by the applicant in the application. Similarly deficiency letters are sent to applicant by post.

IEC File No. and Status

IEC application status available on the website of CLA

File No for IEC application

A new option to know the file number has been introduced for all exporter who are sending their application through Post/Courier. The applicant has to input PAN number to get the file number.
Status of IEC Application
The applicant can know the status of the IEC application using option “Status of IEC Application” on the website of CLA.
IEC issued day wise
IEC’s issued daily can be viewed on the website using option “IEC issued day wise”
File No for IEC application
Applicant’s who have sent their application through post/courier can know their file number using option “File No for IEC application”

Source: Ministry of Commerce and Industry, India

Happy Blogging ! Nitin Chauhan | nitin@maximumhit.com | www.maximumhit.com
http://nitinmaximumhit.blogspot.com "We brand our clients to stand out from the competition."

PayPal Update : RBI has allowed us to continue local bank withdrawals

We have been diligently working with the RBI and our business partners to resume Indian bank withdrawals for the thousands of Indian businesses who depend on PayPal to sell their goods or services in the global marketplace.

Today, we are happy to announce that the RBI has allowed us to continue local bank withdrawals for settlements for exports of goods and services.  We are currently making changes to comply with Indian regulations for settlements for exports of goods and services, and we anticipate that, as of Wednesday,

March 3rd, customers will be able to use our bank withdrawal service. 

As part of the changes, you will be required to fill out a new field entitled 'Export Code' when you request a withdrawal. This information is required under the current laws of India in order to identify the nature of cross-border merchant transactions. 

Moving forward, the RBI has told us that PayPal needs specific approvals to allow personal remittances to India, which we currently do not have.  Until we get these approvals, personal payments into India will remain suspended.  However, if you are an exporter, you will continue to be able to use the PayPal service for payments of goods and services.  In fact, with the changes we are making to our system, PayPal is now set to be a more powerful engine for exporters in India.  With purpose codes for export transactions and FIRCs (Foreign Inward Remittance Certificates), you should now be able to get the export related benefits you seek.

You can check the PayPal blog for additional updates.

Happy Blogging !

Nitin Chauhan | nitin@maximumhit.com | www.maximumhit.com
http://nitinmaximumhit.blogspot.com "We brand our clients to stand out from the competition."