SEO Q & A

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Google Analytic FAQ'S

  1. If I want to exclude traffic from a particular IP, from where can I do this in GA?
  2. From Where can I add a New Use in Google Analytics?
  3. What is Bounce Rate and how it is calculated?
  4. What are Goals in Google Analytics?
  5. What are Funnels used for in Google Analytics?
  6. What are Annotations? And what is the Use of it?
  7. How many goals we can set in a single account?
  8. What are Pages View??
  9. What is Intelligence Beta Do?? What is the use of It??
  10. How many types of Traffic Source are there and what are they??
  11. What is New vs. Returning Visitor?
  12. What is the difference between Visitors and Absolute Unique Visitors?
  13. What is Lenth of Visits in Google Analytics??
  14. What are top Exit Pages in GA??
  15. How can we track Email Marketing visits in Campaign Management?
  16. What are Custom Reports?
  17. How can I export Monthly reports in PDF format from Google Analytics?
  18. How can you connect your Google Analytics Account to Google Adwords Account?
  19. What is Session Time out?
  20. What are Cookies in GA?
  21. How to set goals in GA?
  22. What is the use of advanced segments in GA?
  23. What is the use of in-page analytics?
  24. What is real time?
  25. What are the regular experiences in Google analytics ?
  26. What is goal value?
  27. What is goal function?
  28. What is visit duration?
  29. How to tracking in Google analytics?
  30. How to reduce the bounce rate?
  31. What are filters and what is use?
  32. What is tracking code?
  33. How to use tracking code in one  and multiple sub-domains  or Multiple TLDS ?
  34. How to tack adwords campaigns?
  35. How many server side language GA support ?
  36. How to track social networking vesting’s in GA ?
  37. What is Exclude URL Query Parameters?
  38. What is Multi-channel Funnels Channel Groupings?
  39. What is the use of Custom Alerts?
  40. How to set scheduled Emails?
  41. How to track adwords campaigns?
  42. What is matching search queries?
  43. What is destination URl’S?
  44. What is is keyword positions?
  45. Difference between Demographics Vs Behavior ?
  46. What is the use of custom vaster flow?
  47. The percentage of visiting in which the user left your site after visiting the entrance page is know as?
  48. What is unique pageview ?
  49. How can you see all the filters that have been applied to a profile in GA?
  50. To apply filters to your data so as to keep your “raw” data intact, you can create a ?
  51. What is the high bounce rate generally indicates?
  52. A pharmaceutical product website has a product description page with images, price and description of the drug x. the user can click the order now button on this page to reach the payment processing page. To tack what fraction of the visitors visited the product description page, but the payment processing page, you should:
  53. Unduplicated (counted only once) visitor to your website over the course of specified time period are contend as?
  54.   What is navigation summary shows?
  55. While creating a new filter in GA, by which filed can a custom filter be specified?
  56. To identify the steps of a payment processing wizard that are causing people to abandon the purchase, you should as ?
  57. When the GA code is installed, tracking begins?
  58. For the purpose of GA Report, a session is considered to have ended if the user has been inactive on the site for?
  59. Filters can not be used to ?
  60. If a visitor hits reload after reaching a page, it will be counted as ?
  61. The query String variable utm_content is used to
62.The traffic sources leading to increase in traffic and revenue can be identified by:
  1. Goal funnel>selected goal
  2. All traffic sources report> Ecommerce tab
  3. Goal value> select goal
  4. All traffic sources report> goal conversion tab
63.In GA how to auto tagging and link tagging ?
64.A visitor’s interaction with your website after clicking on your Google AdWords ad can be monitored by?
65.The google analytics code snippet need to place in ?
66.For the purpose of generation reports, a unique visitor is determined using
  1. Cookies
  2. Password
  3. Username
  4. Email id
67.Google analytics logs a page-view:
a. each time the page is loading irrespective of the tracking code execution.
b. each time the tracking code is execution.
c. each time the user logs in any of the Google accounts.
d. each time the user clicks on a Google ad.
68.if you click visualize on a keyword report, each dot on the motion chart hence obtained will represent a:
a. keyword
b. date
c. frequency
d. user

69.what is the maximum number of events per visit that can be tracked by GA?
70. Excluding your own internal traffic in a GA report can
a. not be achieved.
b. be achieved by using funnels
c.   be achieved by using filters
d. be achieved by using Goals.

 30 Most Asked SEO Interview Q & A

here is the list of 30 latest & frequently asked technical SEO interview questions and answers for the candidates who are willing to grab a new job in SEO field in the very first attempt.
  1. Which are the most important area to include your keywords?– Page title and Body text are the most important areas where we can include keywords for the SEO purpose.
  2. What are webmaster tools? – Webmaster tools is a free service by Google from where we can get free Indexing data, backlinks information, crawl errors, search queries, CTR, website malware errors and submit the XML sitemap.
  3. What is the best way to maximize the frequency of crawling of your website by search engines? – Frequently adding new, original and quality content on the website.
  4. Do you know who is Danny Sullivan? – He is a Journalist who covers the field of web search, considered as search engine guru and editor at searchengineland.com
  5. Who is Matt Cutts? – He is the head of web spam team at Google. Read more about Matt Cutts here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
  6. What is the best criterion to identify the value of a backlink? – The authority of the domain, quality of the content on the page where the backlink is provided and then the page rank of the website.
  7. What is keyword proximity? – Keyword Proximity is a measurement criteria of the closeness of the keywords within the Page Title, Meta Description and Body Text.
  8. What is keyword prominence? – Keyword prominence is the location of the keywords in the page title, meta description and body text…..Read more about prominence at: http://www.seoglossary.com/article/64
  9. Difference between exit rate and bounce rate? – Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leaves a particular website just after visiting a single page on this and exit rate refers to the percentage of people who leaves from a particular page….read more herehttp://www.blindfiveyearold.com/bounce-rate-vs-exit-rate
  10. What is the Panda update and which is its current version? – Panda is a search algorithm update by the Google to take on the content farms, low quality websites and the websites getting low quality backlinks, Google removed a lot of the webpage from the higher search index during this update and the current version of Panda is 2.5.3 updated on October 19/20th Oct. 2011…read here for latest panda updates http://www.seroundtable.com/tag/panda
  11. What was caffeine update? – Caffeine update was rolled out by Google in June 2010 and the main purpose of this update was to include more fresh results in the search index, at least 50%..read more about caffeine update here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
  12. A customer can give you an access to only one tool, which one will you choose, Webmasters or Analytics? – Of Course Webmaster tools, because these are almost the essential tools for the search engine optimization, we can have some analytics data in the webmasters as well. But now due to the inclusion of webmaster data in Analytics, we would like to have access to Analytics.
  13. What is 404? – It is a server error code which is returned by the server what a particular webpage or the file is missing from the webhost server.
  14. What is 301 redirect? – It is a SEO friendly version of permanent redirect for the webpages or the domains. Read more about 301 redirect here http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php
  15. What is 302 redirect? – It is a temporary redirect. Read more herehttp://www.internetofficer.com/seo/302-redirect/
  16. What is robots.txt? – Robots.txt is a text file used to give instructions to the search engine crawlers about the caching and indexing of a webpage, domain, directory or a file of a website. Read more herehttp://www.robotstxt.org/
  17. What are the other methods to restrict a webpage from the search index? – we can use noindex meta tag. Read more herehttp://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html
  18. What are Google Webmaster Tools crawl errors? – Crawl errors provides the information about the URL’s of your website which are not accessible but linked from somewhere. Read more herehttp://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35120
  19. What is a landing page? – a landing page is a page in the website which is designed to attract the visitors to contact/subscribe/buy a service or the product by reading few lines of important information about that particular service or the product on that page. Read more about landing page here http://www.copyblogger.com/landing-pages/
  20. What is the recent change in Google Analytics? – Real time visitors info, visitors flow, webmaster tools SEO data and website speed data. Read more here http://analytics.blogspot.com/
  21. How to handle the duplicate page in the website? – using canonical tag. Read more here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
  22. What are the types of CSS and which is better for SEO? – 3 types, Internal CSS, inline CSS and external CSS. Read more about CSS types here at http://www.expression-web-tutorial.com/Types_CSS_Styles.html. The external CSS is best for SEO purpose. Read why to use external CSShttp://www.basictips.com/tips/article_64.shtml
  23. How many heading tags are there in HTML? – 6 tags, from H1 to H6
  24. Can we use more than one H1 on a single webpage? – Of course, if there is a need of describing two related topics on the same page then we can use, but using more than 2 or 3 will not provide any credit to the search engines.  Matt Cutts advise on using more than one H1 taghttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM
  25. Italic or Bold, which is more useful? – Both are almost same but Italic have a slight more better for keyword targeting on the webpage. Read more here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization
  26. What are top SEO ranking factors? – Quality of content on the webpage, quality and quantity of backlinks to the webpage, anchor text used in the backlinks, domain authority, social sharing metrics and some other traffic metrics like page CTR, bounce rate and average time on the webpage. Read more here http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors and herehttp://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2010/01/14/google-ranking-factors/
  27. What is the criteria for removing a webpage from Google search index? – It should return a 404 not found error or it should be 301 permanently redirected.
  28. Some basic and quick steps to increase the webpage speed. – removing the unused code and scripts. Replacing internal and inline CSS with the external CSS. Using web server’s page compression methods. Using small sized images or minimizing the no. of images.
  29. What is CTR? – It is Click Through Rate. Read more about CTR herehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickthrough_rate
  30. What is CTA? – It is Call to Action. Read more herehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_to_Action


25 Top SEO Job Interview Questions


1. What do you know about our company and can you define who we are?
2. How would you define SEO and SEM?
3. What is your previous SEO history like? Can you give examples of rankings you’ve achieved.
4. What is your biggest mistake and biggest success in SEO?
5. What are the most important initial SEO steps on a website?
6. Which methods would you use for link building?
7. What is your strenght in terms of SEO?
8. How would you monitor rankings?
9. Which verticals have you worked on before?
10. Which side of SEO would you like to be involved? Either link building, coding or whatever?
11. What if your client is not open to ideas to make changes on their website, what would you come up with?
12. Which blogs and websites do you follow daily to keep up-to-date and why?
13. Do you know who Matt Cutts is?
14. Which Google products do you use?
15. Which SEO tools do you prefer?
16. How is your copywriting skills? Can you give some examples?
17. Do you use any type of web analytics?
18. What is a pagerank?
19. What is “nofollow”?
20. How do you see the future of SEO?
21. How do you define your HTML hand-coding skills?
22. Why is a sitemap important and how would you make search engines find it quickly?
23. Do you know anything about robots.txt?
24. What is your opinion about paid links?
25. How would you track the number of outlinks of a website?

  1. What are Google Webmaster Tools crawl errors?
  2. How to handle the duplicate page in the website?
  3. What are the other methods to restrict a webpage from the search index?
  4. A customer can give you an access to only one tool, which one will you choose, Webmasters or Analytics?
  5. What is the best criterion to identify the value of a backlink?
  6. What is the best way to maximize the frequency of crawling of your website by search engines?
  7. What are webmaster tools?
  8. How can Google Webmaster Tools be used for Google SEO?
  9. Difference between page impression and page views?
  10. How may process to Verifying Your Site with GWMT
  11. What does Google Webmaster Tools do?
  12. How to Geographic target a website used GWMT.
  13. What is the most  Preferred domain in GWMT
  14. What is sitelinks ?
  15. How to configure URL parameters in GWMT?
  16. What is change of address?
  17. Explain Search Queries and Impressions and Clicks?
  18. What is an instant preview?
  19. How to remove Malware?
  20. What is Fetch as Google?
  21. What is 301 redirection?
  22. What is the use of traffic option in GWMT ?
  23. How to Fix Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools
  24. What are the current updates in GWMT?
 


seo technical interview questions

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.
  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 workind 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 social media 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 bewtween 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 competiting sites.
  1. Are you familiar with web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?
  2. From an analytics perspective, what is different between a user 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?


1) Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
I have been working on SEO for 12 years and its been my full time job for just over five years. In the past I have lead a few SEO chats with the ‘big’ boys and I have gained a lot of knowledge through doing so.
I recently started a network of sites which are earning through adsense
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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?
I have a few blogs up and running at the moment as well as a few forums to. I no longer do as much freelance work as I used to but I do a bit and I plan on doing this for the next 6-12 months
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3) Where do you think the SEO industry is headed?
PPA will become the norm. Finally MSN will become big with cleaver marketing but Google will still be king
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4) What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
Webmaster-talk.com. I also read a lot of blogs and forums related to my sites
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5) Have you attended any search related conferences?
Yep. In the past I have lead conferences like this
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6) What SEO tools do you regularly use?
tools.SEOBook.com and SEOElite
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7) What SEO areas are you weak and strong in, and give examples of both.
Link bait is my strong point while boring jobs such as writing content and directory submission are a weak point for me
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8) What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
Links Links Links. Link bait is very important to get your site to success with the SE’s
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9) Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
I try to outsource jobs like this 
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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?
I love link bait but try contacting webmasters for a link exchange. Many will be happy to do so.
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11) What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
Dunno. SEO is my thing. Not designing ect
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12) Are you familiar with any blackhat SEO techniques, search arbitrage, and affiliate marketing?
Yep but I don’t use blackhat ever
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14) Are you familiar with A/B testing and multivariate testing?
I split test and compare Google AdWords advertising occasionally on new sites
15) Do you have experience in email marketing, banner advertising, other types of media buys and other forms of online advertising?
Again I believe this can be interlinked well with SEO and SEO techniques
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16) Are you experienced in managing PPC campaigns? To what extent and on what platforms?
Google Adwords professional even though I don’t use my status.
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17) Do you have experience in bid management tools, API tools, and click fraud issues?
Try to keep away from anything other than manual stuff. Bid management is done manually and I have had no real click fraud problems
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19) What technologies are you familiar with? (We primarily use HTML, CSS, ASP, .net, PHP, SQL, and JavaScript)
HTML, CSS and PHP
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20) Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?
I’m not
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21) Do you know who Matt Cutts is?
He’s a Google Geek. No but really he is the most influential of the Google team
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22) What is the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?

 Pt 1. Search engine optimisation
1. What are the most important elements of SEO?
It is generally a question of consistency. The main elements are to ensure that the key content on site is readable by a search engine spider (ie. in HTML text format) and that all pages on site are linked in some way via HTML text links. If this is done then your site has a chance to compete in search results. Once this is achieved then it is generally just a case of tweaking the wording, using headings for emphasis and organizing content around specific themes.
It is also crucial to give regard to page titles and the specific descriptive snippet (meta description) that appears in search results. Having a bland or confusing listing in the results is as bad as not being there at all. The search results are the first point of sale for the business and should be treated that way.
2. How does the quality of a website impact on its search ranking?
In two ways. Firstly quality encourages links. People search for quality content, people book mark quality content and people link to quality content. Ultimately it will be the relative volume (and quality) of links to your site that search engines record (as compared to a competitor) that will determine the ranking.
Secondly Google does not treat all links equally. When calculating the all important page rank it compares the content of the site providing the link with that of the destination and weights accordingly. The more relevant the association between the content on the two sites the greater value the link will be given. Therefore the higher the “quality” of the referral site the more value that will be passed on. Also Google allocates page ranking scores and these are also passed on via links. Therefore a site with “quality” page rank passes on more search listing value than one with a low score.
3. Should a SEO strategy take into account the differences between search engines and web directories? If so, how?
In theory you could optimize for all different flavours of search engine and directory. At times the differentiation between SE and directory can also be a little hazy. Yahoo for example is, strictly speaking, a directory not a SE. However it is much more like a SE in operation than a pay to play web directory like Yellow Pages etc. So whilst you could tailor your strategy down to a really granular level based on every different type of SE and directory in practice the most cost effective way is to target Google as this has the most stringent requirements and generally speaking if you can crack Google you will also do well in the others.
With regards to the true directories I generally encourage clients to run some paid search ads to judge what are the high performing keywords and what wording works best in terms of delivering customers to the site and then use this as the basis for directory listings and refining descriptions etc for free results. So in this regard the strategy should be inclusive across all listing mediums.
4. What are some of the most common website flaws in terms of SEO?
o Key content in unreadable formats. Ie. images, flash movies, javascript etc
o Menu navigation that is unable to be followed by search engine spiders ie. that using flash, images, javascript without having an alternate means of accessing via text links or central site map
o Bland and undersold page titles and descriptions. Every page on a web site is an opportunity to target increasingly granular themes and keywords. Many sites use a universal approach to page titles and descriptions and try and make them suit everyone and everything but the result is that they are attractive to no one.
o Lack of thought in content wording. Web copywriting is different to that required for offline purposes as it must target not only humans but search engine cataloging systems. Therefore wording needs to be tight and reinforce content themes and trigger words that someone is likely to search for.
o Attempts to spam search engines. The best results come from tighly organized and worded pages built around relevant themes and linked via consistent means to other similar pages. Excessive repetition and use of link farms etc are often counter productive in the long term.
5. Is it better to submit a site to a search engine or let the search engine find it? Why?
As long as you are not doing it repeatedly there is really no harm in submitting your site to a search engine although this will not necessarily speed up the indexing process. The best way to get indexed is to work to get links to your site on other sites that have already been picked up in Google and have reasonable page ranks that provide relative assurance that they will be spidered again soon.
One of the things that I generally get my clients to do (if appropriate)when a new site is launched is to run a few Google Adsense contextual ads on the site (at least for a little while). This will force Google to index the site so that it can serve appropriate contextual ads.
6. What sort of tactics constitute ‘SEO spam’ and what are the consequences?
The difference between good SEO and bad SEO is often simply a question of degree. A few highly optimized landing pages can provide great results in delivering searchers deep into the site and streamline this process for all concerned. Taken to the extreme this can turn into link farms with pages of links bouncing users and spiders around annoyingly. If you run foul of Google you can find your site black banned as happened temporarily to BMW Germany earlier in the year.
Generally speaking the following are things to be careful of…
o Link farming. Pages of links linking to each other and set up for the purposes of passing on search engine points rather than providing value to customers.
o Over optimizing through repetition. Just repeating the same keyword over and over provides little value. The key is to provide context not rubbish. Read it aloud if it sounds clumsy rewrite it.
o Invisible text. eg. white text on a white background so that the search engines pick it up but is invisible to naked eye. Search engines are smart enough to pick this up now.
o Using redirects or other forms of cloaking to serve different content to search engine spiders than to browsers.
7. If a website is properly search engine optimised, is it really necessary to pay for search results? Why/why not?
The organic search indexing system is often slow. It can take up to 3 months for any site changes to get picked up therefore paying to play is often the only way to legitimately get quick results. Also with search marketing it is really a case of page one or oblivion. If the keyword that you are targeting is very popular and competitive then it will take longer to get to the first page of the search results. Paid search is often the only way to get there in the short term.
SEO and SEM (Paid Search Engine Marketing) should really be considered complimentary strategies because they can feed off each other. Running PPC ads enables you to get great feedback on what customers are looking for and the most successful sales pitches that deliver them to your site. These can then be fed into your onsite SEO to refine it. The idea being that you run SEM up until you can get in the page one listings for free and then you can divert the spend elsewhere.

·  What four search engines comprise 90%+ of all general (non site-specific) web search traffic?
The most correct answer would be Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live and Ask, though AOL would also be acceptable (AOL, however, pulls its search results from Google and is thus more of a portal that includes Google’s search engine than a true search engine itself).
·  Explain the concept - “the long tail of search.”
The long tail is an economic theory of demand. It posits that in the modern American economy, there are popular products and unpopular products in every sector and segment of demand and that, in any of those given sectors, a demand curve exists with a few popular products that have high demand and a great number of unpopular products that have a much smaller amount of demand per product. Long tail theory says that in any given demand curve, the “tail” or unpopular products, when combined, will have a greater amount of demand than the popular products at the “head.’
Here’s how this applies to search:
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The above graphic does a good job of visually explaining the concept – popular queries in the head have thousands of queries, while unpopular queries in the “long tail” are rarely searched for. However, that “long tail” is actually, when taken together, a far greater amount of demand than the few popular queries. This theory seems to be vindicated by statements like those from Udi Manber of Google suggesting that 25% of queries have “never been seen before.”
·  Name the three most important elements in the head section of an HTML document that are employed by search engines.
Title, Meta Description and Meta Robots are the big 3. Although Meta Robots isn’t essential to have, it’s certainly able to control spider and search activity. Meta keywords is another common answer, but it would rank as a distant 4th, as our experiments show that none of the major engines will rank a page for a keyword that is listed only in the meta keywords tag.
·  How do search engines treat content inside an IFrame?
The engines all interpret content in an embedded IFrame as belonging to a separate document from the page displaying the IFrame content. Thus links and content inside IFrames refer to the page they come from, rather than the page they are placed on. For SEO, one of the biggest implications of this is that links inside an IFrame are interpreted as internal links (coming from the site the IFrame content is on) rather than external links (coming from the site embedding the IFrame).
·  What resource and query can you use to determine which pages link to any page on SEOmoz.org and contain the words “monkey” and “turnip”?
Use Yahoo! and search for linkdomain:seomoz.org monkey turnip.
·  What action does Google threaten against websites that sell links without the use of “nofollow”?
Google’s Matt Cutts has noted that pages and sites caught selling links for manipulative purposes may have their ability to pass PageRank (or other link juice weighting factors) removed.
·  What is the difference between local link popularity and global link popularity?
Local link popularity refers to links from sites in a specific topical neighborhood (as identified by algorithms such as Teoma – now used by Ask.com), while global link popularity doesn’t discriminate and counts all links from any site on the web.
·  Why is Alexa an inaccurate way to estimate the traffic to a given website?
Because SEOmoz is 3X more trafficked than NPR…
Seriously, though, the underlying problem is that Alexa receives data from only those users who have the Alexa toolbar installed. As such, the sampling is massively skewed towards webmasters and technology buffs, who are more likely to use the toolbar than the population at large.
·  Name four types of queries for which Google provides “instant answers” or “onebox results” ahead of the standard web results.
Flight searches, such as Seattle to Chicago; recipe searches such as chicken recipes; image searches such as those for Hopper paintings; stock quotes like GE stock quote and many more. Google lists them all on their features page. Of course, they neglected to mention our favorite (and I believe there a few more that aren’t covered publicly).
·  Describe why a flat site architecture is typically more advantageous for search engine rankings than a deep site architecture.
Flat architectures on websites allow spiders to crawl a large amount of pages without having to spider through many “clicks” or different pages to reach those links. A deep site architecture will force bots to crawl to many pages before being able to reach all of the content on a site. Flat site architecture provides three primary bonuses – first, search spiders are more likely to visit all of the content; second, the spiders are more likely to discover and index new content more quickly (as they don’t have to visit as many pages to be exposed to new content); third, PageRank and link juice is more effectively passed with fewer pages and more links rather than more pages with fewer links, helping to keep content ranking and out of the (now defunct) supplemental results.
 Q: What are most famous Directories, supported by google, name some directories, what is open directory project.
A: DMOZà supported by google
 Jayde, yahoo dir, sify khoj
The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors. DMOZ is open directory project.
 Q: Types of link Exchange, which is important and why?
A: 1 way, 2 way, 3 way, both 1 way n 2 way(recipocal) are impt, take description frm him.
 Q: Name top 10 search engines:
A:  Google, Yahoo, MSN, Live, ASK, Altavista, search.com, lycos.com, hotbot.com,

Q: who decides traffics:  Alexa.com
Google Buzz

40 SEO Interview Questions

  1. If a website's search engine saturation with respect to a particular search engine is 20%, what does it mean?a. 20% of the webpages of the website have been indexed by the search engine
    b. Only 20% of the pages of the website will be indexed by the search engine
    c. 20% of the websites pages will never be indexed
    d. The website ranks in the first 20% of all websites indexed by the search engine for its most important search terms
  2. 10 people do a web search. In response, they see links to a variety of web pages. Three of the 10 people choose one particular link. That link then has a __________ clickthrough rate. a. less than 30%
    b. 30 percent
    c. more than 30%
  3. Which of the following factors have an impact on the Google PageRank?a. The total number of inbound links to a page of a web site
    b. The subject matter of the site providing the inbound link to a page of a web site
    c. The text used to describe the inbound link to a page of a web site
    d. The number of outbound links on the page that contains the inbound link to a page of a web site
  4. What does the 301 server response code signify?a. Not Modified
    b. Moved Permanently
    c. syntax error in the request
    d. Payment is required
    e. The request must be authorized before it can take place
  5. If you enter 'Help site:www.go4expert.com' in the Google search box, what will Google search for?a. It will open up the Google help pages applicable to www.go4expert.com
    b. It will find pages about help within www.go4expert.com
    c. It will only find page titles about help within www.go4expert.com
    d. It will direct you to the request page for re-indexing of www.go4expert.com
  6. What is Anchor Text?a. It is the main body of text on a particular web page
    b. It is the text within the left or top panel of a web page
    c. It is the visible text that is hyper linked to another page
    d. It is the most prominent text on the page that the search engines use to assign a title to the page
  7. Which of the following free tools/websites could help you identify which city in the world has the largest search for the keyword - "six sigma"?a. Yahoo Search Term Suggestion Tool
    b. Alexa
    c. Google Traffic Estimator
    d. Google Trends
    e. WordTracker
  8. What term is commonly used to describe the shuffling of positions in search engine results in between major updates?a. Waves
    b. Flux
    c. Shuffling
    d. Swaying
  9. Are RSS/Atom feeds returned in Google's search results?a. Yes
    b. No
  10. Which of the following statements regarding website content are correct?a. If you have two versions of a document on your website, Google recommends that you only allow the indexing of the better version
    b. Linking to a page inconsistently does not affect the way Google views the page/s. Examples of inconsistent linking could be http://www.go4expert.com/page/ and http://www.go4expert.com/page and http://www.go4expert.com/page/index.htm.
    c. Syndicating your content could lead to Google viewing the material as duplicate
    d. Placeholders for pages which do not have content are never viewed as duplicate content by Google
  11. What does the term Keyword Prominence refer to?a. It refers to the fact that the importance of choosing high traffic keywords leads to the best return on investment
    b. It refers to the importance attached to getting the right keyword density
    c. It refers to the fact that the keywords placed in important parts of a webpage are given priority by the search engines
    d. It refers to the fact that the keywords in bold font are given priority by the search engines
  12. What is the term for Optimization strategies that are in an unknown area of reputability/validity?a. Red hat techniques
    b. Silver hat techniques
    c. Grey hat techniques
    d. Shady hat techniques

  13. Which of the following statements is correct with regard to natural links?a. They are two way links (reciprocal links)
    b. They are from authority websites
    c. They are voluntary in nature
    d. They are from .edu or .gov extension websites
  14. Which of the following can be termed as good keyword selection and placement strategies?a. Targeting synonyms of the main keyword
    b. Targeting the highest searched keywords only
    c. Copying competitor keywords
    d. Optimizing five or more keywords per page
  15. What does the 302 server response code signify?a. It signifies conflict, too many people wanted the same file at the same time
    b. The page has been permanently removed
    c. The method you are using to access the file is not allowed
    d. The page has temporarily moved
    e. What you requested is just too big to process
  16. Which of the following statements about FFA pages are true?a. They are greatly beneficial to SEO
    b. They are also called link farms
    c. They are paid listings
    d. They contain numerous inbound links
  17. What is the name of the search engine technology due to which a query for the word 'actor' will also show search results for related words such as actress, acting or act?a. Spreading
    b. Dilating
    c. RSD (realtime synonym detection)
    d. Stemming
    e. Branching
  18. What will the following robots.txt file do?
    User-agent:Googlebot
    Disallow:/*?
    User-agent:Scooter
    Disallow:    a. It will allow Google to crawl any of the dynamically generated pages. It will also allow the altavista scooter bot to access every page
    b. It will disallow Google from crawling any of the dynamically generated pages. It will also disallow the altavista scooter bot from accessing any page
    c. It will disallow Google from crawling any of the dynamically generated pages. It will allow the altavista scooter bot to access every page
    d. None of the above
  19. Which of the following statements about RSS are correct?a. It is a form of XML
    b. It stands for Realtime streamlined syndication
    c. It is a good way of displaying static information
    d. It is a microsoft technology
  20. Which of the following statements are correct with regard to using javascript within the web pages?a. It uses up the valuable space within the webpage, which should be used for placing meaningful text for the search engines
    b. Search engines cannot read Javascript
    c. It is a good idea to shift the Javascript into a separate file
    d. Most of the search engines are unable to read links within Javascript code
  21. Which of the following options are correct regarding the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) of a particular keyword?a. It is directly proportional to the popularity of the keyword
    b. It is inversely proportional to the competiton for the keyword
    c. It is directly proportional to the chances of the keyword ranking on the first page of the Google search results
  22. What is the illegal act of copying of a page by unauthorized parties in order to filter off traffic to another site called?a. Trafficjacking
    b. Visitorjacking
    c. Viewjacking
    d. Pagejacking
  23. Which of the following search engines offers a popular list of the top 50 most searched keywords?a. Google
    b. Yahoo
    c. AOL
    d. Lycos
  24. Which of the following search engines or directories provides the main search results for AOL?a. Lycos
    b. DMOZ
    c. Google
    d. Yahoo
    e. Windows Live
  25. Which of the following can be termed as appropriate Keyword Density?a. 0.01-0.1%
    b. 0.1-1%
    c. 3-4%
    d. 7-10%
    e. More than 10%
  26. The following robots meta tag directs the search engine bots:
    <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow">    a. Not to index the homepage and not to follow the links in the page
    b. Not to index the page and not to follow the links in the page
    c. To index the page and not to follow the links in the page
    d. Not to index the page but to follow the links in the page
  27. What is Keyword Density?a. The number of times the keyword is used / (DIVIDED BY) the total word count on page - (MINUS)the total words in HTML on the page
    b. The number of times the keyword is used X (MULTIPLIED BY) the total word count on page
    c. The number of times the keyword is used in the page description
    d. The number of times the keyword is used in the page title
    e. The number of times the keyword is used / (DIVIDED BY) the total word count on the page
  28. Which of the following are examples of agents?a. Internet Explorer
    b. Search engine spiders
    c. Opera
    d. SQL Server database attached to a website
  29. If you search for the term "iq test" in the Word Tracker keyword suggestion tool, will it return the number of independent searches for the term "iq"?a. Yes
    b. No
  30. Cloaking is a controversial SEO technique. What does it involve?a. Increasing the keyword density on the web pages
    b. Offering a different set of web pages to the search engines
    c. Hiding the keywords within the webpage
    d. Creating multiple pages and hiding them from the website visitors
  31. Which of the following facts about Alexa are correct?a. Alexa provides free data on relative website visitor traffic
    b. Alexa and Quantcast provide information on visitor household incomes
    c. Alexa is biased towards US based traffic
    d. Quantcast only tracks people who have installed the Quantcast toolbar
    This is the last question of your test.
  32. Google gives priority to themed in-bound links.a. True
    b. False
  33. Which of the following methods can help you get around the Google Sandbox?a. Buying an old Website and getting it ranked
    b. Buying a Google Adwords PPC campaign
    c. Placing the website on a sub domain of a ranked website and then 301 re-directing the site after it has been indexed
    d. Getting a DMOZ listing
  34. A Hallway Page is used to:a. Attract visitors from the search engines straight onto the Hallway Page
    b. Organizes the Doorway Pages
    c. Helps people navigate to different Doorway Pages
    d. Enables search engine bots to index the Doorway Pages
  35. Which of the following options describes the correct meaning of MouseTrapping?a. The technique of monitoring the movement of the mouse on the webpage
    b. The technique of monitoring the area on which an advertisement was clicked
    c. The web browser trick, which attempts to redirect visitors away from major websites through a spyware program
    d. The web browser trick, which attempts to keep a visitor captive at on a website
  36. What is the most likely time period required for getting a Google page rank?a. 1 week
    b. 3 weeks
    c. 2 months
    d. More than 3 months
  37. All major search engines are case sensitive.a. True
    b. False
  38. Which of the following website design guidelines have been recommended by Google?a. Having a clear hierarchy and text links
    b. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link
    c. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you should break the site map into separate pages
    d. Keeping the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)
    e. Use less than 30 images or graphics per page
  39. How are site maps important for the search engine optimization process?a. Site maps help the search engine editorial staff to quickly go through a website, hence ensuring quicker placement
    b. Google gives credit to the websites having site maps. The GoogleBot looks for the keyword or title "Site Map" on the home page of a website.
    c. Site maps help the search engine spider pick up more pages from the website
    d. None of the above
  40. Google looks down upon paid links for enhancing page rank. If a website sells links, what action/s does Google recommend to avoid being penalized?a. The text of the paid links should state the words "paid text link" for Google to identify it as a paid link
    b. Only Paid text links to non profit websites should be accepted
    c. Paid links should be disclosed through the "rel=nofollow" attribute in the hyperlink
    d. Paid links should be disclosed through the "index=nofollow" attribute in the hyperlink


General interview questions
  1. Introduce yourself?
  2. What are your career preferences?
  3. How much salary you are expecting?
  4. What is your plan regarding continuing your education?
  5. Tell us about your hobbies?
  6. What are your strengths & weaknesses?
  7. Are you ready to work in a team?
  8. Can you work in stress?
  9. What good things you liked in your ex boss?
  10. How do you feel working on weekend?
  11. Define success?
  12. How good your communication is?
  13. Where do you see yourself in next 2 years?
  14. You like trying new things or stay with old ones?
  15. Why you have applied for this position?
  16. Tell us about your family?
  17. Areas where you can revamp your skills?
  18. What if you are not selected for this position?
  19. What makes you feel that you are the best candidate for this position?
  20. What you preferred, money or work?
  21. Tell us about your subjects?
  22. What is your greatest strength?
  23. What are you looking for in a job?
  24. What kind of person would you refuse to work with?
  25. What is more important to you: the money or the work?
  26. Tell me about your ability to work under pressure.
  27. Do your skills match this job or another job more closely?
  28. What motivates you to do your best on the job?
  29. Describe your management style.
  30. How do you propose to compensate for your lack of experience?
  31. Describe your work ethic.
  32. What qualities do you look for in a boss?
  33. What position do you prefer on a team working on a project?
  34. Do you have any questions for me?

28 SEO INTERVIEW QUESTIONS THAT MAKE SENSE

1. Which blog do you subscribe and read?
Basically, if an SEO person is monitoring relevant blogs, that should be good because we see it as a way to keep up his/her continual learning. The answer to this question can also reveal how this person provides SEO solutions which could be based on the learnings from blogs, forums or subscriptions.

2. How do you handle clients and colleagues who are hard to please and convince them into implementing your SEO recommendations?
One of the things that define a successful SEO is the ability to maintain good relationships and giving up on a tough client would probably derail your SEO campaigns.
3. Can you describe what is your worst crisis and how you handled it?
Not necessarily an SEO-related crisis. Will determine the character of an applicant through tough times at work (difficult to meet deadlines, resource problems, etc).
4. What is your criteria in determining work priorities?
Is it the deadline, the type of client, the easiest task, the hardest task? It reveals their ability to manage time and managing it well.
5. Describe Search Engine Marketing to your next-door neighbor who doesn’t know much about computers.This will be important in conveying the message in the right language effectively. Our audience may vary but as long as we adapt to their level of understanding, we won’t have much problems.
6. Why do you want to work for our company?
Is it about the challenge, the type of accounts or just to make resumes look good?
7. Why did you pursue SEO as a career?
More than looking at their key skills in their resume, their answers also help identify the things they like to do and make use of them if possible. We can then define jobs that are closely related to these answers.
8. Do you maintain a blog about search?
Have a look at the contents in case you haven’t done so. Verify if you agree with the points stated or if the blog is just a plagiarized content from a notable blog. Worse, the blog could be promoting schemes you explicitly abhor or perhaps the site is made for AdSense (MFA).
9. What is your idea of an ideal SEO performance measurement?
An answer that limits keyword rankings should sound an alarm. But a mention about conversion rates, traffic referrals from search or ROI measurement should be a sign of relief. Next question could be how to implement these measurements.
10. How do you describe a typical SEO campaign?
The response will determine how a candidate understand the whole program not only on roles they take (low level) but also on the overall structure of the campaign (high level) and identify areas such as roles, dependencies, goals and expected values, track progress and on how they benefit from and/or help team members.
11. Explain your preferred way of performing keyword research.
Candidates would probably tell how they do keywords to make an impression rather than risk telling something about a set of things done by someone else and fail to answer follow up questions. Even keyword tools have their own limitations too, so a human involvement in this keyword research exercise should be emphasized.
12. Describe how search engine robots crawl the web.
This question will gauge a candidate’s understanding the basics of SEO. No exact answer is necessary as long as the logic of the answer follows the universally accepted idea (robots follow links, indexes text, etc). Questions may also be like how Google compares page A and page B for keyword ranking or the factors Yahoo! considers when indexing content.
13. If you have had client presentations, what are the challenges and learnings you can share?
The candidate will be able to demonstrate his/her ability to win the favor of colleagues and clients by giving concrete and sensible examples through his/her answers to this questions.
14. Elaborate about one SEO project you have done in the past, its challenges, achievements and client feedback.
The purpose is to see whether the candidate has sound understanding of SEO workflow on which comes ahead and what comes next. It could also reveal how the candidate handles client relationships and ability to create a compromise on difficult situations without sacrificing quality of work.
15. Who is your “SEO idol” and why?
It could be an in-house SEO person in the candidate’s office, Danny Sullivan or Matt Cutts or Aaron Wall or Rand Fishkin. Sure you know who are they, don’t you? If they don’t have one, it’s fine.
16. What type of tools do you usually use aside from in-house company tools that you can’t disclose?
Are they using Compete, Alexa, Web Position Gold or Advanced Link Builder? Having a sound analysis is always a good thing. But the basis of such analysis must also be accurate and relevant.
17. How much do you know about Google Big Daddy, Google Dance, Microsoft AdCenter or orientation of Google data centers?
The answer must be carefully analyzed. Perhaps, the purpose of this one is to tell whether candidates are used to making up answers on questions they don’t actually know or being honest about not knowing at all. I’d prefer candidates who do the latter.
18. How do you prevent “Keyword Cannibalization” among pages within your site?
19. Rank what are the five most important on-page SEO factors when ranking pages and explain why you came up with such choices.
This will identify what are the priority factors that are considered by the candidates. Since we don’t exactly know what are the most important SEO factors, it will be unfair to judge them based on their choice. At least we can tell through our experience if they are hypothetically correct.
20. How do you promote SEO on other colleagues who don’t belong to the search team (designers, web developers, marketers, programmers)?
Is this candidate more focused only on the things s/he is tasked to do? Is s/he more proactive in seeking to correct existing methodologies that are detrimental to SEO or any marketing efforts for that matter?
21. What are your favorite SEO tools and describe how you use the data they generate and what benefits they provide?
This might reveal how experienced and how analytical a candidate is in terms of taking advantage of the data available.
22. How do you execute link campaigns?
Establishing good amount of original content on the site? Establishing many online partners who serve immediate invound links? Widgets? Directory submissions? The list is long but it’s not difficult to distinguish great answers from lame ones.
23. How do you leverage organic search and paid search for optimal search results?
For folks that have experience in both disciplines as shown in their resumes, it will be good to see how they’ve managed their search campaigns together.
24. When will you recommend to a client that organic search is a better option than paid search? (And vice versa.)
Candidates must know the basic advantages and disadvantages of organic and paid search in order to determine which among the two is applicable, in cases when clients can’t afford to have both.
25. What is the difference between 301 and 302 redirection and the difference between visibility:hidden and display:none on CSS codes?
It is also important to have at least familiarity with technical aspects of SEO.
26. How do you check for proper “404 Error” page rendition within a website?
If candidates can provide clear answers and demonstrate a good understanding of issues that affect crawlability of a site, then this is a positive sign.
27. At which stage should you be involved in a web build project?
If s/he fails to mention “during the planning stage” or similar response, it’s not a good sign at all.
28. After a year of SEO and your efforts yielded minimal (read: less than expected) results, what will you do?
Again, this calls for the candidate to come up with initiatives. The first sentence of their reply could determine if they are able to take responsibility or just give up on the project easily.


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