[Woolly]

Hi Guys

I have recently been on loads of interviews which even included Microsoft [MSN] yesterday. To help me in the interviews I gathered a list of really good questions from various sites.

For all those new to the subject a bit of good advice - take stats to show people. For SEO positions I showed people the number impressions for my sites from when I started to now. If you have an order form or information request form then you could demonstrate that in addition to getting more impressions you had an increase in the number of people signing up.

Okay - here is the list


First these are the general areas that you should be clued up on:

CMS and technical understanding of how search Engines work and
Design/Usability implications for SEO
Key word research
Content and writing for SEO
Most important ranking factors and meta data
Builiding links, PR and SEO innovations
Tracking tools

Now the horrible ones

1. What SEO results can you show?


2. What do you believe are important things to take into consideration when optimising a site?


3. Who do you respect in the industry?


4. What web analytics programs are you familiar with?


5. List On-Page SEO factors


6. List 5 link building techniques.


7. What is page segmentation? (Ever heard of VIPS?)


8. What's the difference between PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?


9. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI - Indexing)?

10. What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?

11. What is sandbox?

12. How long does it take to get out of sandbox?

13. How can you track your rankings?


14. What services does the wordtracker offer, and how do they relate to seo?

15. What are the common factors between google/yahoo/msn?

16. How can you keep your PPC bids from cannibalizing your search efforts on other (non pay per click) search engines?

17. What percentage of your pay per click budget should go to each search engine?

18. Does either Google Adwords or Overture work better for your particular product or service? Or, perhaps neither one is appropriate from a return on investment (ROI) perspective.

19. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.

20. 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?

22. Where do you think the SEO industry is headed?

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

24. Have you attended any search related conferences?

25. What SEO tools do you regularly use?

25. What SEO areas are you weak and strong in, and give examples of both.

26. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?

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

29. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
blogs, rss, podcasting

30. Are you familiar with search arbitrage?

31. Are you familiar with enterprise web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?

32. Are you familiar with A/B testing and multivariate testing?

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

34. Are you experienced in managing PPC campaigns? To what extent and on what platforms?

35. Do you have experience in bid management tools, API tools, and click fraud issues?

36. Do you have experience in extensive competitive analysis and what techniques do you use?

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

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

39. Do you know who Matt Cutts is?

44. In Google Lore - what are ‘Hilltop’ Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?

45. What changes did you make and what ranking effect did it have?

46. What is sticky content?

[ceefive]

Wow! Tough!

[Woolly]

Ok, here are some of the answers. Note that I have not done all of them so others can join in and argue the answers

1. What SEO results can you show?


2. What do you believe are important things to take into consideration when optimising a site?


3. Who do you respect in the industry?
Matt Cutts, Mike Grehan

4. What web analytics programs are you familiar with?
WebTrends and Google Analytics

5. List On-Page SEO factors
keywords in url, keyword, domain name, header, description meta tag, keyword meta tag,

6. List 5 link building techniques.
Affiliates, internal links, external links, reciprocal links, directory links.

7. What is page segmentation? (Ever heard of VIPS?)
Very important these days on a page/content development angle as well as understanding valuations of links (internal and back links). Block level anaysis is in all of the big 3. A must for a core understanding

VIsion-based Page Segmentation - The image to the right illustrates the basic concept behind VIPS. Nearly every page on the internet has the same basic structure to it. The top table row <tr></tr> is generally always the page header, which contains the website's logo and sometimes a site menu. etc

Exactly where on a page a link appears in the <table> structure, can determine the real value of that link.

It is just common sense, if you follow the habits of webmasters from around the world, that the page body text carries the most important information on the webpage. And, it makes sense that any tables that may be imbedded in the page body region of the webpage might just be additional advertising. Your website is the very best testimonial that you can look at to understand the power of the VIPS algorithm.

8. What's the difference between PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?
PageRank is a live calculation that goes far beyond a 1-10 scale. It's value in scoring has been consistently devalued since 2002-3.

TBPR is a google toolbar that only gets updated every 3 months or so and does not truly reflect PR

Actually, Google updates the "real" page rank continually - and it impacts the algorithm long before an update occurs for toolbar Page Rank.
The amount of page rank voted to any given link also depends on how many total links are on the linking page. Plus, Google can decide that certain pages should not transfer any Page Rank at all. So predicting what the toolbar will tell you in the future involves pretty much guesswork.


9. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI - Indexing)?
Latent semantic indexing helps search engines to find out what a web page is all about. It basically means you shouldn't focus on a single keyword when optimizing your web pages and when getting links.
The web pages on your web site should be related and focus mainly on a special topic while using different words that describe the topic. Use variations of your keyword and synonyms. That makes it easier for search engines to determine the topic of your site.


10. What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
An information retrieval system that uses phrases to index, search, rank, and describe documents on the web. This system would look at the way those phrases were used across the web to decide if they were “valid” or “good” phrases. In addition to considering if their use on all webpages was significant statistically by how frequently they were used, it would also look at how those phrases might have been related to each other - certain phrases tend to be mentioned in the same documents as other phrases.

Used not only in onpage factors but off page as well for creating effective link text strategies. Google even used it for Spam detection (potentially) these days. There is a great deal of information of relevance contained in here.

In Google Lore - what are 'Hilltop' Florida' and 'Big Daddy'? Algo update

11. What is sandbox?
A myth.

12. How long does it take to get out of sandbox?
Several weeks

13. How can you track your rankings?
Alexa Rank Comparison Tool
http://www.getfreesofts.com/soft/396...k_Tracker.html


14. What services does the wordtracker offer, and how do they relate to seo?
Keyword mining – find loads of keywords, most competitive, etc

15. What are the common factors between google/yahoo/msn?

demographic differences - http://www.leadgenerators.co.uk/arti...mographics.php

16.How can you keep your PPC bids from cannibalizing your search efforts on other (non pay per click) search engines?

17. What percentage of your pay per click budget should go to each search engine?

18. Does either Google Adwords or Overture work better for your particular product or service? Or, perhaps neither one is appropriate from a return on investment (ROI) perspective.


19. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.

20. 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?

22. Where do you think the SEO industry is headed?

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

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
WebMasterWorld
clickZ
e-Consultancy

24. Have you attended any search related conferences?
Ad Tech

25. What SEO tools do you regularly use?
keyword tool
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/


25. What SEO areas are you weak and strong in, and give examples of both.

26. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
1. Linguistic Analysis (How a search engine processes your site) will become more sophisticated. What you can do: Get rid of jargon and business speak - talk to your visitors, engage them, optimising as much for the user as for the search engine.
2. Link Popularity (the quantity and quality of sites that link to yours) plays a greater role in ranking, quality links and harder to come by. What you can do: Successful link building to increase a website's "popularity" will be about creating a dialogue with other site owners and blog authors. If you want to harness search traffic, making your website link worthy must be a primary directive.
Useful Link:
Delicious Social Tagging Tool and Search Engine - http://del.icio.us
3. Social Tagging (User Opinion and Personalised search results). What you can do: No website is an island - make sure your products and services stand up to opinion - actively engage in a conversation with your Users, but be prepared for criticism. In the future it may not be enough to attract traffic in the short term - it will also be vital that a user recommends your site to ensure long term gains.
28. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks? What do you think about link buying, link bait, and other specific backlink strategies?

A measure of the number of web pages found on the Internet that contain a link to a specific page. Backlinks can be found both within a web site and on other external websites. Search engines that use backlinks to measure the value of a web page.
Strategy – forums, articles and tutorials

29. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
blogs, rss, podcasting

30. Are you familiar with search arbitrage?
How does this arbitrage work? First, a publisher hosts ads on a web site or blog, from the Yahoo Publisher Network or Google's AdSense program. The search engines pay for clicks on the ads hosted on the site or blog—they're essentially giving the web publisher a commission from the click fees they collect from their advertisers.

Once a web publisher or blogger has hosted ads on their site, the next step is to drive traffic to the site using a pay-per-click (PPC) ads that are displayed in search results. If you pay less for buying clicks than what you receive for the ads hosted on the site, then you've made an easy profit. In a nutshell, that's the essence of search arbitrage.
31. Are you familiar with enterprise web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?

32. Are you familiar with A/B testing and multivariate testing?

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

34. Are you experienced in managing PPC campaigns? To what extent and on what platforms?

35. Do you have experience in bid management tools, API tools, and click fraud issues?

36. Do you have experience in extensive competitive analysis and what techniques do you use?

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

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

39. Do you know who Matt Cutts is? Google guru and the unofficial/official voice of google. Check out this blog

44. In Google Lore - what are ‘Hilltop’ Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?

45. What changes did you make and what ranking effect did it have?

46. What is sticky content?
Sticky content refers to content published on a website, which has the purpose of getting a user to return to that particular website. Webmasters use this method to build up a community of returning visitors to a website.
Examples of sticky content include the following: Chat_room, Online_forum, Webmail, Internet_games, Weather, News, Horoscopes, and much more.

[chimeron]

thanks for this Miles your list is mind-opening, at the very least.

learning never ends.

[benjarriola]

This is so long, can we tackle this one at time? Maybe on separate threads. Or maybe 5 at a time.

[maepaulino]

the list of the questions reminded me of "Getting to know you" threads

this is very enlightening, I'm looking forward to the answers of the experienced SEOs in this forum

[Loisel]

Thanks for Sharing! Keep it up sir! respect...

[jozzua]

Nice collection of questions.

Originally Posted by Woolly

2. What do you believe are important things to take into consideration when optimising a site?

Good Content, Good inter-link site structure, search engine submission- how search engine sees your site-search engine spiders as well as the human visitor Consideration

Originally Posted by Woolly

22. Where do you think the SEO industry is headed?

All directions, infinity, maybe where technology ends