So you want a career in SEO? The first step will be to convince the interviewer or client that you are fit and able for the job. Check to see if you would fair and compare your answers, failing that you may just learn something although the best stuff is for my clients only..
1. What SEO results can you show? I’m the Number 1 SEO Specialist in Norfolk or how about one of the best SEO Specialists in the UK, Check my Portfolio for more information.
2. What do you believe are important things to take into consideration when optimising a site? Understanding the business and it’s unique selling point is paramount to a successful campaign. Without the understanding or knowledge it is highly unlikely you will target all the relevant keywords associated with that business.
3. Who do you respect in the industry? Web Designers who build websites with SEO in mind, It’s no good if the site cannot be fully indexed or is structured incorrectly or misses vital script inclusions.
4. What web analytics programs are you familiar with? Why use anything other than google analytics? It’s free, easy to use and informative.
5. What is page Vision-based Page Segmentation or VIP’s? VIPS will allow search engines to differentiate between links from the content block and links from other blocks such as text advertisement blocks or footer blocks. As such, algorithms could easily weight links from each block differently. A link from the content block could be considered as more likely to be a true recommendation than a link from a text link advertisement block. Search engines may therefore give extra weight to in-content links while devaluing links that appear to be advertisements. Sites that rent links through link networks usually do place them in a block above, below or to the side of the content block. When VIPS is implemented, there is a risk that many rented advertisement links could be devalued.
6. What’s the difference between PageRank and Toolbar PageRank? One is updated about 3 times a year whilst the other offer a result that gives real time results.
7. What is sandbox? Imagine a place where you go when you have been naughty.
8. How long does it take to get out of sandbox? First you will have to analyse and correct the reason why you are in there in the first place, once you do this and develop in a sound ethical way google will let you out when they are ready. It still a good time to work on your SEO as it will take affect when your site has been released, so to speak.
9. How can you track your rankings? Regardless of which tracking system you use i would emphasise on the general relevant keyword traffic increase to your business, don’t get to hooked up on one search term as its bad for your health.
10. What are the common factors between Google/yahoo/msn? Apart from being search engines i see these websites as having the potential of the gold rush days of the wild wild west.
11. What percentage of your pay per click budget should go to each search engine? I would concentrate on maximising the potential of Google before even worrying about other search engines.
12. Give me a description of your general SEO experience. Traded online since 2001 with both retail and web development skills. No1: SEO Specialist in Norfolk
13. Do you currently do SEO on your own sites. Absolutely i do and i run online businesses, Any SEO professional would do that wouldn’t they?
14. Do you operate any blogs? Yes.
15. Where do you think the SEO industry is headed? It needs regulation as there are many giving those who do do it correctly a hard time due to unrealistic low pricing and losing customers confidence. Good SEO Specialists are hard to find but if you do find one i suggest that you keep hold of them. Just remember Rome wasn’t built in a day but it has stood strong for many years after.
16. What SEO tools do you regularly use? There are loads out there but some are better than others and it has taken many years of effort to gather the best tools. If you would like to know what they are i suggest you do the same as me and try them all to find out..
17. What SEO areas are you weak and strong in, and give examples of both. Well I’m weak at leaving a poor job, i have pride in my work and results matter to me. Where I’m strong is that i have a wealth of experience behind me which understands business concepts, their objectives and their warranted costs.
18. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site? Anyone in SEO knows that Link building is what gives the site the strength to rise in the ranks for major keywords, however this is only as good as the optimisation techniques used to increase relevant traffic.
19. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for back links? Hard work and effort attracting them to the site in question, there’s no bigger link generator than good quality informative content that people find useful.
20. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO, blogs, rss, pod casting. Networking Has been with us for ages and works when you target the right audience. However used incorrectly can be time consuming without results. Most Social network site likes use the rel=”nofollow” tag, therefore defeating the point of link building.
21. 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.
22. Do you know who Matt Cutts is? (Mr Google as far as i’m concerned or a senior software engineer at Google as an answer to this question)
23. In Google Lore - what are ‘Hilltop’ Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?
Why Page Theme is Usually More Important than PageRank:
In the Hilltop white paper they talk about how they can use expert documents to help compute relevancy. An expert document is a non affiliated page which links to many related resources. If page A is related to page B and page B is related to page C then a connection between A & C are assumed.
Additionally Hilltop states that it strongly considers page title and page headings in relevancy scores (in fact these elements can be considered more important than link text).
The benefit of Hilltop over raw PageRank (Google) is that it is topic sensitive - and is thus generally harder to manipulate than buying some random high power off topic link would be. The benefits of Hilltop over topic distillation (Teoma) are that Hilltop is quicker & cheaper to calculate, and that it tends to have more broad coverage.
When Hilltop does not have enough expert sites the feature can be turned off. It is believed that Google is using Hilltop to help sort the relevancy for some of their search results today.
On November 16th 2003, Google commenced an update (the Florida update) which had a catastrophic effect for a very large number of websites and, in the process, turned search engine optimization on its head. It is usual to give alphabetical names to Google’s updates in the same way that names are given to hurricanes, and this one became known as “Florida”.
In a nutshell, a vast number of pages, many of which had ranked at or near the top of the results for a very long time, simply disappeared from the results altogether. Also, the quality (relevancy) of the results for a great many searches was reduced. In the place of Google’s usual relevant results, we are now finding pages listed that are off-topic, or their on-topic connections are very tenuous to say the least.
In December 2005, Google began to roll out what they called the “Big Daddy” update, and by the end of March 2006 it had been fully deployed in all of their data centers. It wasn’t a normal update, which are often algorithm changes. Big Daddy was a software/infrastructure change, largely to the way that they crawl and index websites.
As the update spread across the data centers, people started to notice that many pages from their sites had disappeared from the regular index. Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer at Google, put it down to “sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the in links or the out links of that site. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling.”
24. What is sticky content? It’s exactly as it sounds, it is content that would be site wide.
These are a few questions you might encounter in a job interview and here is how i would answers to them. Good luck if you are new to the industry but please remember not to promise something you cannot deliver as it will come back to haunt you later on.
25. If you do show someone your website always remember to use your spell check just in case of any Typo’s.
