So you want a career in SEO? The first step will be to convince the interviewer or client that you are fit and able to do the job. Check below to see how you measure up and compare your answers. Failing that you may just learn something – although the best information, as always, is reserved for our clients…
1. What SEO results can you boast? We’re 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 perceive are the important things to take into consideration when optimising a site? Understanding the business and it’s unique selling point (USP) is paramount to a successful campaign. Without the understanding or knowledge it’s highly unlikely you’ll 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 are not high on our list. It’s no use to anyone if a website can’t 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 VIPS? 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 ‘weigh’ links from each block differently. A link from a 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 approximately three times a year whilst the other offers a result that gives ‘real time’ results.
7. What exactly 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 remedy the reason/s why you are in there to begin with. Once you do this and begin to develop in a sound, ethical way Google will release you, but only when they are ready! Whilst in there it’s still a good time to work on your SEO as it will take effect when your site has been released, so to speak.
9. How can you track your rankings? Regardless of which tracking system you use we would put the emphasis on the general relevant keyword traffic increase to your business, don’t get too hooked up on one search term as it’s bad for your health!
10. What are the common factors between Google/Yahoo/MSN? Apart from all being search engines we 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 (PPC) budget should go to each search engine? we would concentrate on maximising the potential of Google before even worrying about other search engines.
12. Give a description of your general SEO experience. We’ve traded online since 2001, attaining both retail and web development skills. No1: SEO Specialist in Norfolk
13. Do you currently optimise your own sites? Absolutely, yes! We manage many different online businesses. Any SEO professional worth their salt would do, wouldn’t they?
14. Do you operate any blogs? Yes. Blogs are effective and aid other SEO techniques.
15. Where do you think the SEO industry is heading? It needs regulation as there are many ‘sharks’ giving those of us who do it properly a bad time due to unrealistic price setting and losing customer’s confidence. Good SEO Specialists are hard to find but if you do find one we suggest that you keep hold of them. Just remember Rome wasn’t built in a day but it has stood strong for many thousands of years after.
16. What SEO tools do you regularly use? There are lots to choose from of course, some are better than others and it has taken many years of effort to gather the best resources. If you would like to know what they are then we suggest you do the same as us and try them all to find out…
17. What SEO areas are you strong in and where could you do better? Give examples of both. Well we’re weak when it comes to leaving a poor job! Webserve have pride in their work and results matter to us. Where we’re strong is that we have a wealth of experience to fall back on, plus we understand business concepts, 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 it’s strength to rise in the ranks for major keywords. However this can only be 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 and Pod casting? Networking has been with us for ages and works when you target the right audience. However, used incorrectly it can be time consuming and lack results. Most social networking sites ‘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 website 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 pay-per-click (PPC) ads that are displayed in the search results. If you pay less for the clicks than what you receive from the ads hosted 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 we’re concerned! Or we’ll accept senior software engineer at Google as your answer)
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 random high power off topic links. 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 doesn’t have enough expert sites the feature can be turned off. It’s believed that Google is using Hilltop to help sort the relevancy for some of their search results currently.
On November 16th 2003, Google commenced an update (the Florida update) which had a catastrophic effect on a very large number of websites and, in the process, turned search engine optimisation on it’s head. It’s normal practice to give alphabetical names to Google’s updates in the same way that names are given to hurricanes, and thus 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 off the radar 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 centres. 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 centres, people started to notice that many pages from their websites 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 as to what might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to ‘spammy’ online neighbourhoods, or link buying/selling.”
24. What is sticky content? It’s exactly as it sounds, i.e.content that is site wide.
The above gives you a reasonable idea of some of the questions you might encounter in a job interview situation and how an SEO Specialist such as Webserve would potentially answer them. Good luck if you’re new to the industry but please remember, as always, not to promise something you can’t deliver – it will always come back to haunt you later on!
