SEO Process

SEO Question and Answers

What do you mean by Keyword Stemming?

Keyword stemming is a useful tool for web pages and search engine optimization. The process of keyword stemming involves taking a basic but popular keyword pertaining to a particular website and adding a prefix, suffix to make the keyword into a new word. This particular process allows a website to expand upon the number of variable options, which can help a website get more traffic. Words that are a product of keyword stemming can expand in either direction, or even add words to the phrase, making the possibilities limitless.

An example of keyword stemming would be if you took the word “search” and made additional keywords out of words such as “searcher,” “searches,” “searching,” “searched,” and “search-able.” Using keyword stemming on the word “search” would bring in hits for each of the stemmed keywords when they are searched for in an engine.

What do you mean by Keyword Proximity?

  Keyword proximity refers to the distance in space, as measured in within the keywords as well as the phrases including the keywords without repetition and with contextual relevance.

Keyword proximity measures the closeness between two keywords. In general, the closer the keywords are, the better.

For Search Engine Optimization, the proximity of the keywords or keywords included in a phrase in relation to each other and one another is of great importance and is the basis of using the appropriate combination of the words in the page titles, headers, paragraphs and page content.

What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site for a particular keyword?

1) Keyword in anchor text of external & internal back links

2) Internal link structure

3) Keyword density in content, title, description, alt tags, h1 tag etc

What’s special in XML Sitemap and where do you submit that?

  That is a file which list all the pages of website in XML format designed for SE’s. Here we can give the crawl-able frequency and also we can define the priority of all the web pages (1.0, 08. 065 etc). This can be submitted in Google Webmaster tools.

How can you optimize a website having 2 lakh pages?

  Following are the special additional SEO stuffs that we have to implement for dynamic website.

1) Generation of dynamic title & description

2) Dynamic XML Sitemap generation

3) Good Internal link structure (Normal)

I want to change the domain name of well ranked website in SERP. Is it possible to retain the same keyword positions?

  Definitely we can. Just 301 redirecting the corresponding old URLs to the new URLs. In initial after we did this, we may experience a drop in rankings. Once our new URLs got indexed, we can expect a same position that we had earlier.

What’s your idea about page rank and how it’s calculated?

  Let me first tell about the calculation behind that. Google says that page rank calculation formula is having more than 2 lakh variables. I am sure that following things are the main factor,

1) Internal Back Links

2) External Back Links

3) Domain Age

Apart from this, number of visits, bounce rate, CTR etc may be a factor in calculating the page rank. Page rank is just a metric from Google which defines the quality of the page. Moreover we do have many other targets like keyword position, quality traffic and conversions. In my vision, I am having very least importance to page rank. But I am crazy about getting full green PR tool bar for my blog.

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?

  It doesn’t unless the rumor proves to be fact. Yes, I check on the rumor but as with all rumors, it can have detrimental effects if you “jump on the band wagon” and it proves to be just a rumor with no basis in fact.

What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?

  Competitive analysis means taking a close look at websites that rank highly in search results and comparing those sites to the one you are optimizing. They have employed methods that are working and are a valuable source for ideas.

How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?

  The main indicator is to perform a search on all major search engines using the keywords/ keyphrases I am optimizing for. An analysis of those results will help to determine if optimization has gained in the results or lost ground. This analysis should be done over time as each search engine will update and index on a varying schedule. Another aspect is to use website statistics to determine where traffic is originating.

From an analytic perspective, what is different between a user from organic search results vs. a type-in user?

  A user coming into your site from an organic search usually has never visited your site before or is performing a general search for a specific product or topic. These visitors are trying to find the site that most suits their needs. A “type-in” user is specially interested in your website. They may have found your URL in print advertising or from a friend. Often, these users are familiar with what you are offering and are coming back to your site as a repeat visitor.

Are you familiar with web analytic and what packages are your familiar with?

  Yes I am and the tool I use most frequently is Google’s webmaster tools. I also use the available Yahoo hosting tools for my own sites. Knowing what search terms your visitors are actually using to find your site as well as where those visitors are coming from will help refine SEO efforts. The amount of time each visitor spends on your site will help in determining if content changes are needed.

Why might you want to use nofollow on an internal link?

  Many sites have shopping carts and member login or logout links. This type of link is simply an administrative function and does nothing to contribute to site content. The search engine does not need to index those pages.

What things wouldn’t you to do increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?

  I would avoid any site with the appearance of a link farm. I would also avoid any “spam” practice such as unsolicited email campaigns, certain affiliate advertising sites, sites that re-direct visitors to your site, and anything resembling the practices of Zango.

What role do social media play in an SEO strategy?

  Social media such as social networking sites and news sites can provide for viral marketing. Viral marketing has proven to be powerful if the content of a site is appealing.

What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks?

  I check the competitors backlinks to find highly relevant sites and request a link from them. If reciprocal linking is required, I may be able to place a link back to them in a relevant portion of a page on the site but if not, I will state so and may not gain that link. Another method I use is to submit press releases to relevant media.

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

  In regards to search results, it is a method that search engines such as Google use to determine relevance of a page based on phrases actually used in a document. For example, if you have a page instructing people on wildlife photography, the search engine would reasonably expect to see terms and phrases such as “selecting a camera”, “approaching wildlife”, and “low light photo conditions”. Related phrases will add to the relevance of a page where unrelated phrases will reduce the relevance of a page. This is one technique that Google is using to weed out “spam” sites.

What do you think about link buying?

  I discourage the practice for the most part. There are more effective means of paid marketing. One exception would be purchasing listings in highly reputable directories such as Yahoo directory.

Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important “on page” elements

1. Visible text being relevant to expected search terms.

2. Page titles.

3. Navigation and “alt” attributes for navigation items and link text.

4. An “alt” attributes for images and other media presented on pages.

If the company whose site you’ve been working for has decided to move all of its content to a new domain, what steps would you take?

  I would update the old site with permanent redirects to to new page for every page. Then I would attempt to remove old content from the major search engines to avoid duplicate content issues.

Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?

  1. Interview website owner or webmaster to get a good grasp of the site’s purpose and goals.

  2. Perform a keyword analysis to find best performing keywords that should be used for that site and for individual pages of the site

  3. Analyze site content to determine usage of relavant keywords and phrases. This includes visible text as well at titles, META tags, and “alt” attributes.

  4. Examine site navigation

  5. Determine the existence of robots.txt and sitemap and examine those for effectivenes.

  6. Make recommendations for changes needed for the site and each individual page.

Explain: what META tags matter in today’s world?

  The most important META tag for SEO is your page description. Search engines do make use of this tag but it does not outweigh the title or visible text. The META keywords tag is not much of a factor in the major search engines but should not be overlooked.

What do you think of using XML sitemaps?

   XML Sitemaps are important. It helps search engines crawling your site and articles. Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask support the Sitemaps protocol that lets the four biggest search engines have the updated page information. Sitemaps do not guarantee all links will be crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee indexing.
Most importantly, when you have a site that is not crawlable for some reason. Using an XML sitemap will help the search engines know about and discover your URLs on your site that they could not find due to your site’s crawlablity issues.
Also, when you have a site with 1000′s of URLs, using an XML sitemap allows you to set priorities of your URLs so Google and other engines know which URLs you feel are most important and should be indexed first before indexing other URLs on your site.
They are an additional tool to help the search engines when they crawl a site. There is no requirement for any sitemap and your pages will get indexed without them if you pay close attention to navigation within your site.

What do you think of PageRank?

  In relation to SEO projects, it is relatively unimportant but can give an indication of how much work needs to be done in gaining inbound links.

How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?

  The main indicator is to perform a search on all major search engines using the keywords/ keyphrases I am optimizing for. An analysis of those results will help to determine if optimization has gained in the results or lost ground. This analysis should be done over time as each search engine will update and index on a varying schedule. Another aspect is to use website statistics to determine where traffic is originating.

What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI Indexing)?

  LSI indexing rise to overcome the limitations of "literal" search term matching. For example, if someone is searching for "hiking in Northerly Nevada" a literal search would only match the words used without taking into account words such as "hike", "hiked". LSI can give more relevant results because it does take word usage and context into account determining what a page is "about" rather than a strict reliance on literal wording.