SEO Interview Questions

·  What do you know about this company and can you define who we are?
·  How would you define SEO and SEM?
·  What is your previous SEO history like? Can you give examples of rankings you’ve achieved?
·  What is your biggest mistake and biggest success in SEO?
·  What are the most important initial SEO steps on a website?
·  Which methods would you use for link building?
·  What is your strength in terms of SEO?
·  How would you monitor rankings?
·  Which verticals have you worked on before?
·  Which side of SEO would you like to be involved? Either link building, coding or whatever?
·  What if your client is not open to ideas to make changes on their website, what would you come up with?
·  Which blogs and websites do you follow daily to keep up-to-date and why?
·  Do you know who Matt Cutts is?
·  Which Google products do you use?
·  Which SEO tools do you prefer?
·  How is your copywriting skill? Can you give some examples?
·  Do you use any type of web analytics?
·  What is a pagerank?
·  What is “nofollow”?
·  How do you see the future of SEO?
·  How do you define your HTML hand-coding skills?
·  Why is a sitemap important and how would you make search engines find it quickly?
·  Do you know anything about robotstxt?
·  What is your opinion about paid links?
·  How would you track the number of outlinks of a website?
·  What do you mean by cloaking?          
·  What are the different ways of link building?
·  How do you optimize dynamic web pages?
·  What is Mod_Rewrite module?
·  How you can target seo as country wise?
·  What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
·  What is Alexa ranking?
·  What is an SEO, SEM and how important are they for an organization? Explain
·  Could you briefly explain pagerank algorithm?
·  What is google spamdexing?
·  Explain several steps that you would take to optimize a website?
·  How important the site needs to be wc compliant?
·  How and what does msn, yahoo and google search looks for in a website?
·  Define all the different ways to do marketing for a website? (PPC, Ads, Backlinks, etc)
·  What is an Organic search?
·  Name few popular sites and how do you think they become popular?
·  Why google ranks Wikipedia for most of the topics?
·  Do you know about Signals, Classifiers and Topicality?
·  How does a search engine work and what is the future?
·  Can you get “abc” company listed for the keyword “Google” in the first page?
·  What is a Search Engine?
·  Why are Search Engines important?
·  What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
·  Why do I need to consider SEO for my website?
·  How do Search engines rank sites?
·   What do you mean by SERPs?
·  Did you work on PPC?
·  Is sitemap usefull for SEO?
·  Explain your SEO Experience?
·  Can you write HTML code by hand?
·  Explain importance of Meta tags in seo?
·  Why are you leaving your current seo job?
·  Have you attended any seo conferences?
·  What role do social media play in an SEO strategy?
·  Explain what META tags matter in today's SEO world?
·  What kind of SEO strategies do you normally implement for back links?
·  What do you think is different about working for an SEO agency vs. doing SEO in-house?
·  To what extent do you think seo is effective?
·  As a seo consultant do you consider yourself as creative?
·  Have you ever prepared proposal for seo clients? If yes can you give me one proposal now?
·  What are the problems you face in seo industy?
·  How do you evaluate whether a seo campaign is working?
·  In what area of seo are you strong? And what area of seo you are weak?
·  What seo blogs and Forums do you read?
·  How far do you think social media optimization help a website to achieve top position in search engines?
·  As a seo consultant what do you prefer Google / Yahoo/ Bing ?
·  Do you have Knowledge of Static as well as Dynamic Website Optimization?
·  What is the role of social bookmarking sites in Seo?
·  What do you mean by social networking Traffic? How do they help for website seo?
·  Have you done any Video Submissions and Video Promotions.?
·  When will my Submissions appear on the engines?
·  Explain me the steps you follow for optimizing a website?
·  For what clients you have done seo? Are you successful in doing seo for them?
·  What is link building? Link buying?
·  What kind of activities do you normally implement for generating back links for a website?
·  Why do we use nofollow on an internal link?
·  What do you mean by competitive analysis and what techniques do you use?
·  How many target keywords should a website have? Or how many target keywords do you suggest for a website?
·  How do you help your client to decide budget allocation for seo and pay-per-click?
·  Do you have your own blogs? Do you do any seo freelance works?
·  How do you handle your client if he do not want to implement your seo recommendations?
·  What’s the difference between the on-page and off-page optimization.
·  Why might you want to use no follow on an internal link?    
·  What do you think about link buying?
·  Who are the two key people - who started Google?
·  Who is Matt Cutts?
·   If you were bidding on a contract, what competitor would you most worry about?
·   What is the difference between PageRank and Toolbar PageRank?
·  How’s the future of search engine optimization?  
·  What’s web 2.0?
·  What do you know about the podcasting, blogs and RSS?
·   What is Google sandbox?
·   What do you know about the XML sitemap and how do you generate it.
·  What are ranking factors in Google, Yahoo and MSN?
·   What is key word density?

What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

   SEO stands Search Engine Optimization. It is the process getting your site to place well on search results.
   SEM stands Search Engine Marketing. It implies buying advertisements space on search result pages. Sponsored listings are SEM. is most important for the businesses who sell their products online or generate sales leads. SEM services not only traffic to your website, but also increases the rate at which your traffic is converted into customers.
   Both are related. When using Google Adwords, the better you optimize your pages for search, the less you will be paying for your selected keywords in the PPC campaign and the better placment your ads will get.

Black Hat SEO Techniques

Keyword Stuffing - Keyword Stuffing means mislead position in search results by overloading the world wide web page content using long lists of keywords you need to rank for. It offers repeated use of an keyword to improve a page relevance.

Hidden Text – Hidden Text involves inserting text that may be mostly repetitive use of keywords usually placed in the bottom of the site. This hidden word is text shaded to blend with the background of the page and it is invisible to the consumer visiting the site. The concept at the rear of this Black Hat SEO strategy is how the search engine bot can detect the particular hidden text even when people cannot find it as these spiders look at page’s content through the HTML code. Few Google search spiders can see and also dismiss any text that may be used to blend with the page’s background color.

Page Stuffing – Page Stuffing widely used technique to attract traffic from search engine like yahoo and Google. Here the variations of the web page that is replicated or a bit changed are submitted to the search engine. The possibility of all these variations resulting in top rankings on the search engine is high should the page does well for any particular word or maybe phrase.

Cloaking – Cloaking means using one web site for the search engine optimization that crawls the web page and then altering the web page to demonstrate another page to help users. This alteration of internet pages is used as being a practice to trick Google. This can deceive users about the content they will spot when clicking for the search results.

Meta Tag Stuffing – Meta Tag Stuffing is another means of adding keywords in a very web page without having overloading the page with keywords. Nonetheless, when using this tactic, high traffic keywords are put in the page which can be totally irrelevant to the web page content material. This is done and then boost additional traffic to the site regardless that the these keywords do not match the website content.

Link Farming – Link Farming involves changing shared links having other websites to improve SEO. The main purpose behind this plan is to increase the volume of websites that will connection to your site. This is because SERPs rank websites while using quality and variety of other websites linking for a site. You can gain a highly regarded ranking in yahoo and Google if more sites are connected to yours as this signifies your site has high popularity among online users. However, link farming is considered to be a spamming technique and can bring about your site having banned.

SMO/Social SEO methods

• RSS feeds, social news and sharing buttons, user rating and polling tools, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos.
• Blogging, commenting on other blogs, participating in discussion groups, and posting status updates on social networking profiles.

Types of link Bait

Informational hooks - Provide information that a reader may find very useful. Some rare tips and tricks or any personal experience through which readers can benefit.
News hooks - Provide fresh information and obtain citations and links as the news spreads.
Humor hooks - Tell a funny story or a joke. A bizarre picture of your subject or mocking cartoons can also prove to be link bait.
Evil hooks - Saying something unpopular or mean may also yield a lot of attention. Writing about something that is not appealing about a product or a popular blogger. Provide strong reasons for it.
Tool hooks - Create some sort of tool that is useful enough that people link to it.
Widgets hooks - A badge or tool, that can be placed or embedded on other websites, with a link included.
Unique content hooks - This hook is intended for people that are in need of unique contents or articles for traffic or AdSense revenue. This became popular after Google implemented Duplicate Contents Filter and sites with duplicate contents saw fall in traffic. To use this hook, you have to create unique contents and give it out to Bloggers and webmasters with an obligation to put link back to your site.

What is Link Bait?

Linkbait is the latest buzz word in the SEO world and has come to be the preferred way to natural link building.
Linkbait is essentially a piece of content placed on a web page - whether it's an article, blog post, picture, or any other section that is designed for the specific intention of gathering links from as many different sources as possible.
Link bait is any content or feature, within a website, designed specifically to gain attention or encourage others to link to the website.
Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything "interesting enough to catch people's attention."

On-Page Optimization

Design your website or web pages in a search engine friendly way. By implementing meta tags like page title, description, keywords, images,etc,.

Off-Page Optimization

A website that is not placed on the site itself, instead of somewhere else on the web, but can influence the ranking of this website. Exactly this is the incoming links from other websites which is most difficult to control the off-page manners, than the on-page Optimization. Do work by buildup link from outside of your own web pages to follow up rankings in the search engines.