50 hot SEO Interview Questions

Technical / Tactics

Every SEO prefers certain tactics over others, but familiarity with many could indicate a deeper understanding of the industry. And while every SEO doesn't need to have a web developer background, having such skills can help set someone apart from the crowd.

1. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
2. Can you write HTML code by hand?
3. Could you briefly explain the PageRank algorithm?
4. How you created any SEO tools either from scratch or pieced together from others?
5. What do you think of PageRank?
6. What do you think of using XML sitemaps?
7. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
8. What SEO tools do you regularly use?
9. Under what circumstances would you look to exclude pages from search engines using robots.txt vs meta robots tag?
10. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
11. Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
12. Have you ever had something you've written reach the front-page of Digg? Sphinn? Or be Stumbled?
13. Explain to me what META tags matter in today's world.
14. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
15. 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?
16. Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important "on page" elements
17. Review the code of past clients/company websites where SEO was performed.
18. What do you think about link buying?
19. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI Indexing)?
20. What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
21. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
22. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for back links?
23. What role does social media play in an SEO strategy?
24. What things wouldn't you to do increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?
25. What's the difference between PageRank and Toolbar PageRank?
26. Why might you want to use nofollow on an internal link?

Analysis

A big part of SEO involves assessing the effectiveness of a campaign both relative to past performance as well as to competing sites.

1. Are you familiar with web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?
2. From an analytics perspective, what is different between a user from organic search results vs. a type-in user?
3. How do you distinguish the results of your search optimization work from a seasonal change in traffic patterns?
4. How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?
5. What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?
6. If you've done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven't been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?
7. How many target keywords should a site have?
8. How do *you* help a customer decide how to their budget between organic SEO and pay-per-click SEM?
9. 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?
10. Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?

Industry Involvement

Is SEO just a job to pay the bills? Nothing wrong with that, but some senior positions can benefit from more enthusiasm and interest that can be measured by work done outside of the office.

1. If salary and location were not an issue, who would you work for?
2. In Google Lore – what are 'Hilltop', 'Florida' and 'Big Daddy'?
3. Have you attended any search related conferences?
4. Google search on this candidates name, (if you cannot find them, that's a red flag).
5. Do you currently do SEO on your own sites? Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?
6. Of the well-known SEOs, who are you not likely to pay attention to?
7. What are some challenges facing the SEO industry?
8. What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
9. Who are the two key people – who started Google?
10. Who is Matt Cutts?
11. If you were bidding on a contract, what competitor would you most worry about?

Open-Ended

These questions are more about how an answer is given rather than the actual answer. They often scare interviewees, but with no wrong answer they're actually a good opportunity to shine.

1. Tell me your biggest failure in an SEO project
2. What areas of SEO do you most enjoy?
3. In what areas of SEO are you strongest?
4. In what areas of SEO are you weakest?
5. How do you handle a client who does not implement your SEO recommendations?
6. Can you get "xyz"? company listed for the keyword "Google"? in the first page?
7. What do you think is different about working for an SEO agency vs. doing SEO in-house?
8. Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?

Posted in: Interview Questions General | Tags: interview questions and answers interview meta seo pagerank algorithm pr digg sphinn meta tags optimize seo tools nofollow analysis google rank wikipedia seos open-ended

---

16 Programming phone screen questions

1. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
2. How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?
3. Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.
4. How many gas stations would you say there are in the United States?
5. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?
6. How much should you charge to wash all the windows in San Francisco?
7. How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?
8. How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?
9. You have eight balls all of the same size. 7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?
10. You have five pirates, ranked from 5 to 1 in descending order. The top pirate has the right to propose how 100 gold coins should be divided among them. But the others get to vote on his plan, and if fewer than half agree with him, he gets killed. How should he allocate the gold in order to maximize his share but live to enjoy it? (Hint: One pirate ends up with 98 percent of the gold.)
11. You have to get from point A to point B. You don’t know if you can get there. What would you do?
12. Imagine you have a closet full of shirts. It’s very hard to find a shirt. So what can you do to organize your shirts for easy retrieval?
13. Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never disobey this law. One day, the queen of the village visits and announces that at least one husband has been unfaithful. What happens?
14. In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. if they have a girl, they have another child. if they have a boy, they stop. what is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?
15. If the probability of observing a car in 30 minutes on a highway is 0.95, what is the probability of observing a car in 10 minutes (assuming constant default probability)?
16. If you look at a clock and the time is 3:15, what is the angle between the hour and the minute hands?

Posted in: Interview Questions | Tags: interview programming phone screen quesions phone screen us hint

---

PHP interview questions and answers, from Yahoo!

1. Which of the following will not add john to the users array?

         1. $users[] = 'john';
         2. array_add($users,'john');
         3. array_push($users,'john');
         4. $users ||= 'john';

2. What’s the difference between sort(), assort() and ksort? Under what circumstances would you use each of these?

3. What would the following code print to the browser? Why?

      $num = 10;
      function multiply(){
            $num = $num * 10;
      }
      multiply();
      echo $num;

4. What is the difference between a reference and a regular variable? How do you pass by reference & why would you want to?

5. What functions can you use to add library code to the currently running script?

6. What is the difference between foo() & @foo()?

7. How do you debug a PHP application?

8. What does === do? What’s an example of something that will give true for ‘==’, but not ‘===’?

9. How would you declare a class named “myclass” ? with no methods or properties?

10. How would you create an object, which is an instance of ‘“myclass’??

11. How do you access and set properties of a class from within the class?

12. What is the difference between include & include_once? include & require?

13. What function would you use to redirect the browser to a new page?

         1. redir()
         2. header()
         3. location()
         4. redirect()

14. What function can you use to open a file for reading and writing?

         1. fget();
         2. file_open();
         3. fopen();
         4. open_file();

15. What’s the difference between mysql_fetch_row() and mysql_fetch_array()?

16. What does the following code do? Explain what’s going on there.

      $date='08/26/2003';
      print ereg_replace('“([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)'‚¬?,\\2/\\1/\\3,$date);

17. Given a line of text $string, how would you write a regular expression to strip all the HTML tags from it?

18. What’s the difference between the way PHP and Perl distinguish between arrays and hashes?

19. How can you get round the stateless nature of HTTP using PHP?

20. What does the GD library do?

21. Name a few ways to output (print) a block of HTML code in PHP?

22. Is PHP better than Perl? – Discuss.

Posted in: Interview Questions | Tags: interview questions and answers interview php yahoo sort ksort web foo

---

Top 10 Web architect interview questions and answers

1. What is frame level testing and how do we test it?
2. Write test case for a search engine?
3. How do you test the URL of a Web-based application?
4. What is Web architecture that are followed while doing online project and tell the samples of architecture?
5. I how to test Web application in which the value is changing dynamic every time and anyone can modify it?
6. Write a test case scenario for Web-based address book?
7. How to test iBackup and storage products?
8. How can you test the security of a Web site,both manually and by using a tool.
9. What happens in a Web application when you enter all the data and click on submit button?
10. How to kill cookies from Web page?

Posted in: Interview Questions asp.net | Tags: interview web web architect interview questions top 10 frame search engine cookie

---

Top 10 Apache interview questions and answers

1. On a fresh install, why does Apache have three config files - srm.conf, access.conf and httpd.conf? - The first two are remnants from the NCSA times, and generally you should be ok if you delete the first two, and stick with httpd.conf.
2. What’s the command to stop Apache? - kill the specific process that httpd is running under, or killall httpd. If you have apachectl installed, use apachectl stop.
3. What does apachectl graceful do? - It sends a SIGUSR1 for a restart, and starts the apache server if it’s not running.
4. How do you check for the httpd.conf consistency and any errors in it? - apachectl configtest
5. When I do ps -aux, why do I have one copy of httpd running as root and the rest as nouser? - You need to be a root to attach yourself to any Unix port below 1024, and we need 80.
6. But I thought that running apache as a root is a security risk? - That one root process opens port 80, but never listens to it, so no user will actually enter the site with root rights. If you kill the root process, you will see the other kids disappear as well.
7. Why do I get the message "… no listening sockets available, shutting down"? - In Apache 2 you need to have a listen directive. Just put Listen 80 in httpd.conf.
8. What is ServerType directive? - It defines whether Apache should spawn itself as a child process (standalone) or keep everything in a single process (inetd). Keeping it inetd conserves resources. This is deprecated, however.
9. What is mod_vhost_alias? - It allows hosting multiple sites on the same server via simpler configurations.
10. What does htpasswd do? - It creates a new user in a specified group, and asks to specify a password for that user.

Posted in: Interview Questions | Tags: interview questions and answers interview php website apache interview questions apachectl graceful mod_vhost_alias htpasswd

---