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.

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

Are you familiar with web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?
From an analytics perspective, what is different between a user from organic search results vs. a type-in user?
How do you distinguish the results of your search optimization work from a seasonal change in traffic patterns?
How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?
What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?
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?
How many target keywords should a site have?
How do *you* help a customer decide how to their budget between organic SEO and pay-per-click SEM?
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?
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.

If salary and location were not an issue, who would you work for?
In Google Lore – what are 'Hilltop', 'Florida' and 'Big Daddy'?
Have you attended any search related conferences?
Google search on this candidates name, (if you cannot find them, that's a red flag).
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?
Of the well-known SEOs, who are you not likely to pay attention to?
What are some challenges facing the SEO industry?
What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
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?

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.

Tell me your biggest failure in an SEO project
What areas of SEO do you most enjoy?
In what areas of SEO are you strongest?
In what areas of SEO are you weakest?
How do you handle a client who does not implement your SEO recommendations?
Can you get "xyz"? company listed for the keyword "Google"? in the first page?
What do you think is different about working for an SEO agency vs. doing SEO in-house?
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

SEOs Don't Need an Information Retrieval Degree

In grade school a common technique for winning an argument was to declare that you were smarter and therefore you were right. Yeah, it wasn't a particularly profound way to win people over, but hey you can't expect all that much from a grade schooler during a 15 minute recess. Unfortunately, it seems that some people didn't quite move on from that style and make frequent use of I have a degree and therefore I'm right. This is silly.

Now I don't want to get into pointing fingers, because that would be unprofessional. Errr… that's a lie. I really do want to name names because deep down inside there's still a little grade schooler in me too. But I'll resist and instead let you know that there's a hint somewhere on this page of who inspired this post. OK, poking fun of people aside, I'd like to examine whether a formal education in informational retrieval (IR) really does make you a better search engine optimizer. Why information retrieval? Because that's the topic name that these "I'm smarter than you people" most often use.

So what is information retrieval? Unlike search engine optimization which is as uninformative as phrases get, you can accurately infer the meaning of information retrieval.

"Information retrieval (IR) is the science of searching for information in documents, searching for documents themselves, searching for metadata which describe documents, or searching within databases, whether relational stand-alone databases or hypertextually-networked databases such as the World Wide Web."
– Wikipedia

Don't be fooled by that overly simplistic definition. The human brain makes us incredibly effective at information gathering and delivery, but trying to automate what our brains do is incredibly complex. This is why Google hires so many PhD's.

So effective information retrieval is difficult; the theory behind it is complex; and the amount of research is large. Does any of that mean that you can't be a good SEO unless you've cracked open a textbook? Does a formal education in information retrieval even help you become a better SEO?

Before I answer those questions, let me give you my credentials. Or rather, let me tell you that I've never studied information retrieval. My background is in computer science. I've spent most of my career writing software or managing software projects. Without an information retrieval background, some people will undoubtedly say that I shouldn't write what I don't know about. Ha ha, that's a good one. Imagine how many fewer blogs there'd be if people only wrote about the areas they're experts in. I have an opinion, this is my blog, and so I'm sharing that opinion.

Do You NEED An Information Retrieval Background?

If people have an academic interest they should pursue that interest. Having said that, I don't believe SEO requires any particular background. I happen to have a technical background, but others have started from the marketing side. Still others don't have a web-related background at all with some getting into SEO accidentally. I even heard about a guy that started down the SEO road while in the hospital and not able to work due to injury.

I've worked with two people who take IR quite seriously. Both are smart and articulate, but only one actually impressed when it came to real-world SEO. A large number of non-IR-loving SEO's I've worked with are also smart and articulate. What's more, these other SEO's have demonstrated an ability to succeed at SEO whether for client sites or their own projects. How'd they do that without the right education? They're motivated to learn what they need to learn. SEO, like many web-related activities, has a low barrier of entry where hard-working, smart people can step in a do a good job without knowing the nitty-gritty details of building a search engine. Rather than focus on what goes into making a search engine, they focus on what comes out.

Does IR Help With SEO?

An IR background may give a beginner the upper hand. That is, if you take two people trying to do SEO for the first time you're probably better off listening to the one with the degree. That lead will only last for so long. I quickly found out that my computer science degree gave me a leg up in the interview process and with learning new things quickly, but I eventually started to bump into people that could run circles around me who had completely unrelated backgrounds. That's just the nature of many things technology — the best education comes from keeping up with the latest news and trying new things.

Is There Any Benefit to Understanding IR?

The one area where I think having a solid grasp of IR would help is in understanding why a particular technique works or doesn't work. Some people really need to know why something works, while others are quite happy just to know what works. For example, I don't know how my car works (search engine), but I do know that pressing on the gas gives me the desired response (SEO). This situation is acceptable because I know I can go to a mechanic (Google engineers) when my car needs servicing. But no matter how good that mechanic is, he won't make me a better driver. It's still up to me to make sure I get to my destination successfully.

One problem with relying too much on an information retrieval education is that the search engines aren't going to avoid a technique that makes their results better just because it goes against theory. Google is known to make hand edits which are hardly algorithmic and knowing what's going to trigger a manual edit isn't going to come from a textbook.

So to all of you information retrieval experts out there, share your ideas (if you want to), but don't wave your degree in everyone else's face. It doesn't help your case and is likely to hurt it instead. Besides, my Computer Science degree is better than anything you've got. Oops… there's that grade schooler again :-)