Important SEO Interview Questions

1. What SEO results can you show?

2. What do you believe are important things to take into consideration when optimising a site?

3. Who do you respect in the industry?

4. What web analytics programs are you familiar with?

5. List On-Page SEO factors

6. List 5 link building techniques.

7. What is page segmentation? (Ever heard of VIPS?)

8. What’s the difference between PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?

9. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI - Indexing)?

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

11. What is sandbox?

12. How long does it take to get out of sandbox?

13. How can you track your rankings?

14. What services does the wordtracker offer, and how do they relate to seo?

15. What are the common factors between google/yahoo/msn?

16. How can you keep your PPC bids from cannibalizing your search efforts on other (non pay per click) search engines?

17. What percentage of your pay per click budget should go to each search engine?

18. Does either Google Adwords or Overture work better for your particular product or service? Or, perhaps neither one is appropriate from a return on investment (ROI) perspective.

19. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.

20. Do you currently do SEO on your own sites and give me some examples. Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?

22. Where do you think the SEO industry is headed?

23. What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?

24. Have you attended any search related conferences?

25. What SEO tools do you regularly use?

25. What SEO areas are you weak and strong in, and give examples of both.

26. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?

28. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks? What do you think about link buying, link bait, and other specific backlink strategies?

29. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
blogs, rss, podcasting

30. Are you familiar with search arbitrage?

31. Are you familiar with enterprise web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?

32. Are you familiar with A/B testing and multivariate testing?

33. Do you have experience in email marketing, banner advertising, other types of media buys and other forms of online advertising?

34. Are you experienced in managing PPC campaigns? To what extent and on what platforms?

35. Do you have experience in bid management tools, API tools, and click fraud issues?

36. Do you have experience in extensive competitive analysis and what techniques do you use?

37. What technologies are you familiar with? (We primarily use HTML, CSS, ASP, .net, PHP, SQL, and JavaScript)

38. Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?

39. Do you know who Matt Cutts is?

44. In Google Lore - what are ‘Hilltop’ Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?

45. What changes did you make and what ranking effect did it have?

46. What is sticky content?