Friday, April 2, 2010

SEO Interview Questions & Answers

1.How many words should my pages be?
A. There is no specific number of words a page should be for SEO purposes.

2.How quickly will Google re-index my pages after I've SEO'd them?
A. how popular your site is, how often Google's spiders typically come around, how deep in the site the changes have been made, and more.It depends upon the proper choose keywords phrases and how popular your web site is and it also depend upon your SEO activities.

3.Which of the following statements about RSS are correct?
► a. It is a form of XML
► b. It stands for Real-time streamlined syndication
► c. It is a good way of displaying static information
► d. It is a Microsoft technology

a. It is a form of XML

4. All major search engines are case sensitive.
► a. True
► b. False

b. False

5. What is Keyword Density?
► a. The number of times the keyword is used / (DIVIDED BY) the total word count on page - (MINUS) the total words in HTML on the page
► b. Combination of the number of times a keyword or a keyword phrase, in proportion with other words, appears on a Web page
► c. The number of times the keyword is used in the page description
► d. The number of times the keyword is used in the page title
► e. The number of times the keyword is used / (DIVIDED BY) the total word count on the page

b. Combination of the number of times a keyword or a keyword phrase, in proportion with other words, appears on a Web page

6. What is the name of the search engine technology due to which a query for the word actor will also show search results for related words such as actress, acting or act?

► a. Spreading
► b. Dilating
► c. RSD (real-time synonym detection)
► d. Stemming
► e. Branching

d. Stemming

7. What will the following robots.txt file do?

User-agent:Googlebot

Disallow:/*?

User-agent:Scooter

Disallow:

► a. It will allow Google to crawl any of the dynamically generated pages. It will also allow the AltaVista scooter bot to access every page
► b. It will disallow Google from crawling any of the dynamically generated pages. It will also disallow the AltaVista scooter bot from accessing any page
► c. It will disallow Google from crawling any of the dynamically generated pages. It will allow the AltaVista scooter bot to access every page
► d. None of the above

c. It will disallow Google from crawling any of the dynamically generated pages. It will allow the AltaVista scooter bot to access every page

8.Are RSS/Atom feeds returned in Googles search results?
► a. Yes
► b. No

b. No

9.How does SEOmoz typically get clients - how do you market yourselves?
A.Actually, we get most of our clients through calls and emails to us. A typical week after the Newsweek piece came out had between 15-30 inquirie. Now, that's down to between 5-10. Mostly, people know about us through finding the SEOmoz website and the articles/blog. We've also got a good conference presence that makes a big difference. Maybe in a future post I can go into detail on how I'd market a new SEO company.

10. A Hallway Page is used to:
A. ► A. Attract visitors from the search engines straight onto the Hallway Page
► B Organizes the Doorway Pages
► C Helps people navigate to different Doorway Pages
► D. Enables search engine bots to index the Doorway Pages

D. Enables search engine bots to index the Doorway Pages

Thursday, April 1, 2010

How To Choose The Best Domain Name

In this article we are going to look at the thought process you should go thru to choose your domain name.

First of all let's define what a domain name is.

A unique name that represents each computer on the Internet. (Some machines do have more than one domain name.) The DNS converts the domain name requested by an Internet user into an IP address.

The Domain Name System (DNS) helps users to find their way around the Internet. Every computer on the Internet has a unique address – just like a telephone number – which is a rather complicated string of numbers. It is called its "IP address" (IP stands for "Internet Protocol").

But it is hard to remember everyone's IP address. The DNS makes it easier by allowing a familiar string of letters (the "domain name") to be used instead of the arcane IP address. So instead of typing 64.65.51.245 , you can type www.team-schuman.com. It is a "mnemonic" device that makes addresses easier to remember.

So what makes the best internet domain name?

First of all don't pick a name that has nothing to do with your Web site. If you are selling flowers don't pick a name like apples.com. Picking an oddball name makes no sense and it will just confuse your audience.

Don't make your new domain name too long. The longer it is the harder it becomes to remember. Can you remember myflowers.com or lookatmyflowerswebsite.com?

Short names are not the way to go either. It is to your benefit to try and buy a domain name that has a few keywords that relate to the topic of you Web site when possible.

Keyword placement when choosing your domain name is helpful as your site develops a higher placement with the search engines. Having the name jeffsflowers.com will do better with a search engine than jeffssite.com. With jeffsflowers.com you know I have a flower website where with jeffssite.com you don't know what kind of Web site I have.

When registering your domain name in some cases you will need to determine if you want to use hyphens in the name itself. Personally I have found this to be a great way to get a domain name that otherwise my not be available. The domain name myflowers.com might already be taken whereas the name my-flowers.com might be available.

Everything I have read says try to get a .com domain name first before going to a .net or .org etc. As more and more domain names are taken this becomes harder to do and I think you are better off getting a keyword rich domain name like my-flowers.org than you are to buy a .com domain name like jeffssite.com.

Is buying a cheap domain name a bad idea? Absolutely not. I do it all of the time. I get all of my domain names here:
http://www.godaddy.com

Then I transfer them to my hosting company here:
http://www.team-schuman.com/host4profit.

I can buy a domain name for less than $10 from Godaddy.com and transfer it for free to Host4Profit. This saves me $20 on buying it from the hosting company itself. A domain name is a domain name and you might as well save a little money where you can.

Finding out what names are available is very easy to do. Let's use Godaddy.com as an example.

1. Go here: http://www.godaddy.com

2. Click on the icon for Domain Names

3. Enter a domain name and see if it is available

4. They will come back with a list of available names

5. Decide what one you want and buy it

One last thing to consider. Protect your name by registering multiple extensions (.net, .org, etc.) This deters people from copying your name. For example, if you own my-flowers.com you can also register my-flowers.net and any other extension that's available. As you build up traffic to your site if someone types in an version other than the .com version you can forward it to your .com site and not lose any traffic.

In closing it is important to spend a little time when choosing the best domain name for your website. Try and get some keywords in your domain name. Don't stop at choosing just a .com version and save a little money by buying a cheap domain name whenever possible as long as it still contains some keywords.