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

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.

Keyword Selection as an Internet Strategy

If you are starting your site from scratch, selecting keywords at this stage is a time and money saver. If you are redesigning your website, this is the time to outdo your previous mistakes.
Zeroing On the Right Keywords
If you are wondering what keyword has to do with website design think again. It determines whether your website architecture will have a folder or linear structure. If it is a folder structure then how many levels?

Let's take a hypothetical example. Suppose you are a company selling confections. You are designing an e-commerce website. You may have two or more options for website architecture.
Option 1: confectionary company displaying products by type e.g. cakes, candies, cookies, chocolates etc.
Option 2: confectionary company displaying products by occasions e.g. birthdays, weddings, thanksgiving, baby showers etc.
Option 3: This option is a tad expensive because it involves more complex programming at the database level. You can let the visitor decide how he or she wants to view the website product wise or occasion wise.

Which structure will be more appropriate?
Before deciding we need to find the online search behavior of our future customers. Using a keyword tool we find out that the search phrases customers use to find the ' cakes' are for specific types of cakes like wedding cakes, birthday cakes, diaper cakes and so on. Same stand true for candy.
Naturally the second option is a better website architecture structure. It can grow both laterally and longitudinally. It's more suitable for search patterns hence later it will be easier to optimize.

The best way to do a keyword search is to write down the phrases that describe your website's purpose. Start with:
5 one-word phrases
10 two-word phrases
5 three-word phrases
Run them in a keyword tool. You will be amazed at the results.
Save them in a spreadsheet.

Selecting the Right Keywords:

Your spreadsheet probably has a thousand keywords. It's best to have a base keyword in mind around which your site will evolve. Keep these in mind before you start selection.

One word phrases are the hardest to rank for because they require a high number of backlinks which is difficult for a new site.

Their conversions are also the worst because people are not searching for that product or information. They realize it as soon as they type it and see 44 million websites for 'cakes'.

Two phrase keywords are good to optimize for as they have more searches and hence more conversions. But they are difficult to do so especially for a new website.
Three phrase keywords may be few but are relatively easy to optimize for. It's best to start with three word keywords.

Select the 3 word phrases most suitable for your site. Make them top priority for now...But do not ignore the 2 phrase or single word keywords. With time you will be able to drive traffic to your website using these keywords too and they most probably will have more search traffic.

The other factors that matter are:

The number of competing sites
The strength of those competing sites
Select a long string for 3 word phrases whose searches rank more than 5 per day. This is the starting list for keywords for your site. Repeat the same procedure for two word phrases.

At this stage it may be suitable for you to leave out 1 word phrases not in the website design but in the optimization process..

Integrating the Keywords in your Website Design
All efforts at selection are useless if keywords are not properly integrated in design.

2 tips before starting:

Do not optimize for more than 3 keywords on one page
Preferably optimize for related keywords Example:
Virtual Offices in Irvine Orange County (keyword)
-Virtual Offices
-Virtual Offices Irvine
-Virtual Offices Orange County

Get your website designer to use these search phrases in the page in Title tags, Keyword tags, Header tags and Alt tags. While writing the content for the page make sure you use the phrase at least twice in 350 words of content. Use synonyms of the keywords.

How to Maximize Benefits From Google Adwords Keywords Tools

Google Adwords is the major platform to operate Pay Per Click advertising campaigns. Pay Per Click also commonly known as Double Click Digital Advertising. Pay Per Click advertising is a very successful method to reach to the potential clients or in other words it is the way of advertising where you can customize your advertising campaigns as per your budget, client demographic requirements or target customers based on geographical location. You have full control on advertising budget to explore the market. Pay Per Click Advertising has a great impact on building the brand globally or locally depends on your product market reach.

There are few steps must be considered while creating the keywords list for the advertising, use the keyword tool various new option to find the most related keywords:

* Find keywords based on your site content. Instead of entering your own keywords, try using the Website Content option. It lets you enter the URL of your business website or of any site related to your business. The AdWords system will then scan your page and then suggest relevant keywords.
* Create new, separate ad groups with similar keywords. We recommend creating several ad groups in each campaign, each with a small, narrowly-focused set of similar keywords. Use the Keyword Tool to discover relevant keywords, then divide them into lists of 5 to 20 similar terms.
* Identify negative keywords. The Keyword Tool can show you off-topic keywords that users may be thinking about. Suppose that you sell cut flowers and that you give the keyword 'flowers' to the Keyword Tool. It may suggest the related term 'gardens' and you may want to add that term to your ad group as a negative keyword. That will keep your ad from being displayed on searches for 'flower gardens' or similar terms. This helps to ensure that only interested customers see your ads.
* Find synonyms - or not. The Use synonyms box in the Descriptive words or phrases option is always ticked by default. This means that it might suggest 'bed and breakfast' as a synonym for the keyword 'hotel'. If you untick the box, the tool will suggest only keywords that contain at least one of the terms that you entered.
* Specify a language and location. If you're using the Keyword Tool while signed in to your account, you may see an option to tailor results to a particular location and language. If you happen to be targeting Spanish speakers who live in France, make sure that you set the Keyword Tool to that language and location.
* Start broad and then get specific. Try broad terms like 'flowers' in the Keyword Tool first. Then try specific terms like 'red roses' or 'miniature cactus'.


Google Adwords has made it simple for the advertisers to target the desired audience by providing the various built in tools. An advertising campaign normally comprised of budget, cost of click (CPC) or bid on keyword, keywords, text ads and the landing page and the most important part of the campaign is the history of Google Adwords Account (The Google Adwords Account that is maintaining the campaign, history of keywords and bidding options and CTR.

Google Adwords while designing the campaign keeps track of three things in common, The Keyword you choose, the text ads you write and the content of the landing page or contents of the website as a whole. Google Adwords algorithm calculates the relevancy of these three variables. Let me say it in other words how relevant are the keywords to the text ads and combined these two how relevant to the content of the landing page.

The secret behind doing all this in Google Adwords is to serve the internet user the most suited information what he is looking in the search engine while surfing and querying the search engine. Most of the advertiser bluntly hammers the keywords in the campaign to get the cheap visitors, this attitude of advertising gives them LOW CTR and un interested visitors. Google has launched this advertising mode to reach the potential clients on the fly and not to get the blind visitors. This method of stuffing keywords only increases the cost of the campaign in terms of invalid clicks or no sales.

Well, going back to the topic of maximizing potential through Google Adwords Keyword tool, the factor is relevancy. The keyword, the text ad and the landing page content.

The best practice is to divide the Google Adwords campaign into appropriate Ad Groups and better option is to name them logically to manage. All Ad Groups should be named as per the purpose they are going to serve and then accordingly fill the ad groups with the related keywords and write the compelling related text ad or text ads. Try to add one or 2 keywords in the text add. Let me elaborate more here for example you have 50 keywords in a ad group, try to first group these keywords logically in the ad group and let say you have 3 logical categories of keywords, you need to write minimum three text ads containing at least 2 keywords in the text ads. This way you increase the relevancy factor in your text adds and collection of keywords.

The third and most important part of the Google Adwords campaign is the quality of the landing page, quality means the relevancy of the contents of the page with the text ads, remember here keywords you already made relevant to the text add.

Now look into the scenario how you query the search engines, you first enter the keyword or phrase in the search box of the search engine, when you press the hit button the paid ads display, and you clicked one of the paid ads and landed on the advertiser's website.

Google Adwords also works in the same fashion; this is what the reason writing highly compelling text ads relevant to the keywords comes first and determines the bid price. And at last user visits the website, if website contents are not relevant to the text ads, customer will leave the website without doing any purchase or registering the products etc.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts. It is an application of crowd sourcing.

Examples include rewards sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site.

The affiliate marketing industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as 'retailer' or 'brand'), the network, the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate') and the customer. The market has grown in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third parties vendors.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree, because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization, paid search engine marketing, e-mail marketing, and in some sense display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate marketing—using one website to drive traffic to another—is a form of online marketing, which is frequently overlooked by advertisers.While search engines, e-mail, and website syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies.

You can place your affilitate marketing using

http://www.clickbank.com/index.html.

Seo Video Tutorials

Title Tags Tutorial Video:

Core fundamentals of Title Tags:

- They provide search engines with a guide to your on page content

- They are still on of the most influential on site optimization techniques

- They are a place to re-enforce keywords and the theme of your site

- They need to be 63 characters or less to appear in full on Google

- They are relatively easy to edit in Notepad, Dreamweaver or using your CMS or ECommerce software package.

Here you can see the helping video on Title Tags:



All About Backlinks & How To Check Them

Here you can see the helping video on Here you can see the helping video on Backlinks:


http://www.gsinc.co.uk/video/backlinks/



SEO tutorials on research you can do on Google

1 The Site Search Feature

Cost-per-click (CPC)

What is Cost-per-click (CPC)?

Cost-per-click (CPC), which is also known as pay-per-click (PPC), refers to sponsored ads sold directly by major search engines. These keyword-based ads are usually labeled as sponsored and appear in the first two or three positions of a search results page and/or in a column on the right side of the screen. PPC ad rankings are based on a formula that takes into account the highest bid amounts, the highest number of clicks and the keyword relevancy of the ad to the user’s query. A professionally managed PPC campaign will yield the best results and return on investment (ROI).

PPC advertising will enable you to drive targeted traffic to your website while easily managing budget constraints and measuring ROI. CPC advertising also provides a strong complement to natural search engine optimization efforts. Whether your objective is short or long term, a focused and well-planned PPC strategy will mean the difference between a profitable advertising campaign and a painful one.

Doorway Pages

What are doorway pages, and should I use doorway pages?

Doorway pages are Web pages designed and built specifically to draw search engine visitors to your website. They are standalone pages designed only to act as doorways to your site. Doorway pages are a very bad idea for several reasons, though many SEO firms use them routinely.

As a rule of thumb, if you can't reach the page by following the site navigation, then it is a doorway page. You are not supposed to "visit" the page. Instead, you are just supposed to find it in the search results and then click through to get to the site in question. In essence, a doorway page is no more than a one-page click-through advertisement for a website. However, when you are searching, you don't want to visit one-page click-through advertisements for a website. You want to visit websites. Think of doorway pages as giant banner ads, only worse. You're searching for "widgets" and instead of getting a widget site, you get a page that says, "click here for widgets." You just did that! Now they're asking you to do it again. Are you going to click?

The fact is that doorway pages don't do a very good job of generating traffic, even when they are done by "experts." Many users simply hit their back buttons when presented with a doorway page. Still, many SEO firms count those first visits and report them to their clients as successes. SEO Firm: "You got 140 visits to your site today!" Client: "But no one visited our products pages!"

Can you spot the doorway page?

Look at the site map below. There are three doorway pages on the site. Can you spot them? You should know that Google can spot them just as easily.

SEO Copywriting

What is SEO Copywriting?

SEO Copywriting, or to give it its full name, search engine optimization copywriting or search engine copywriting, is the technique of writing the viewable text on a web page in such a way that it reads well for the surfer, and also targets specific search terms. Its purpose is to rank highly in the search engines for the targeted search terms.

As well as the viewable text, SEO Copywriting usually optimizes other on-page elements for the targeted search terms. These include the Title, Description and Keywords tags, headings and alt text.

The idea behind SEO Copywriting is that search engines want genuine content pages and not additional pages (often called "doorway pages") that are created for the sole purpose of achieving high rankings. Therefore, the engines cannot possibly view SEO copywritten pages as undesirable, and the rankings they achieve tend to be as stable as those that are achieved by other search engine optimization techniques.

Practitioners of the search engine copywriting method recommend around 250 viewable words per page, with one, or at most two, targeted search terms strategically placed within the text and other on-page elements.

SEO Copywriting strengths

One thing that can be said about search engine optimization copywriting is that works for suitable websites and for suitable search terms (see below). SEO Copywriting can achieve rankings that tend to do well across the search engines, although no page can do equally well in all engines.

It is sometimes said by practioners of search engine optimization copywriting, that the method tends to maintain its rankings as the engines tweak and change their algorithms, whereas other methods produce less stable rankings. This can't be true. If 2 pages are in the top 10 search results; one getting there by the SEO copywriting method and the other by different search engine optimization techniques, they are both there because they match the engine's criteria (algorithm) quite well. When the criteria is changed, the match that each of them had is necessarily changed. The matches could become closer to, or further from, the engine's criteria. Whether each page goes up or down in the results depends on what changes have been made to the engine's criteria. It is a matter of chance, and not a matter of whether SEO copywriting was used or not.

SEO Copywriting weaknesses

Competitive search terms

The technique only works for search terms that are not particularly competitive. Competitive search terms are those where many people are trying very hard to gain the top rankings for their sites. Casino, sex, insurance, health and hotels sites are among the most competitive, and there are many other topics where people fight for rankings. For medium to highly competitive search terms, other, more vigorous, methods are needed.

Suitable sites

Not all websites are suitable for SEO Copywriting. Many simply don't have sufficient text on their pages, and adding text would spoil the design or nature of the sites. Also, some sites that do have sufficient text sometimes don't want to be forced into changing what is written on the pages, just for the sake of the search engines.

Cost, and the limitation of targeted search terms

SEO Copywriting is a time-consuming process, and professional SEO copywriters are not cheap, therefore the cost of each page is significant. Since each page can target only one or two search terms, it would usually require a good number of pages to be made-over in order to target all the required search terms.

Tied to a copywriter

What happens when a website owner finds it necessary to alter the text on a page that has been worked on by a professional SEO copywriter? It can't be done without either ruining the costly SEO work and, with it, the page's rankings, or re-hiring a professional copywriter to redo the work once the changes have been made.

Slipping in the rankings

If a page is successfully optimized by SEO Copywriting, and is ranked in the top 10 search results for its targeted search term, then the optimization was worth the cost. But what happens when someone else decides to optimize a page from a different website for the same search term? If their optimization technique is successful, and the page gets into the top 10, the #10 page will slip to #11 - and off the first page of results. Then suppose another website does the same thing...and another...and another. Sooner or later, the successful page will slip from the first page of search results. As soon as people decide to optimize their pages for the chosen search terms, existing top 10 pages are on the way down. Then what?

If the sliding pages were professionally SEO copywritten, there is nothing else that the technique can do for them, or if it can, the whole costly copywriting process must be redone. Adding one or two instances of the target search terms isn't merely a case of typing them in somewhere, because the final text still needs to read well for the site visitors. Again, the website owner is tied to a copywriter.

Summary

SEO Copywriting is good when:-

there are not many search terms to target

the search terms are on the low to middle end of competitiveness

money isn't a problem, or if it is your own website

you don't mind the text on your pages being frozen (if money does matter)

Otherwise, 'search engine friendly' techniques should always be done as a first measure, and real search engine optimization should be done for the search terms for which 'search engine friendly' techniques are unsuccessful.

NOTE:

Competitive search terms are not necessarily those where millions of results are returned. They are those where people are competing hard for the top positions. There's a big difference.