SEO Interview Questions and Answers -Adesh Saxena
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This document provides sample interview questions and answers for an SEO job interview. It discusses popular SEO interview questions regarding experience, algorithm updates, technical skills, tools used, myths, on-page vs off-page optimization, and more. Sample answers are provided to help applicants prepare for SEO-related job interviews.
![First, ifyou have experience that the interviewer doesnot knowabout, bring that up:Then,
point out (if true) that youare a hard working quicklearner.
44. What qualities doyou lookfor ina boss?
Be generic andpositive. Safe qualities are knowledgeable, a sense of humor, fair, loyal to
subordinates and holder of high standards. All bosses think theyhave these traits.
45. Tell me about a time whenyou helpedresolve a dispute betweenothers.
Pick a specific incident. Concentrate on your problem solvingtechnique andnot the dispute
you settled.
46. What positiondoyou prefer ona team working ona project?
Be honest. Ifyou are comfortable indifferent roles, point that out.
47. Describe your work ethic.
Emphasize benefits to the organization. Things like, determinationto get the job done and
work hard but enjoyyour work are good.
48. What has beenyour biggest professional disappointment?
Be sure that you refer to something that was beyondyour control. Showacceptance andno
negative feelings.
49. Tell me about the most funyou have hadon the job.
Talk about havingfunbyaccomplishing something for the organization.
50. Do you have anyquestions for me?
Always have some questions prepared. Questions preparedwhere you will be anasset to
the organizationare good. How soonwill I be able to be productive?andWhat type of
projects will I be able to assist on? are examples.
The Best Answers to ToughInterviewQuestions
Tell me about yourself.
This is reallymore of a request than a question. But these few words canput you onthe spot in a wayno questioncan. Many quicklylose control of
the interview duringthe most critical time-the first five minutes. This is not the time to go intoa lengthyhistoryor wander off in different
directions. Your response shouldbe focused and purposeful. Communicate a pattern ofinterests, skills, and strengths that re late to the positionin
question. Consider your response to this question as a commercial that sellsyour autobiography. Provide ananswer that includes, what you are
gettinga degree in, your major, a fewhighlights from your resume suchas projects or classes that relate to the position yo uare interviewingfor,
anywork experience, leadershipexperience, andfinallyinclude whyyou are interestedinthisparticular employer. One of the most effective wa ys
to prepare for this question is to develop a 60-second(can extendto 2 minutes)biographic sketch that emphasizes a pattern of interests, skills, and
accomplishments. Focus your response arounda commontheme related to your major interests and skills. Take, for example, the following
response, whichemphasizes computers.
Since I was a teenager, I enjoyed working withcomputers. It was myhobby, mypassion, andmywayof learning. Like most kids I enjoyed computer
games. When myparents gave me a computer as a rewardfor making honor roll mysophomore year, I masteredDOS, Windows, andWordPerfect
within six months. I thenwent on to teachmyself programming basics. Bythe time I graduatedfrom high school, I knew I wantedto study
programming. From that point on, everything fell intoplace. Mylife revolvedaroundcomputing. Bymyjunior year at Syracuse, I decidedI wanted
to work for a major software manufacturer. That is whyI hadan internshiplast summer at FastTrackSoftware. I have alsocompleted several great
projects including…[list a few here]…I aminvolvedon campus in several organizations such as Beta Beta Fraternitya nd intramural sports teams. I
am interestedinworking for COMPANY NAME so I canbe at the forefront ofbreaking trends andnewtechnology. Whenmycollege roommate told
me about hisstart in your department, I was persistent in asking himfor detailsuntil he helpedme get a referral, which brought me here today. I
feel like this position is a great fit between myaccomplishments andstrengths andwhat you are lookingfor. I am prepared to answer any
questions you mayhave about myeducation and experience."
This response sets a nice tone for starting the interview. The interviewee is able to saya lot within60 seconds bystaying focused. The message is
clear:the interviewee has both passionandfocus relatingto the position. He stays onmessage and concludes byleaving the door openfor
additional questions about his education and experience. Unfortunatelysome candidates get offon the wrongfoot byrambling onfor several
minutes about their childhood, family, hobbies, travels, andinterests.
Repeat KeyAccomplishment Statements Throughout the interview you willbe askednumerous questions about your attitude andabilityto do the
job. Whenever possible, talkabout your accomplishments interms ofwhat you did and the results of your actions for employers. Give examplesof
your effectiveness, whichshouldinclude specific skillsandstatistics.
We're considering twoother candidatesfor this position. Whyshould we hire you rather than someone else?](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/seoforinterview1-190124102234/85/SEO-Interview-Questions-and-Answers-Adesh-Saxena-33-320.jpg)
SEO Interview Questions and Answers -Adesh Saxena
- 1. SEO Interview Questions Search engine optimizationis a fast growing field ininternet marketing. Most fortune 500 companies have alreadyadoptedSEO despite their strong brandingand overwhelminglylarge mediaspends on TV. With increase inlarge companyspends onsocial andsearch marketing, SEO jobs are onthe rise. Whether you want to work as a SEO consultant or a corporate employee, these SEO interviewquestions will helpyou bag a client or get a job. Popular SEO Interview Questions and Answers Q1: What’s your SEO experience? When you are asked this question, if youare a fresher, you must answer the theoreticalknowledge you have. Saythat youknow about keyword research, onpage andoffpage SEO, link building best practices andso onfrom a theoretical point of view. If you are experienced, tell them the projects you have workedon, some of the rankings youhave achievedandthe time you to ok to accomplish this. It also helps to talkabout technical aspects ofSEO you have handledas well. Q2: What do you think about the latest algorithm update from Google? You must follow industryblogs andbe updatedabout the SEO trends. Sowhenyou are askedabout the latest algorithm update, you shouldtalk about your views onwhat kindof sites/search queries got affected, how it compares to the previous update which wasrolled out andso on. Here is a scenario. Assume the latest update rolledout wasthe Penguin update andthe one before that was panda. You couldsaythat Penguin update wasmostly targeted at lowqualitycontent andnot about links as the Panda update was. It hit heavilyon content farms and thin content pages. Q3: Are you technicallysavvy? Not manySEO interviews focus onyour technical skills. But those who reallyknow what SEO is all about will reallyput your technical skills totest. Most of the time, you’llhave to dig deepintoa site code to findissues. If youare not at all technicallyinclined, doing SEO might be quite challenging. No matter howmanytools you purchase, you still needsome basic level of technicalknowledge to succeed inSEO. Q4: Do you take onfreelance projects? There are two things that an interviewer canfindout from the answer you give. If you take freelance projects, it means you are a go getter and that you are comfortable withinteractingwithclients anddoingbusiness development. Thisis a huge plus for anyemployee. On the other hand, freelance consultants have a tendencyto get clients for themselves instead ofthe companyif it’s a service company. If you are going to work in a companyand their policystates that youshouldnot take on other projects, you shouldn’t doit. It’s not onlyunethical; you could also lose your joband face prosecution for violating employment agreement. Even if your companyallows you to take freelance project on the side, it’s suggestedthat you don’t doit. Insteadchannel that leadto your employer. Not onlyare youshowing commitment inyour current role, but you are alsocontributing to the growth ofthe companythat is paying your bills. Q5: Do you use anySEO tools? If you have beenin the SEO industryfor some time, you’dhave come across manytools. Ifyou have usedtools like SEOmoz, bu zz stream, Wordtracker, Googlekeywordtool or anyother tool, mention it. The tools you used alsogives the employer anoverview ofwhat kindof workandprojects youhave been associatedwith. If yo usayyou are good at SEOmoz tools, then the employer willknow that youare a professional because it’s a paid tool and not manyamateurs can affordit. Q6: Mentionsome SEO myths you knowandwhat the actual facts are This questionhelps the interviewer understand your knowledge ofSEO. Insteadof throwing some myths at you andtryingto mak e you answer, this broad questionwill helpthem understandyour depthof knowledge. Here are some myths andanswers for reference
- 2. Meta descriptionis usedfor ranking- Meta descriptions are not usedfor rankings byGoogle and onlyusedas a short snippet of text whichusers see alongwith searchresults Google will always use mymeta-data-No. Google will not always use your meta title or meta description. Basedonthe query, Google may change your meta data to suit the searchers query More links the better- False. Evenone highqualityrelevant editorial links cantrump1 millionspamlinks you might get via blogcomments, forum posting, site wide links andsoon(Not to mentionyour chance to get a penalty) Q7: Which industryblogs andsitesdo youfollow? This questionis askedso that the interviewer canjudge howwell you are updatedwiththe current SEO trends. Some ofthe good ones to follow are Searchengineland.com SEOmoz.org SEObook.com Seo-theory.com Distilled.net Q8: Do you do black hat SEO? If you do black hat SEO, admit it. If you don’t, tellthe interviewer whyyou do not follow suchpractices. If you are ready to stopblackhat andgo completelywhite hat (which you shouldanyways), mentionthat as well. Some of the reasons you donot want to use black hat are Riskof getting penalty Unethical Not a longterm strategy Q9: Can you tell me the difference betweenon page andoff page SEO? On page SEO refers to all SEO activities done onthe website that needs to be ranked. Theyinclude Meta optimization Content creation Internal linking Fixing technical issues like page discovery, duplicate content, implementing canonical tags and soon Optimizing usage ofkeywords Off page refers to anyactivity we doto get links to point to our site. These mayinclude Guest posting Link outreach Viral linkbuilding Submissionto niche sites PR outreach Q10: What are your thoughts onbuying links, article marketing, article spinning, anddirectorysubmissions? Buying links:Don’t doit. Not onlydoes it violate Google guidelines, it’s alsoa costlymethodwhich will backfire whencau ght. Article marketing:Submittinghighqualityarticles to article directoriesto get traffic and some link juice is fine. However, withthe latest Google updates, most article directories have beenrendereduseless from a linkacquisitionpoint of view. Submittingarticlesto 1000’s of article directories is not a good idea. Article spinning:It’s better to syndicate content rather thancreating spuncontent. Article spinningrarelyworks andmost ofthe spun content can be easilydetected byadvanced algorithms Google employs. Directorysubmissions:It was valuable maybe 4-5 years back. But now it’s worthless. Links from directories other thanmaybe dmoz.org, botw.com etc is worthless. --- -- 1- Tell me something about yourself? Seo Job Interview Questions andHow to answer them Seo Job Interview
- 3. (Image Source:- Voguemarieflickr ) You shouldbrief your interviewer about your family, your educationalbackgroundandyour workexperience. 2- What was the recent update whichGoogle had and what changeswouldyou suggest for it? Google recentlyhadthe Penguinupdate which wasa measure to control webspam. Penguin update hadpenalized websiteswhichhada spammy backlinking profile andreturnedmore semantic results. Semantic results were based onthe relationshipbetween words present onthe search query. Penguintrusted sites that hadoriginal and goodcontent, freshcontent, goodsocial media presence andqualityorganic links. 3- What all verticals have you handledso far? Verticals means onwhat themes of websiteshave youworkedso far- thismayinclude education, real estate, IT, travel, Shopping, jobs etc. 4- What do you understandbythe Panda update? The Panda update wasdone to improve the qualityof search results inGoogle. Panda update alsoknown as the farmer update was done to eliminate content farms whichprovidedless user friendly experience. It usedmachine language scalabilityas one ofthe important metrics for judging relevancyof a webpage. All the focus wastransformedonthe user andnowqualitycontent , proper design, proper speed, proper use of imagesandvideos, content to ad ratio all matteredmore after the Panda update. Youneedto optimize your site for better clickthrough rate anda less bounce rate. 5- What is Google Sandbox? Google Sandbox is animaginaryarea where new and lessauthoritative sites are kept for a specifiedtime perioduntil theyestablishthemselves of being displayedonthe searchresults. It happens bybuilding toomanylinks withina short period oftime. 6- What is the difference between onpage seoandoff page seo? On page seomeans optimizingyour website andmaking changes ontitle, meta tags, site structure, site content, solving canonicalizationproblem, managing robots.txt etc. Off page optimizationmeans optimizing your web presence which involves backlinkbuildingandsocial media promotion. 7- How will you solve canonicalization issue or what is .htacess file? .htacess file is used to solve the canonicalizationissue of a website. It mayhappenthat the home page of the site maytake several urls like http://www.example.com or http://www.example.com/index.html or http://example.com . The search engines might treat these url as different and maydivide the linkjuice gainedbyhaving various backlinks made with anyof these 3 urls. The link juice gets dividedb etweenthese three urls equally. .htacess file is created to have a single url of the home page sothat the link juice is passedonto single url. 8- What is keywordstemming? Keyword stemmingis the process offinding out the root word fromthe search query. A queryhaving the word “ playful” wouldbe brokendownto the word “play” with the helpof stemming algorithm. The search results returnedwouldbe having the word ” play” init. 9- What is LSI? LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It is a data retrievaltechnique whichfinds connection betweenwords andthe use of synonyms while fetching data from the index. 10- What do you knowabout the Florida update? Florida update happenedonNovember 16th 2003. This update appliedstemming, maintainedlocalrank, penalizedover optimizedsitesby applyingfilter etc. Inshort, it modifiedthe search results before presentingit to the user byapplyingfilters. 11- What are the limitations of title anddescriptiontags? Title tagcanbe between66-70 characters and meta descriptiontagcanbe between160-170 characters. 12- Does Google useskeywordtags? No, Google doesnot make use of keyword tags.
- 4. 13- What is 301 redirect? It is a methodof redirecting user from the oldpage url to the new page url. 301 redirect is a permanent redirect and is helpful inpassingthe link juice fromthe old url to the newurl. 14- What was your exact job profile inyour previous company? Provide a suitable explanationabout your job profile whichwouldinclude your job responsibilities and the amount ofwork youhave handledso far. 15- What do youunderstandbyCloaking? Cloakinginvolves usingdeceptive techniques whichpresents the user witha different version ofthe webpage than that presen tedto the search engines. 16- What tools do youuse for doing seo? I use Google webmaster tools, Google Analytics, Open site explorer, Alexa, Website grader etc. See:- List offree seo tools 17- What are your goodqualities? You will have to answer here about your goodqualitieslike- I am hardworking, sincere, punctual, love to accept challengesetc. 18- What is the difference betweenSeoand Sem? Seo stands for SearchEngine Optimizationwhile Sem stands for Search Engine Marketing. Seoprovides organic traffic to a website withthe helpof search engines while Sem involves the use of Google adwords andother paidchannelsof advertising. 19- What is PPC? PPC stands for PayPer Click. It is a form ofadvertising methodologyin whichthe advertiser pays for everyclick ontheir ads. Google uses this form of advertising in its channel of advertisingcalled Adwords. 20- Which is better Robots.txt or Meta Robots Tag? Meta Robots tag is muchbetter as it helps in forcingthe search engine crawlers not to index anddisplaythe hiddenpages in your server. 21- Do you use separate Seo strategies for Google,YahooandBing? Yes I use separate strategiesfor Google,Yahooandother search engines.More backlinks are requiredfor Google .It pays more attentionto backlinks and site authoritywhile YahooandBing pays more attentionto title andMeta tags. Hence, a site takes time to rankon Google as compared to YahooandBing. 22- How will youincrease the Pagerank ofa page? Bybuilding more backlinks fromauthoritysites andhigh page rankwebpages. 23- How will youcheck the number of backlinks of your competitors site? With the help ofthe linkoperator onGoogle andbyusing various external tools like Alexa, BacklinkWatch, OpenSite Explorer, Backlinkfinder etc. 24- Which is more important-Buildingbacklinks to a website or buildinggreat content? Both are important. Building great content is necessaryas it is your first steptowards ranking ;andbuilding backlinks helps to buildauthorityto your website andis animportant metric for ranking well. Hence both shouldgo parallel and bothare e quallyimportant. 25- Who is Matt Cutts? Matt Cutts is the headof Google's webspamteam. 26- If a website hasa searchengine saturationof 40% , what does that mean?
- 5. It means 40% of web pages fromthat particular website are indexedbythe searchengine. 27- What do youmean byanchor text? Clickable text writtenon an hyperlink is known as anchor text. It is of great value to the searchenginesand is used for evaluating the relevance of web pages withrespect to search queries. 28- How will youtreat Web standards while optimizinga website? Google loves web standards hence I will applythe webstandards providedbyW3Cwhile optimizinga web site. 29- What methods wouldyou applyfor decreasing the loadingtime of a website? I would use externalstyle sheets, less images(unlessnecessary), optimize the images anddecrease the file sizesof the image without reducing the qualityof the image, use CSS sprites to reduce HTTPrequests etc. 30- Which tools doyou use for choosingkeywords? I use Google Keyword tool, Wordtracker tool, Wordstream, Seo book keyword tool etc. *Remember certain toolsare paidbut you may use the trialversionfor some days. 31- What blogs and sitesdo you regularlyvisit to update yourself? I follow Matt Cutts blog. Seomoz blog, Seochat forums, Searchengineland.com,Seobook, Seosandwitch etc. 32- What are doorwaypages? These are pagesthat are speciallycreatedto rankhighonsearchengines using deceptive techniques.Doorwaypages donot provide useful content but insteadredirect users to the mainpage. 33- What are the Social Media channels youhave usedfor marketing? I have usedblogs like blogger,wordpress,typepadetc, social bookmarking sites like Digg,Jumptags,Delicious etc., social networking sites like Facebook,Linkedin etc., VideoSharing siteslike Youtube,Vimeoetc. 34- What wouldyou suggest to the client whohas a website made on Flash? How wouldyou doSeo for that site? Search engines find it harder to parse the contents presentedusing Flash. I wouldsuggest the client to use analternative to flash like HTML 5. 35- What do youunderstandbyFramesinHTML? A frame is a HTML technique which divides the content ofa page ontoseveralparts. Search engines see Frames as completelyd ifferent pages and as such Frames have a negative impact on Seo. We shouldavoidthe usage ofFrames and usebasic HTML instead. 36- Which is the popular searchengine in Russia? Yandex is popular inRussia. 37- If the meta robots tag has a value of "no index, nofollow"what does it mean? It means the searchengine crawlers wouldnot index the contents andwouldnot follow the links present onthe page. 38- Who is RandFishkin? Rand Fishkinis the CEO and Co founder of Seomoz, the most popular seosoftware inthe world. He startedthe informative "White Board Friday" seriesfor explaining the concepts relatedto Seoand searchengines. 39- How will yourestrict the search engine crawlers from indexing a folder named "Secret" that is present in the root? The following code whenadded onthe robots.txt text file would restrict the crawlers from accessingthe folder User-agent:* Disallow:/Secret/
- 6. 40 - What do you understandbyGoogle Dance? Google Dance happens whenmajor updates happenon the database maintainedbyGoogle. Constant shufflingleads to unstable rankings of the Web Pages.This continues for some days andis knownas Google dance. It waswitnessedinthe past before the real time searching happened. Now, Google updates its index almost everydayand changes are witnessed narrowly. 41- Which are the top 3 social media websitesthat you will suggest to your client for SMO work? I wouldsuggest Facebook, Twitter andGoogle Plus. 42- How does Google Plus helps in Seo? Google Plus helps the promotedwebpagesto get plus ones whichare considered as genuine votes byGoogle. More plus ones helps to enhance our search engine rankings. Moreover,it helps to get highrankings in personalized searchresults where our friends cansee the webpagesshared and promotedbyus. Read more here:-UsingGoogle Plus for Seo 43- What is a Pizza Box interms ofGoogle? Google server comes ina standardcase whichis commonlyknownas "Pizza Box". 44- How important is to have a keyword in a domain name? After the recent EMD update, the weightage onthe presence ofkeywordon a domain hasreduced. It is therefore important to go for a domain name that canfocus onbuildinga brandrather than using onlykeywords whichcouldmake a domainlook spammy. Althoughhaving keywords in the domainhelps but it would work onlyif the combination comesout as brandable. Some popular examples of website whichsuccededwithout havingkeywords in it are flipkart.com, myntra.com, ebay.com, digg.com, reddit.com andofcoz google.cometc. But, there are some themes where the presence ofkeywords becomes necessarylike the presence of the keyword "recipes" inallrecipes.com or the presence of the word"food" in the domainfoodnetwork.com. Hence, its important to take decisions basedonthe theme you needto target. -- here is the list of30 latest & frequentlyasked technicalSEO interview questions andanswers for the candidates who are willing to graba newjob in SEO fieldinthe veryfirst attempt. Which are the most important area to include your keywords? – Page title andBodytext are the most important areaswhere we caninclude keywords for the SEO purpose. What are webmaster tools?– Webmaster tools is a free service byGoogle fromwhere we canget free Indexing data, backlinks information, crawl errors, searchqueries, CTR, website malware errors andsubmit the XML sitemap. What is the best wayto maximize the frequencyof crawling ofyour website bysearchengines? – Frequentlyaddingnew, original andquality content onthe website. Do you know who is DannySullivan? – He is a Journalist who covers the fieldof web search, consideredas search engine guru and editor at searchengineland.com Who is Matt Cutts? – He is the headof webspamteamat Google. Readmore about Matt Cutts here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ What is the best criterionto identifythe value ofa backlink? – The authorityof the domain, qualityof the content on the page where the backlink is providedandthen the page rank ofthe website. What is keyword proximity? – KeywordProximityis a measurement criteriaof the closenessof the keywords withinthe Page Title, Meta Description andBodyText. What is keyword prominence? – Keywordprominence is the locationof the keywords inthe page title, meta descriptionandbodytext…..Read more about prominence at:http://www.seoglossary.com/article/64 Difference between exit rate andbounce rate? – Bounce rate is the percentage of people wholeaves a particular website just after visitinga single page onthisandexit rate refers to the percentage of people wholeaves from a particular page….readmore here http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/bounce-rate-vs-exit-rate What is the Panda update andwhichis its current version? – Panda is a searchalgorithmupdate bythe Google to take on the content farms, low qualitywebsites andthe websites getting lowqualitybacklinks, Google removed a lot ofthe webpage fromthe higher search index duringthis
- 7. update and the current versionof Panda is 2.5.3 updated onOctober 19/20th Oct. 2011…read here for latest panda updates http://www.seroundtable.com/tag/panda What was caffeine update?– Caffeine update was rolledout byGoogle inJune 2010 andthe main purpose of this update was to include more fresh results inthe search index, at least 50%..readmore about caffeine update here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search- index-caffeine.html A customer can give you an access to onlyone tool, whichone willyou choose, Webmasters or Analytics? – Of Course Webmaster tools, because these are almost the essential tools for the search engine optimization, we can have some analytics data inthe webmasters as well. But nowdue to the inclusionof webmaster data inAnalytics, we wouldlike to have access to Analytics. What is 404? – It is a server error code whichis returnedbythe server what a particular webpage or the file is missingfrom the webhost server. What is 301 redirect? – It is a SEO friendlyversionof permanent redirect for the webpages or the domains. Readmore about 301 redirect here http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php What is 302 redirect? – It is a temporaryredirect. Read more here http://www.internetofficer.com/seo/302-redirect/ What is robots.txt? – Robots.txt is a text file used to give instructions to the search engine crawlers about the caching andindexing of a webpage, domain, directoryor a file ofa website. Readmore here http://www.robotstxt.org/ What are the other methods to restrict a webpage from the searchindex? – we canuse noindex meta tag. Readmore here http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html What are Google Webmaster Tools crawl errors? – Crawl errors provides the informationabout the URL’s of your website whichare not accessible but linked fromsomewhere. Read more here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35120 What is a landing page? – a landingpage is a page in the website whichis designedto attract the visitors to contact/subscribe/buya service or the product byreading few lines of important informationabout that particular s ervice or the product on that page. Readmore about landing page here http://www.copyblogger.com/landing-pages/ What is the recent change in Google Analytics? – Realtime visitors info, visitors flow, webmaster tools SEO data and website speed data. Read more here http://analytics.blogspot.com/ How to handle the duplicate page in the website? – usingcanonical tag. Read more here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the- most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps What are the types of CSS andwhichis better for SEO? – 3 types, Internal CSS, inline CSS and externalCSS. Readmore about CSS types here at http://www.expression-web-tutorial.com/Types_CSS_Styles.html. The external CSS is best for SEO purpose. Read whyto use external CSS http://www.basictips.com/tips/article_64.shtml How manyheading tags are there inHTML? – 6 tags, from H1 to H6 Can we use more thanone H1 ona single webpage? – Of course, if there is a need of describingtwo related topics on the same page thenwe can use, but using more than 2 or 3 will not provide anycredit to the searchengines. Matt Cutts advise onusing more thanone H1 tag http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM Italic or Bold, which is more useful? – Bothare almost same but Italic have a slight more better for keywordtargetingon the webpage. Read more here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization What are top SEO ranking factors? – Qualityof content onthe webpage, qualityand quantityof backlinks to the webpage, anchor text used in the backlinks, domainauthority, social sharing metrics and some other traffic metrics like page CTR, bounce rate and average time onthe webpage. Read more here http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors andhere http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2010/01/14/google-ranking-factors/ What is the criteria for removing a webpage fromGoogle searchindex? – It shouldreturn a 404 not founderror or it shouldbe 301 permanently redirected. Some basic and quicksteps to increase the webpage speed. – removing the unused code andscripts. Replacinginternalandinline CSS withthe external CSS. Usingweb server’s page compressionmethods. Using small sizedimagesor minimizingthe no. of images. What is CTR? – It is Click ThroughRate. Read more about CTR here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickthrough_rate What is CTA? – It is Callto Action. Read more here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_to_action_(marketing) --
- 8. Q: What is SearchEngines? Ans:Search Engines are verycriticalkeyelement useful to find out specific andrelevant informationthrough huge extent of WorldWide Web. Some major commonlyusedsearch engine: Google Yahoo Bing Q: Tell me something about Google. Ans:Googleis the world’s largest andrenowned searchengine incorporating about 66.8% of market share. It wasintroduced in 1998 bystudents of Stanford Universitystudents SergeyBrin andLarryPage. The unique algorithmic ranking systemis consideredas its keyof success. Apart of Google Mail servicesthere are various worthyanduseful toolsare being offeredabsolutelyfree which include Blogger, Feedburner, YouTube, Google Plus, Adsense, Webmaster Tools, Adword, Analytics andmanymore. Q: Define SEO? SEO Ans:SEO is the abbreviatedformof “Search Engine Optimization”. It is the set ofprocessinaccount ofwhicha website or webpage is being constructedor optimizedthat helps themto enhance their appearance or visibilityat topinSERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Q: Explaindistinct types ofSEO practice? Ans:Primarilytwo types of SEO are beingsportinginpractice – Off-Page SEO andOn-Page SEO. Off-Page SEO is the methodof earningbacklinks fromother websitesinorder to enhance the rankingof the site. This methodinclude various method ofSEO includingBlogposting, forum, article submission, Press release submission, classifiedandmiscellaneous. On-Page SEO is the process ofoptimizinga website which includeson-site worksuchas writingcontent, title, description, Alt tag, Meta tags as well as ensuringweb-page’s code anddesignwhich canbe indexedandcrawledbysearch engines properly. Q: What are the different techniquesusedinOffpage SEO? Ans:There are lots of techniquesusedinOffpage SEO work. Major Techniques are: DirectorySubmission Social Bookmarking Blog Post Article Post Press Release Submission Forum Posting YahooAnswer Blog Comment DeeplinkDirectorySubmission Regional DirectorySubmissionandall that. Q: Define blog, article & press release? Ans:A blog is referredas aninformation or discussionpublishedonwebsite or WorldWide Web incorporatingdistinct entries calledas posts. Basically, the blogis referred as everything thingwhere you can include others too. It is more individualincontrast to article and pressrelease. It is also consideredas verypersonal insubject to both style andcomprisedideasandinformationandcanbe written inthe wayjust like you maytalk to your readers. It is alsocalled Webdiaryor Online Diary. The articles are concernedwithspecific topic or event andare highlyorientedtowards an opinion insteadof information. An article is supposedto be more oriented towards showing upopinions, views and idea. Generally, it is written bya third partyor expert ofanyspecific field. Press Release is relatedwitha specific action or event whichcanbe republished bydistinct medium of mass-media including other websites. It should be simple, short andprofessional. It conveys a clear message or information. Q: What are Meta Tags? Ans:HTML meta tags are usuallyreferredas tags of page data whichsits betweenopeningandclosing headtags ofa document’s HTML code. Actuallythese are hiddenkeywords who sits inthe code. These are invisible to visitors but are visible andreadable bySearchEngines. Example:
- 9. <head> <title>Not consideredas Meta Tag, evenrequiredanyway</title> <meta name=”description” content=”Write your descriptionhere” /> <meta name=”keywords” content=”Write your keyword here” /> </head> Q: Difference betweenkeyword & keyword phrase? Ans:The keywordtermis basicallyconcernedwitha one-wordterm, onthe other handa keywordphrase consideredas employment of twoor more word-combinations. Therefore, it is veryconfoundedto get highranking inaccount of one-wordkeywordterm untilthe one-word keyword has little online competition. Therefore, this practice is not encouraged to employ. In order to drive more traffic andtoprankinginSERPit is recommended to employkeyword phrase. Q: What do you knowabout Black Hat SEO? Ans:In order to attainHighRanking insearchengine result page, websites gofor various methods andtechniques which are characterizedbytwo categories. The methodwhichare implementedandacceptable according to search engine guidelines are White Hat SEO, onthe other hand, the method which are lessacceptable or instructed to avoidinsearch engine guidelines are “BlackHat SEO”. Q: Can you tell me some BlackHat SEO techniques? Ans:Some Black Hat SEO techniques are: Keyword Stuffing Cloaking DoorwayPages or GatewayPages Link Farming HiddenText, etc. Q: What is spider? Ans:Spider alsocalled as bot, crawler or robot is a set of computer programthat browses World Wide Web in methodical ando rderlyfashionas well automaticallyscan the web-page and website for updatedcontent anddownloada copyto its data center to index. Q: Name the bots (spider)of major searchengine? Ans:The name of bots/spider of Google search engine is GoogleBot, YahooSlurp for Yahoosearch andBingBot for Bing searche ngine. Q: Can you differentiate ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’? Ans:Nofollowlinkis exactlyvice-versa of dofollow link. These are non-crawling linkwhich are not passedbysearchengines bot andhence can’t be cachedor indexed. It is obvious whenwe wishto prevent a link fromcrawling andindexing. Dofollowlinkis a kindof hyperlinkwhichsays all search enginescrawlers to passthroughwhichalsoput animpact over page rank. Whenwe opt to employor attempt to achieve a dofollowlinkthen it is countedbysearchengines andsits in the eye ofGoogle, Bing, MSN, Yahooetc. as a backlink for your website andenhancesyour site ranking. Q: Define Page Rank. Ans:PageRankis a set ofalgorithmfor linkanalysis named after LarryPage and employedbyGoogle search engine towards defininga numerical value from 1 to 10 to eachcomponent of hyperlinkeddocuments like worldwide web. The value accepts onlyroundfigure that means decimal are not allowed. Page rank is calculatedbytheir inboundlinks. Q: Establisha difference betweenPR & SERP. Ans:PR is Page Rank which is defined byqualityinbound links from other website or web-pages to a webpage or website as well as saythe importance of that site. SERPstands for Search Engine Result Page is the placement of the website or web-page whichis returnedbysearchengine after a search queryor attribute. Q: What is Cache?
- 10. Ans:Cache is the process performed bysearch engine crawler at a regular interval of time. It used to scanandtake snapshot of eachpage over world wide webas well as store as a backup copy. Almost everysearch engine result page incorporatesa cachedlinkfor everysite. However, clicking over cached link showyou the last Google cached versionof that specific page rather thanof current version. Also, you candirectlyprefix “cache:http://www.webgranth.com” withdesired URL to viewit cachedversion. Q: Define Alt tag? Ans:The alt attribute also calledas alt tagare employedinXHTML andHTML documents incontext of defining alternative text that is supposedto be renderedwhenthe element can’t be renderedto whichit is applied. One great feature of alt tag is that it is readable to ‘screenreader’ whichis a software bymeans of which a blindperson can hear this. Inaddition, it delivers alternative informationfor an image due to some specific reason a user can’t view it such as incase ofslowconnection and an error occurredinthe src attribute. For example, the HTML for this image will appear somethinglike this: <img alt=”youcandefine alt tagjust belowthe input box of image title while uploading or editing a image.” src=”<http://www.webgranth.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/Alt tag.jpg”> Q: What do you knowabout Adsense? Ans:Adsense is a webprogram conductedbyGoogle that enablespublishers of content websitesto cater text, richmedia, image, video advertisements automaticallywhichare relevant to content of website and audience. These advertisement are included, maintained and sorted by Google itselfandearnmoneyeither byper-click or per-impression basis. Q: Can you define Adword? Ans:Adword is referredas the mainadvertising product of Google which is useful to make appear your ads on Google andits p artner websites includingGoogle Search. ThisGoogle’s product offer PPC(PayPer Click)advertising which is a primarymodule andincorporate a sub moduleCPC (Cost Per Click) where we bidthat rate that will be chargedonlywhenthe users click your advertisement. One another submo dule is CPM(Cost Per ThousandImpression)advertising where advertiser payfor a thousand impressiononflat rate to publisher. Inaddition it alsoincludeswebsite targetedadvertisingof banner, text and rich-media ads. Moreover, the adwill appear especiallyto those people who are alreadylookingfor such type of product youare offeringas wellas offer to chooseparticular sites with geographical area to show your ads. Q: What is PPC? Ans:PPCis the abbreviatedform of PayPer Click andis a advertisement campaignconducted byGoogle. It is referred as a primarymodule with two sub module CPC(Cost-per-click) andCPM(Cost per thousandimpression)throughbiddingandflat rate respectively. InCPCthe advertiser wouldbe onlycharged when the user clickover their advert. Q: What are the aspects inSEO? Ans: The mainaspect inSEO are divided intwo class:SEO On-Page andSEO Off-Page. SEO On-Page includesMeta tag, description, keywords optimization, site structure and analysis, etc. SEO Off-Page aspect are Keyword Research, unique andqualitycontent, linkbuilding throughBlog Comments, Blog Posting, Article submission, Press Release, Classified posting, Forum posting. Q: What do you knowabout RSS? Ans:RSS stands for ReallySimple Syndication is useful to frequentlypublishall updated works including news headlines, blogentries etc. This RSS document alsoknownas web feed, feedor channelthat incorporate summarized text including metadata i.e. authorship and publishing dates etc. However, RSSfeeds make the publishers flexible bysyndicatingthe content automatically. There is a standardized file format XML that lets the informationto be publishedonce which canbe visible to severaldistinct programs. Also, thismake readers more ease to get updates timelyby allowing themto subscribe from their favorite sites. Q: How wouldyou define Alexa? Ans:Alexa is a California basedsubsidiarycompanyof Amazon.com which is widelyknownfor its website andtoolbar. This Alexa toolbar congregate browsingbehavior data andsendit to website, where the data is analyzed and storedandcreate report for company’s webtraffic. Also, Alexa provides data concerned to traffic, global ranking andother additional informationfor a websites. Q: How can you achieve Google Page Rank? Ans:Generally, Google Page Rank is basedoninbound links, therefore, more backlinks youcongregate more your page rank will be. Also, it is influencedbyrankof page whichis linked to you. One other thing to consider is that older your website will be, it will be more favorable and
- 11. trusted to Google. Google reward those websites who incorporateslots of pages, tons ofincoming link andalsohealthyquantityof internal links to another pages withinthe site. In respect ofSEO projects, relativelyit is not sosignificant but delive rs a picture about workto perform towards earning inboundlinks. Q: Whythe Title TaginWebsite is valuable? Ans:In our SEO efforts Title Tags are veryearnest. It is highlyrecommendedto include a Unique Title that exactlysays about the contents sits in that page. It is valuable because thisis thingwhichappears in the searchengine result section and tells the user & search engine, what is about this page. Q: What is Site MapanddistinguishbetweenHTML sitemapandXML sitemap? Ans:A sitemap incorporateslist of web-pages whichis accessible to users or crawlers. It might be a document in anyformemployedas a tool for planning either a webpage or webdesign that enables them to appear ona website as wellas typicallyplaced ina hierarchicalstyle. Thishelps search engine bots andusers to findout the pages ona website. The site maprenders our website more searchengine friendly as well enhances the probabilityfor frequent indexing. HTML sitemapcanbe incorporated directlyin a web page for user’s flexibilityand canbe implemented through proper design. On the other hand, XML sitemapis useful onlyfor searchengine crawlers or spiders and doesn’t visible to users. It sits inthe root of website. such as:http://www.webgranth.com/sitemap.xml Which is better:anHTML site mapor XML Sitemap? BY Matt Cutt Q: What’s the significance of Robots.txt file in a website? Ans:Robots.txt file is consideredas a conventionuseful to prevent cooperating web robots andwebcrawlers fromaccessing all or part of a website or its content for whichwe don’t want to be crawledandindexedbut publiclyviewable. It is also employedbysearchengines to archive and categorize website and to generate a rule ofno follow regardingsome particular areas of our websites. Q: How Keywords are implemented for optimization? Ans:The best wayto opt and implement keywords is to designate those keywords whichare popular, relevant to our content, co mpriseshigh search volume andeffective. Stuffing andover employment ofkeywords must be avoided. Inorder to get best result and effect, our pages shouldn’t containkeyworddensitymore than3-4%. Including keywords into title anddescriptionis highlyrecommended. Q: What is cloaking? Ans:Cloakingis a technique whichis used inBlack Hat SEO that enables to create twodistinct pages where the page content being presentedto search engine spider is different from that whichis beingpresented to user’s browser. These techniquesdoesnot come under the guidelinesof search engines. Q: Do you know about BlogFlipping? Ans:Blog Flippingis the practice to sale a blogwhenit becomesfamous and popular as well as drivinghealthyamount oftraffic. Q: What you opinedabout HTML either it is Case Sensitive or Case Insensitive? Ans:HTML is case Insensitive. It doesn’t matter and deliver identical result either you write inUpper Case or Lower Case. Under what circumstances you wouldintendto eliminate pages from searchengines throughrobots.txt vs. Meta robots tag? Ans:Generally, I wouldcontinue to employrobots.txt inorder to make search engine indexing a directoryon a website. This might be oftena directorythat is concerned withadminfunction or incorporate contents onlyin form of script or image gallery. Generally, robots.txt is employedto prevent a directoryand its sub-folders and files to crawl bysearchengine bot as wellas Meta robots tag for a specific webpage. Q: What things are significant inorganicallyranking a website? Ans: Basicallythere are various things that is beingemployed for organicallyranking a website whichcanbe classifiedin3 distinct categories: Website content:It must be qualityandunique content as well as most be well optimized and wellstructured. Website structure: Thisinclude TAGS, clear navigation, ensuringusability, validation ofHTML errors andmiscellaneous. Back-links:You can create a link for anywhere but prior to this it is obvious to ensure for relevant site andhealthylink. Q: What steps wouldyou followto optimize a website? Ans:These are following steps to be followedwhile optimizing a website:
- 12. First of all we will interviewwebmaster or website owner to congregate relevant information, goals andwebsite’s purpose. Performing keyword analysis and findout the best searchvolume keywords that shouldbe incorporatedinto the website as well as individual pages of the website. Analyzing the content of website in order to ensure usage of content relevant keywords andphrases. This comprisestitles, “a lt” attributesand META tags (Meta Title, Meta description& Meta Keyword). Target & implementing keywords as H1, H2 & so onrelevant to the site and its content. Analyzing website navigation. Ensuring the robots.txt file and sitemap existence as well as check their efficiency. If required, makingrecommendations for modifications inwebsite as well as its eachandeverypage and soon….. Q: SEO Checklist for NewWebsites Q: What is considered as more significant – Creatinggreat content or building backlinks? Ans:Both are obvious. Creatingqualitycontent is consideredas the first element responsible for rankingas wellas buildingbacklinks is useful to buildauthorityto a site as well as coined as a metric for rankingwell. Q: What willbe your stepwhenthe companywebsite you are working withwishto migrate its all content to a new domain? Ans:First of all I wouldupdate the previous website withpermanent redirect to new page for eachandeverypage. Later eradicate previous content from searchengines incontext of avoiding duplicate content issues. Q: How can I merge two sites?ByMAtt Cutt Q: What’s your opinionabout link buying? Ans:GenerallyI avoid this practice. Thoughother means of paid marketing are alsoavailable. The process oflinkbuying is don’t liked bysearch engines. It doesn’t comes under the guidelinesof search engine. Q: Can you establisha difference betweenSEMand SEO? Ans:SEO is a set of processes to get our website or pages appear in searchengine result page. On the other handSEMis searchengine marketing being usedin practice to purchase advertising space insearch engine page result. Q: What strategieswouldyou implement for backlinks? Ans:I wouldrequest for backlinks to competitors relevant website as wellas provide reciprocal link if required. In addition, I would attempt to submit pressrelease, article submission, blogsubmission and other aspects of off-page SEO to most relevant and qualitysites. Q: What do you thinkabout social media inSEO strategy? Ans: Social networkingwebsites are consideredas social media whichis veryeffective and robust for viral marketing. Viral marketinghas been proved as verypowerful resource, inthe case if our content is unique, attractive and appealing. Some media Site: Facebook Twitter Linkedin Myspace Digg Youtube Myspace, etc. Q: In order to prevent penalty, what things you shouldn’t perform to increase ranking? Ans:I woulddiscard links from those websites whichis supposedto act as linkfarm as well as poor qualitysites whichhave low page rank. Ensure that our site must containunique andqualitycontent without keyword stuffing. Also, I usedto avoidanypractices of ‘spam’ which include certain affiliate advertising websites, unsolicitede-mail campaigns etc. Q: What mistakesyou should avoidwhile optimizing the website? Ans:The mainmistakes that shouldbe avoided are filling keywords inWeb-Page, employing identical anchor text for link building, keyword stuffing, gettinglow qualitybacklinks etc. Q: Define andDifferentiate Webmaster Tool & Analytics Tool?
- 13. Ans:Webmaster Tool is a free service cateredbyGoogle which provide us a complete report for indexed data, crawling errors, backlinks information, search queries, website malware errors, CTR and submitting XML sitemap. Basically, it acts as a mediator between website andserver provide complete overviewof data, issuesand other queries. Google Analytics is a free web analysis tool first rolledout inlate 2005 but generallyit become available for users in August 2006. This tool acts betweenwebsite & internet browser/users andoffers complete overviewof visitors statistics whichexactlysays about generalwebsite activities like page views, site visits, bounce rates, average time spent onsite or pages, sources of traffic, locationetc. It is also obvious for tracking Adword queries. Beginners Guide to Google Analytics Q: How can you enhance the crawlingfrequencybysearchengines for your website? Ans:Includingnew, original, unique andqualitycontent onour website more frequentlyenables searchengines to crawl more frequently. Q: What do you knowabout Keywordstemming? Ans:It is the practice to find out root word fromsearch query. For instance, a keyword like “playful” will be split to the word“play” bystemming algorithmthat turns it possible. Thus, the search result appear onthe screenwill containthe word “play” in it. Q: What do you knowabout LSI? Ans:LSI is the abbreviatedform ofLatent Semantic Indexing. It hasbeen emergedas a technique of fetching data via establishinga communication among words as wellas employingsynonyms in the midst ofretrievingthe data fromthe index. Q: Can you tell me about Frames inHTML? Ans:Frames inHTML are obvious as theyusedto discriminate the page content intodistinct fragments. Search enginestreat these frames as absolutelydifferent pages as well as frames alsoput annegative impact over SEO. Therefore, we shouldavoid the practice of using Frames and implement basic HTML instead. Q: How can you knowabout your SEO campaign whether it is workingor not? Ans:First of all I wouldattempt to make a search onall search engines employing relevant keywords and keyphrases, I am optimizing for. The analysis of result will saywhether the methods ofoptimization have gainresults or lost. I wouldanalyze the report regularlyas search engine make update and index. I would attempt to another aspect of website statistics whichsays about originof traffic. Q: What is the meaning of competitive analysis? Ans:Competitive analysis, as its name suggestedit is establishment of a comparison ofdata betweenthe website I am optimizing and that website who rank highlyinsearch results. It will be a great source ofidea. Q: After implementing distinct SEO methods for a site, if you haven’t got anyimprovements. What wouldbe your next step? Ans:I wouldmake troubleshootingfor the issues. Firstly, I woulddesignate whether it is a new project. Again I will analyze relevant keywords and phrase for the site I am optimizing for as well as took an insight studyof competitive analysis. Ifthe website andpageshas beenindex and appears in the first 10 pages of search engine result page but not in the topthree, I wouldgo for some transformation to onpage te xt, page titles andpage descriptions. But in the case if website has not beenindexedstill or droppedfrom index, might be it comprises some big issuesandtotal re - submissionand re-work might be required. However, I opinedhere that this post willbe highlybeneficialfor whoare stepping towards marshaling their career as SEO professional especially for those whoare stillfreshers. Moreover, inthis post I have also listedsome useful SEO interviewquestionfor experienced professionals that will definitelyhelpthem to grabtheir dream job andoffer a great opportunityto add sparkles intheir career. -- 1. Give me a descriptionof your general SEO experience. A. My experience is mainlywith myownsite at www.afreshpath.comand one other site www.qualitymotorsreno.com. So far, mysite is on page one for narrow searchterms involving outdoor recreation inNevada. The other site has gone from not being listedat allinthe first 10 pagesof any search result to beinginpages2 and3 of a couple ofsearch engines. That workis ongoing at this time. 2. Can you write HTML code byhand? A. Yes I can. I douse some WYSIWYG editors andthenmodifythe code byhandas needed. 3. Could you brieflyexplainthe PageRank algorithm?
- 14. A. In simple terms, Google uses the gross number of inboundlinks to a page to determine how important the page is. This “pagerank” haslittle to do with actualsearchresults but can make a difference on user behavior. 4. Have you createdanySEO tools either from scratch or piecedtogether from others? A. No, I do make use of manytoolsalreadyavailable on the internet as well as SEO programs that I have purchased. 5. What do you thinkof PageRank? A. In relationto SEO projects, it is relativelyunimportant but cangive an indication ofhowmuchwork needs to be done in gaining inboundlinks. 6. What do you thinkof using XML sitemaps? A. I use them. Theyare an additionaltool to help the searchengines when theycrawl a site. There is norequirement for any sitemap and your pages will get indexedwithout themif youpayclose attentionto navigationwithin your site. 7. What SEO tools doyou regularlyuse? A. Keyword analysis tools, keyworddensitytools, index checking, backlink checking, wordprocessor to check spellingand grammar, HTML validationandothers. 8. Under what circumstances wouldyou lookto exclude pages fromsearchenginesusing robots.txt vs meta robots tag? A. UsuallyI woulduse the robots.txt to keepa search engine fromindexinganentire directoryon a site. Thiswouldoftenb e directoriesdealing with adminfunctions or directoriesthat onlycontainscript or image libraries. 9. What areas doyou think are currentlythe most important inorganicallyranking a site? A. Text on page! Search enginesutilize text andonlytext in providingsearch results. That text is found in manyplace including the URL andtitle of your pages as wellas the visible text you place on your pages. 10. Do you have experience incopywriting andcanyou provide some writing samples? A. My experience in “copywriting” is limitedto mysite at www.afreshpath.com. It is a blog about outdoor recreationinNevada and sofar is placing well insearch results. 11. Have you ever had something you’ve writtenreach the front-page of Digg? Sphinn? Or be Stumbled? A. Not yet! I am not particularlyworriedabout it but I dotryto write insucha waythat others wouldbe inticedto submit myarticles. 12. Explainto me what META tags matter intoday’s world. A. The most important META tag for SEO is your page description. Searchengines domake use of this tag but it does not outweigh the title or visible text. The META keywords tag is not muchof a factor inthe major searchengines but shouldnot be overlooked. 13. Explainvarious steps that you wouldtake to optimize a website? A. 1. Interview website owner or webmaster to get a goodgraspof the site’s purpose andgoals. 2. Perform a keywordanalysisto findbest performingkeywords that shouldbe usedfor that site andfor individualpagesof the site 3. Analyze site content to determine usage ofrelavant keywords andphrases. This includes visible text as well at titles, META tags, and“alt” attributes. 4. Examine site navigation 5. Determine the existence ofrobots.txt andsitemapandexamine those for effectivenes. 6. Make recommendations for changes neededfor the site andeachindividual page. 14. If the companywhose site you’ve beenworkindfor hasdecidedto move all of its content to a new domain, what steps wouldyo u take? A. I would update the oldsite with permanent redirects to to new page for everypage. ThenI wouldattempt to remove old content from the major search enginesto avoid duplicate content issues. 15. Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important “on page” elements A. #1 issue is visible text being relevant to expected search terms. # 2 would thenbe page titles # 3 is navigation and “alt” attributes for navigation items andlinktext. # 4 would be “alt” attributes for images andother media presentedonpages. 16. What do you thinkabout link buying? A. I discourage the practice for the most part. There are more effective means of paidmarketing. One exceptionwouldbe purchasing listings in highlyreputable directoriessuch as Yahoodirectory. 17. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI Indexing)? A. LSI indexingries to overcome the limitations of“literal” searchterm matching . For example, if someone is searching for “hiking in No rhter Nevada” a literalsearch wouldonlymatchthe words usedwithout taking into account words suchas “hike”, “hiked”. LSI cangive more relevant results because it does take word usage andcontext intoaccount determining what a page is “about” rather thana strict reliance onliteral wording. 18.
- 15. What is Phrase Based Indexing andRetrieval andwhat rolesdoesit play? A. In regards to searchresults, it is a methodthat searchengines suchas google use to determine relevance of a page based onphrases acutally usedina document. For example, ifyou have a page instructing people on wildlife photography, the searchengine wouldreasonablyexpect to see terms and phrases suchas “selectinga camera”, “appraochingwildlife”, and “lowlight photoconditions”. Relatedphrases will addto the relevance of a page where unrelatedphrases will reduce the relevance ofa page. This is one technique that Google is using to weedout “spam” sites. 19. What is the difference betweenSEO and SEM? A. Seo is searchengine optimizationand is the process youuse ingetting your pages to place well onsearch results. SEMis searchengine marketing and involves purchasingadvertising space on searchresult pages. Sponsored listings are SEM. Bothare relatedthough! Whenu sing Google Adwords, the better you optimize your pages for search, the lessyou will be paying for your selectedkeywords inthe PPCcampaignand the better placment your ads will get. 20. What kindof strategiesdo you normallyimplement for backlinks? A. I check the competitors backlinks to findhightlyrelevant sitesandrequest a linkfrom them. If reciprocal linkingis required, I maybe able to place a likbackto them in a relevant portionof a page onthe site but if not, I will state soand maynot gain that link. Another methodI use is to submit pressreleases to relevant media. 21. What role does social media playin anSEO strategy? A. Social media suchas socialnetworking sitesand news sites can provide for viral marketing. Viralmarketing hasproven to be powerful if the content of a site is appealing. 22. What things wouldn’t youto do increase rankings because the risk ofpenaltyis toohigh? A. I would avoidanysite with the appearance of a linkfarm. I would alsoavoidany“spam” practice such as unsolicited email campaigns, certain affiliate advertising sites, sitesthat re-direct visitors to your site, andanything resembling the practices ofZango. 23. Whymight you want to use nofollowon aninternal link? A. Manysiteshave shoping carts andmember loginor logout links. Thistype oflinkis simplyan administrative functionand doesnothigto contribute to site content. The search engine does not needto index those pages. 24. Are you familiar withweb analytics andwhat packages are your familiar with? A. Yes I am andthe tool I use most frequentlyis Google’s webmaster tools. I also use the available Yahooho stingtools for myown sites. Knowing what searchterms your visitors are actuallyusing to find your site as well as where those visitors are comingfrom will helprefine SEO efforts. The amount of time eachvisitor spends onyour site will helpin determiningifcontent changes are needed. 25. From an analytics perspective, what is different betweena user from organic searchresults vs. a type-inuser? A A user coming intoyour site from anorganic search usuallyhas never visitedyour site before or is performing a generalsearchfor a specific product or topic. These visitors are trying to find the site that most suits thier needs. A “type -in” user is specifallyinterestedin your website.They mayhave found your URL inprint advertising or from a friend. Often, these users are familiar withwhat you are offering andare comingbackto your site as a repeat visitor. 26. How do you evaluate whether anSEO campaignis working? A. The mainindicator is to performa search onall major search enginesusing the keywords/ keyphrases I amoptimizingfor. An analysis of those results will helpto determine ifoptimization has gained inthe results or lost ground. This analysisshouldbe done over ti me as eachsearch engine will update andindex on a varying schedule. Another aspect is to use website statistics to determine where traffic is originating. 27. What does competitive analysis meanto you andwhat techniques doyou use? A. Competitive analysis means taking a close lookat websites that rank highlyin searchresults and comparingthose sitesto the one youare optimizing. Theyhave employedmethods that are workingand are a valuable source for ideas. 28. If you’ve done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven’t been anyimprovements, how would you goabout diagnosing the problem? A. I might approachthe problem as if it were an entirelynewproject. Againtaking a look at the keywords andphrases that I amattemptingto optimize for andagaintaking a close inspectionof topranking competition. If the site is indexedanddoes show upinthe irst 10 pagesof a search but on in the topthree, I wouldlook into modificationof major areassuchas page titles, onpage text, and page descriptions. If the site is not yet indexedor has been droppedfrom anindex, there are major problems andthe site mayrequire a total re-workandre-submission. 29. How manytarget keywords should a site have? A. I advise not more than three or four well related keyword phrases. This allows for more effective optimization. 30. You hear a rumor that Google is weightingthe HTML LAYER tag veryheavilyinrankingthe relevance ofits results – howdoesthis affect yourwork? A. It doesn’t unless the rumor proves to be fact. Yes, I checkon the rumor but as withall rumors, it canhave detrimental effects if you “jumponthe band wagon” andit proves to be just a rumor withnobasisinfact. 31.Whydoes Google rankWikipedia for somanytopics? A. Wikipediais anestablished authority! As such, it is referencedbyhuge numbers of other documents withrelevant text associatedwith links back to Wikipedia. 32.If salaryandlocationwere not anissue, whowouldyou work for?
- 16. A. Myselfand onlymyself if those conditions existed. --- SEO InterviewQuestions & Answers is one ofthe hot topics among SEOs. There are manycompanies, software as their core business, SEO as their side business, andlooking for SEO experts who canmanage their clients SEO projects. The problem behindthis situationis th e interviewer’s lack of SEO stuffs. Some SEO newbies are gettingbenefits withthis. Some interviewer are having wrong ideaabout SEO andnot accepting the points from a SEO candidate. This is worse thanthe interviewer having zero knowledge inSEO. If an interviewer doesn’t have anystuff about SEO, thenhe willbe asking general questions. As a candidate, if we make the interviewer understand some basic points of SEO thenthe interview willbe successful. In mySEO career, I have attendedmanyinterviews and some endedup with comedies. RecentlyI attendedaninterview froma pure Internet marketing companyis the specialone whichI got a feelthat is anSEO interview. Evenas aninterviewer inmypresent companyI haven’t thought of askingsuchquestions. ReallyI enjoyedthe interview verywellandjust want to share the questions askedbyinterviewer and answers from my side. 1) Can you tell me your owndefinitionfor SEO? Yes sure, SEO is the collection ofstrategies that we are followingto get visitors to our website from searchengines via organic search results. (But almost similar) 2) What’s your ideaabout page rank and how it’s calculated? Let me first tell about the calculation behindthat. Googlesays that page rankcalculationformulais havingmore than2 lak hvariables. I amsure that following things are the mainfactor, 1) Internal BackLinks 2) External Back Links 3) Domain Age Apart from this, number of visits, bounce rate, CTR etc maybe a factor in calculating the page rank. Page rankis just a metric fromGoogle which defines the qualityof the page. Moreover we dohave manyother targets like keywordposition, qualitytraffic andconversions. Inmyvision,I am havingveryleast importance to page rank. But I amcrazyabout getting full green PR tool bar for myblog. 3) I want to change the domainname of wellrankedwebsite in SERP. Is it possible to retainthe same keyword positions? Yes, definitelywe can. Just 301 redirecting the corresponding oldURLs to the newURLs. Ininitial after we did this, we mayexperience a dropin rankings. Once our newURLs got indexed, we canexpect a same positionthat we hadearlier. 4) Can you name the SEO blogs that you regularlyread? 1) Search Engine journal 2) Search Engine Land 3) SEOMOZ 4) SEOSmarty 5) Jimboykins 5) What SEO tools doyou regularlyuse? 1) Google Adwords Tool to findkeywords suggestions andsearchcount 2) IPBlacklist tool 3) Server Header checker 6) How can you rate you out of 10 in the following areas On-Page Optimization, Off-Page Optimization, Photoshop, and Coding (PHP) On-Page Optimization – 09 Off-Page Optimization – 08 Designing– 06 Coding (PHP) – 03 7) How can you optimize a website having 2 lakhpages? Following are the special additionalSEO stuffs that we have to implement for dynamic website. 1) Generation ofdynamic title & description 2) Dynamic XML Sitemap generation
- 17. 3) Good Internal linkstructure (Normal) 8 ) Have you attendedanysearch related conferences? Yes, I have attended one conference named“searchCamp2008? held at Chennai (India). I had a wonderful time there bysharingthe SEO ideas with manywebmasters. 9) What’s special in XML Sitemap and where do you submit that? That is a file whichlist all the pages of website in XML format designedfor SE’s. Here we cangive the crawlable frequencyandalso we candefine the priorityof all the webpages(1.0, 08. 065 etc). This canbe submittedinGoogle Webmaster tools. 10) What areasdo youthinkare currentlythe most important in organicallyrankinga site for a particular keyword? 1) Keyword in anchor text of external& internal backlinks 2) Internal link structure 3) Keyword densityincontent, title, description, alt tags, h1 tagetc ----- Question1- What is on page SEO? Ans:- The onpage SEO is making sure that your website is searchengine friendly. To make your website searchengine friendlyyou have to perform below written works. Website Analysis Optimize Meta Title Meta Description Meta keyword, Optimizing H1, H2 tag You have to optimize website directorystructure as well as navigation Sitemap creationandupdation Check keywordstuffing Check the qualityof the site content Checking for brokenlinks Optimizationof ALT Text, Anchor Text Managingrobots.txt Question2- What is Off page SEO (SearchEngine Optimization)? Ans- The main off page SEO work is to increase rankingof website insearch engines. It includes“Link Building” or “Back Linking”. Keepone thing in mind that making thousands linkdoesnot matter makingqualitylinks matter. The major searchengines are Google, Yahoo, bing. Youcan improve rankingof your website bydoing belowwrittenwork. Submitting website to SearchEngine (knownas search engine submission ) DirectorySubmission Article Submission Blog creationandSubmission Press Release creationandsubmission Social Bookmarking Videosubmission PPT Submission RSS FeedSubmission Social mediapromotion And manymore………. Question3:- What are Meta Tags? Ans- Basically, Meta tags are keywords. It includesMeta title, Meta keyword, andMeta description. It is a hiddencode in website page. Search engine cansee it but generallywebsite visitor cannot. The Meta tags playveryimportant role in the visibilityof website in the searchengine. Question4: - What is the main use of Robots.txt file?
- 18. Answer:- The main use of Robots.txt file is to be safe from searchengine duplicate content penalty. Apart fromthis, the robots.txt file is usedto stop search engine crawler to crawl private andsensitive data. The locationof robots.txt file is veryimportant. It must be inthe maindirectoryor website suchas (http://mysite.com/robots.txt). Bythe help ofrobots.txt file you cancreate nofollow rule for specific areas of your website. Question5:- What is the best wayto maximize website crawling? Ans- Updating originalandqualitycontent on the website are the best wayto increase search engine crawling rate. Question6:- Tell me the difference betweenbounce rate and exit rate? Note:- This is veryimportant question askedinthe interview. Ans- The bounce rate is nothing but a percentage of website visitor wholeaves andparticular website just after visitinga single page. The exit rate is the percentage of visitor wholeaves from a particular page. Question7 – What are the mainSEO rankingfactors explain? Ans- There is severalraking factors. Some ofthe main and important searchengines raking factors are discussedbelow. Website content quality Qualityof backlinks Age of the domainname Social sharingmetrics Page CTR Bounce Rate Anchor text usedin the backlinks Question: 8- What are the limitation ofdescriptiontag andtitle tag? Ans- The descriptiontag must be between160 to 170 characters andthe Title tagmust be between66-70 characters. Putting keyword in Title tag and Descriptiontag is verybeneficial. Question:9- What are the most important toolsfor SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? Ans:- The most important tools are Google Analytics, Google Webmasters tools, Opensite explorer, Alexa rank toolbar, Google Toolbar, SEO toolbar, website grader etc. Question10:- How to check number of backlinks of your competitor website? Note: - This questionis also asked bymanyinterviewers Ans- There are lot of ways bywhichyou can keepeye on your competitor website suchas bythe help ofOpen Site Explorer, BacklinkWatch,Alexa, using backlinkfinder, bythe help ofGoogle link operator Question11:- Tell me some name of Social Media channelswhich you have usedearlier? Ans:- There are lot of social media channels out there some of the popular channels are: Wordpress Blogger Typepad Digg Delicious Social network like facebook, Google+ or G+, Linkedin, Myspace, Twitter Video sharing site like Vimeo, Youtube etc Question12:- What is Site Map? Ans- Bythe helpof site map youcanmake your website more searchengine friendly. The best thingis that it increases the chance of quick indexing in the search engine. Question13:- Who is Matt Cutts? Note: - This is the mainquestion generallyaskedbyintervieer Ans- Matt Cutts is a headof spam team at Google.
- 19. Question14:- Do you know about PPC? Ans- PPCstands for PayPer Click advertisements. Basically, PPCis a method ofonline advertisement where you payper click when visitor clickon particular advertisements whichis displayedinthe search engines. Question15:- What is black hat SEO? Ans- The black hat SEO is nothing but doingSEO work byignoring searchengine guidelines. Most of the people start doing spam to get highranking in the search engine. The website optimization methodwhich is not acceptedbysearch engine is calledblack hat SEO. Black hat SEO couldbe very dangerous because it maypenalize your website. ----- What does SEO stand for? Thisacronym itselfstands for SearchEngine Optimization. What is SEO? The processof makinga site andits content highlyrelevant for both searchengines and searchers to increase ROI or meet goals. SEO includes technical tasks to make it easier for search engine spiders to index the content on a website or social media networking community. Is SEO spam, junk, dead etc.? Some believe that SEO is deadbut with the expansionof social media networkingcommunities, ethical and “white hat” SEO is more alive than everyandis highlynecessarywhenperforming social media optimization(SMO). Whyaren’t we #1 or on page 1 at Google? AnySEO companythat promises youthe #1 spot on searchengines is trying to sell you something. There are no guarantees as far as search enginesare concernedbut if youhaven’t done SEO yet, have noreal website content, and have a site that contains mostlyFlash, AJAXandJavascript, you will have a difficult time showingup inanysearchengines. SEO is a long term strategy – not a keyword densitygame. Whyam I on #1 all the time but when mywife searchesfor me she doesn’t findme?Search engines like to cache (or keep) your personal preferencesandpersonalizedsearch queries to make searching more convenient for you. If you searchandclickon your website often, search engines such as Google will bring that website to the topof the stack. Clear your history/cache and turnoff personalizedsearch options to see the real ranking. When will we see results?Some websitesare indexedina few hours andsome take a few months. This time spandepends onthe search engine’s processes, your content and age of website as well as your l evel of competition. Can we rankfor Apple? Ranking for a highlycompetitive keywordsuchas this will decrease your possibilityof getting ranked properly. Remember that you are indirect competition withthe likesof Steve Jobs. Can we rankfor everything (huge list of keywords)? Sure youcanbut this is not the most effect wayof being ranked. Customers who want anApple computer but come to your website that sellsmattresses is not onlygoing to leave but will most likelynot return evenwhen theyare readyto purchase a mattress. It is all about the long tail approach and relevancy. You have one chance to make a first impression withyour customers. How much doesSEO cost? This reallydepends the goalsof that you or your companyhave inplace. Every good SEO companywill workwith youto assess your goalsandgive you a project cost and timeline agreement basedon anhourlyrate as SEO is anongoingprocess. So me SEO companies have createdpackages witha set of deliverablesto helpthe decisionmaking process. Whyis SEO soexpensive?This depends on your classification of“expensive”. High qualityethical andnatural SEO costs more because you are payingfor the return onthat investment. SEO is a science andanart that will bring in more moneyto your companythanit takes. An ethical SEO companywillfocus on your ROI. How longdoes it take to get indexed byGoogle? Each searchengines indexes different sites at different times. It couldtake minutesor weeks depending onyour site. Without SEO, it maynever be indexed. How to submit mynewsite to Google/Bing/Yahoo etc.?The search engines provide a few submission portalsbut thesedays your website it submittedthroughcontent and XML Sitemaps. How do I submit to 1000 search engines? There is absolutelyno needto submit to that maywebsites. The top3 search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo)usuallyfeed all the smaller websites their findings. Submit to the big 3 searchenginesand the smaller ones will findthem. Do I need an XML Sitemap? There is some room for debate but it is highlyrecommended to have a XML Sitemapfor your site to provide further informationto search engines. Do I need meta tags for SEO? Yes, althoughsome meta tags are no longer beingusedfor search engine placement andindexing, the informationis usuallydisplayandwillincrease the chances ofsomeone clicking a linkto your website. Other meta tag information gives data to the search engines to help decide if your site is safe andwhentheyshouldreturn to index again.
- 20. Do I need a highPageRankfor SEO? PageRankis important to some but it is all about the content onyour site andyour target audience. There are thousands ofwebsites that have great PageRank withabsolutelyno returnon investment (ROI) andvise-versa. What is linkbait?It is highlylinkable masterfullycraftedpieces of content people not onlylike but alsorecommendto others bylinking. Can’t myniece whois a graphic designer dothe SEO? Again, SEO is anart and a science. There are a number of people that are well versedinmany areas of website designand development but those who are successful inSEO have anextreme passionfor SEO specifically. Just as webdesigners are no coders, graphic designers are not SEO experts. Can’t mynephewwhois a web developer do the SEO?Manyprofessionalschoolsdon’t train webdevelopers about SEO andits place inweb programming. A goodwebdeveloper can onlyprovide about one thirdof the skills neededfor successful SEO. Can myson-in-law who is a Perl, Java and Cprogrammer do mySEO? Programmers oftenunderestimate the difficultyof SEO andattempt to attain rankings bycreating scripts that automaticallyenhance websites. This is a veryriskybusiness as it oftencrosses the thin line of what’s allowedby the search engine guidelines. WhyshouldI outsource mySEO? SEO is a full time process. Unless youhave at least one experiencedfulltime SEO in-house it is stronglyadvised to seekassistance from a SEO companyor consultant. Can’t I just use WordPressplus plugins for SEO? Youcanto get startedbut it’s not enough. Nowadays most moderncontent management systems (CMS) and blogsoftware have built-intechnical SEO capabilities. To outrankothers who use mostlySEO friendlysoftware, you needa professional. Does Google hate SEO? No, Google provides information and website tools to help webmasters fine-tune their SEO efforts. Infact the Google employees andSEO practitioners speakat the same conferences and work together as business partners. Does SEO mean optimizationfor search engines spiders not humans?SEO is not usedto please just search engines robots but humans as well. Most reputable SEO experts advocate search engine optimizationfor end-users and customers. Is buyinglinks, hidden text, IPdeliveryetc. black hat SEO?Most definitely! Some techniquescanbe usedethicallyas well but there these specific tactics are blackhat SEO tactics. Is black hat SEO legal? The questionto ask shouldrather be whether blackhat SEO is recommended. No it is not. Most ofit is probablystill legal, depending onthe technique. It pays onlyfor the fewwhodoit onlarge scale but most that dofindtheir websites and IPadd resses blacklistedfrom search enginesquickly. Does site size matter?Yes, site size does matter. Searchengines willonlycrawl a portionof the data ona site if it is overrun withprogramming codes, large graphics andother technologicalinstances that wouldslowdown as website load time. Do domainextensions (toplevel domains like .com, co.uk)matter?Yes theydo. Especiallywhenit comesto country-baseddomains like .fr, .de or .es – for local results in respective countriesyou shoulduse preferablya countrydomainto get a small advantage. Do nofollowlinks count?Yes, searchengines don’t discount nofollow links completelybut it decreases the credibilityof the linkandtherefore it’s link“juice”. Do you offer PageRankoptimization, searchengine submission, meta tagoptimization?These things are secondary or negligible. In the worldof SEO, content andlinking reignsupreme. Is blogcommenting for SEO spam?Like inmanyother cases, it depends on how it is used. Your name should be relevant and comment value needs to be added. I have a questionor answer that is not onthis FAQ what canI do? There is a comment section! Addyour questions and/or answers there. They might get addedto the actual FAQ. Ifyou wouldlike to keepyour question private or wouldlike to hire me as your SEO consultant, feelfree to contact me for free SEO quote. What does SEO stand for? The acronym stands for SearchEngine Optimization. Inother words, ifyou want your website to be “o ptimized” for great search engine rankings, you want to take advantage of SEO! What is SEO? SEO is the combinationof necessarysteps that result inimproved (higher) rankings in the searchengines’ organic (non -paid)listings. SEO includestechnical tasks to make it easier for search engine spiders to index the content on a website or social media n etworking community. Is SEO spam, junk, dead, etc.? Virtuallyeverylarge companyengagesandinvests in their own SEO campaigns. Theypractice SEO like most other website owners. Bythe numbers, SEO is booming all the time andhas beenfor severalyears now. Whyaren’t we #1 or on page 1 at Google? AnySEO companythat promises youthe #1 spot on searchengines is trying to sell yo u snake oil. There are no guarantees as far as search enginesare concerned. However, here are some questions to consider:Does your site consists mainlyof Flash, AJAX or is it simplygraphics?Are other websites linking backto yours?Does your website have anykind ofsocialmediapresence?These are some
- 21. of the things woulddefinitelyhurt your ranking abilities, but the list ofoffensesis actuallymuchlonger andrequires the attentionof a serious SEO campaign. Whyam I on #1 all the time but when mywife searchesfor me she doesn’t findme?Youprobablyneedto disable personalizedsearch – http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=54048. Search engines like to cache (or keep) your personal preferences and personalizedsearch queries. If you search and click onyour website often, the personalized searchwill bring that website to the topof the stack. Therefore, cleanyour cache andturn off personalized searchoptions to see the real ranking. When will we see results?It will take a while depending onwhat results you expect what for. Some keywords might eventake a year or more while others mayworkafter weeks or months. Also, keepinmind that SEO is basicallya continuous process that never stops and, after time, should pay for itself withthe number of new customers it brings you. Can we rankfor everything (huge list of keywords)? Unless you have a nearlylimitless budget, we recommend that you choose and set your preferences. You needto determine your main keywords, a few of them, andgo after them. Your mainkeywords wouldbe the most relevant, popular, andprofitable ones. How much doesSEO cost? Our SEO plans are primarilydetermined byyour geographicaltarget. If you are competingon a nationwide scale, your SEO campaignwill be more involved and aggressive thanifit were onlycompeting ona local / citywide scale. Our plans are simplycategorizedas: Local ($250 monthly), Regional ($500 monthly), andNational ($750 monthly). Whyis SEO expensive? Think about it another way:SEO isn’t about costing youmoney, rather, SEO is about making you money. Anythingthat is effectivelygoing to bring you more exposure andbetter online rankings is goingto require a lot of time andresources. That said, when you compare our plans with our competitors, you quicklylearnthat we are not expensive. While our competitors often charge thousands ofdollars per month, our plans beginat only$250! How longdoes it take to get indexed byGoogle? There is nohard and fast rule to this question. The time it takes varies. Each search engine indexes different websites at different times. It could take minutes or weeks dependingon your site. Without SEO it might even take forever. How to submit mynewsite to Google/Bing/Yahoo etc.?These days, websitesaren’t submitteddirectlyto search engines. We link to themfrom alreadyindexed sites, pingthem via blogposts, andsubmit XML sitemaps. These activities result inyour site being indexed inthe searchengines naturally. How do I submit to 1000 search engines? There is absolutelyno needto submit to that maywebsites. The top3 search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo)usuallyfeed all the smaller websites their findings. Submit to the big 3 searchenginesand the smaller ones will findthem. Do I need an XML sitemap?Thisis a debatedtopic. Dependingon your site you mayor maynot need one; however, we generallyrecommendit. Do I need meta tags for SEO? Yes. Although some meta tags are nolonger being used for searchengine placement andindexing(suchas meta keyword tags), the Title andDescriptionmeta tag informationis often displayed inthe search results andcanincrease the chances that someone will click the link to your website. Other meta tag informationgives data to the searchengines to helpdecide if your site is safe andwhenthey should returnto index again. Do I need a highPageRankfor SEO? Youneedinternal Pagerankfor your site to get indexed. Toolbar PageRank (the greenbar in your Google toolbar) is not a prerequisite. There are thousands ofwebsites that have great PageRank withabsolutelynoreturnoninvestment (ROI) andvise- versa. What is linkbait?There are at least two commondefinitions oflinkbait (or link bait). One negative and one positive. The negative one says that it’s luring people to linkto you for a reason theynormallywouldn’t. The positive one explains that linkbait is a highlylinkable masterfullycraftedpeace of content people not onlylike but that theyalso recommend to others bylinking. Can’t mynephew, whois a graphic designer, do the SEO?SEO is anart anda science. There are a number of people that a re well versedinmany areas of website designand development but those who are successful inSEO have anextreme passionfor it. In most cases, designers underestimate the importance of SEO and misunderstand it. Can’t myfriend, whois a webdeveloper, do mySEO? Manyprofessional schools don’t trainweb developers about SEO andits place inweb programming. A goodwebdeveloper can onlyprovide about one thirdof the skills required for successful SEO. WhyshouldI outsource mySEO? SEO is a full-time job. Unless you have at least one experiencedfull-time SEO in-house it is stronglyadvisedto seekassistance from a SEO company. Can’t I just use WordPressand some SEO-related plugins for better rankings? That wouldbe a start, but even knowing for sure how to properlyset- up WordPress as well as whichSEO plugins workthe best, without conflictingwith one another, is an involved matter. Evenif this were to take care of your on-site SEO needs, you wouldstill needoff-site SEO (suchas gaining links to your site from other websites). For on-site SEO purposes, we highlyrecommendour own SitePressor website designtechnologyandservice!
- 22. Does Google hate SEO? Not at all. Google evenoffers SEO advice anda plethora of SEO tools. It’s a myth that Google fights SEO’s. In fact, Google employees andSEO practitioners speakat the same conferences and work together as business partners. Is buyinglinks, hidden text, IPdeliveryetc. black hat SEO?Some of these techniques canbe usedethically, but onlythe context candetermine when a particular measure is “black” or “white hat”. (“Blackhat” is a term usedto refer to unethical SEO tactics, while “wh ite hat” is a term usedto refer to honest andethical SEO tactics.) Do nofollowlinks count?It has longbeen knownthat Yahoo doesn’t discount nofollowlinks completely. It alsoseems that Google makes exceptions as well. Do you offer PageRankoptimization, searchengine submission, meta tagoptimization?These things are secondaryor negligible. In the worldof SEO, content andlinking are what matter. QuestionandAnswers: What does SEO stand for? The acronym stands for SearchEngine Optimization. Inother words, ifyou want your website to be “o ptimized” for great search engine rankings, you want to take advantage of SEO! What is SEO? SEO is the combinationof necessarysteps that result inimproved (higher) rankings in the searchengines’ organic (non-paid)listings. SEO includestechnical tasks to make it easier for search engine spiders to index the content on a website or social media networking community. Is SEO spam, junk, dead, etc.? Virtuallyeverylarge companyengagesandinvests in their own SEO campaigns. Theypractice SEO like most other website owners. Bythe numbers, SEO is booming all the time andhas beenfor severalyears now. Whyaren’t we #1 or on page 1 at Google? AnySEO companythat promises youthe #1 spot on searchengines is trying to sell yo u snake oil. There are no guarantees as far as search enginesare concerned. However, here are some questions to consider:Does your site consists mainlyof Flash, AJAX or is it simplygraphics?Are other websites linking backto yours?Does your website have anykind ofsocialmediapresence?These are some of the things woulddefinitelyhurt your ranking abilities, but the list ofoffensesis actuallymuchlonger andrequires the attentionof a serious SEO campaign. Whyam I on #1 all the time but when mywife searchesfor me she doesn’t findme?Youprobablyneedto disable personalizedsearch – http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=54048. Search engines like to cache (or keep) your personal preferences and personalizedsearch queries. If you search and click onyour website often, the personalized searchwill bring th at website to the topof the stack. Therefore, cleanyour cache andturn off personalized searchoptions to see the real ranking. When will we see results?It will take a while depending onwhat results you expect what for. Some keywords might eventake a year or more while others mayworkafter weeks or months. Also, keepinmind that SEO is basicallya continuous process that never stops and, after time, shouldpay for itself withthe number of new customers it brings you. Can we rankfor everything (huge list of keywords)? Unless you have a nearlylimitless budget, we recommend that you choose and set your preferences. You needto determine your main keywords, a few of them, andgo after them. Your mainkeywords wouldbe the most relevant, popular, and profitable ones. How much doesSEO cost? Our SEO plans are primarilydetermined byyour geographicaltarget. If you are competingon a nationw ide scale, your SEO campaignwill be more involved and aggressive thanifit were onlycompeting ona local / citywide scale. Our plans are simplycategorizedas: Local ($250 monthly), Regional ($500 monthly), andNational ($750 monthly). Whyis SEO expensive? Think about it another way:SEO isn’t about costing youmoney, rather, SEO is about making you money. Anythingthat is effectivelygoing to bring you more exposure andbetter online rankings is goingto require a lot of time andresources. That said, when you compare our plans with our competitors, you quicklylearnthat we are not expensive. While our competitors often charge thousands ofdollars per month, our plans beginat only$250! How longdoes it take to get indexed byGoogle? There is nohard and fast rule to this question. The time it takes varies. Each search engine indexes different websites at different times. It could take minutes or weeks dependingon your site. Without SEO it might even take forever. How to submit mynewsite to Google/Bing/Yahoo etc.?These days, websitesaren’t submitteddirectlyto search engines. We link to themfrom alreadyindexed sites, pingthem via blogposts, andsubmit XML sitemaps. These activities result inyour site being indexed inthe s earchengines naturally. How do I submit to 1000 search engines? There is absolutelyno needto submit to that maywebsites. The top3 search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo)usuallyfeed all the smaller websites their findings. Submit to the big 3 searchenginesand the smaller ones will findthem. Do I need an XML sitemap?Thisis a debatedtopic. Dependingon your site you mayor maynot need one; however, we generallyrecommendit. Do I need meta tags for SEO? Yes. Although some meta tags are nolonger being used for searchengine placement andindexing(suchas meta keyword tags), the Title andDescriptionmeta tag information is often displayed inthe search results andcanincrease the chances that someone
- 23. will click the link to your website. Other meta tag informationgives data to the searchengines to helpdecide if your site is safe andwhenthey should returnto index again. Do I need a highPageRankfor SEO? Youneedinternal Pagerankfor your site to get indexed. Toolbar PageRank (the greenbar in your Google toolbar) is not a prerequisite. There are thousands ofwebsites that have great PageRank withabsolutelynoreturnoninvestment (ROI) andvise- versa. What is linkbait?There are at least two commondefinitions oflinkbait (or link bait). One negative and one positive. The negative one says that it’s luring people to linkto you for a reason theynormallywouldn’t. The positive one explains that linkbait is a highlylinkable masterfullycraftedpeace of content people not onlylike but that theyalso recommend to others bylinking. Can’t mynephew, whois a graphic designer, do the SEO?SEO is anart anda science. There are a number of people that are well versedinmany areas of website designand development but those who are successful inSEO have anextreme passionfor it. In most cases, designers underestimate the importance of SEO and misunderstand it. Can’t myfriend, whois a webdeveloper, do mySEO? Manyprofessional schools don’t trainweb developers about SEO andits place inweb programming. A goodwebdeveloper can onlyprovide about one thirdof the skills required for successful SEO. WhyshouldI outsource mySEO? SEO is a full-time job. Unless you have at least one experiencedfull-time SEO in-house it is stronglyadvisedto seekassistance from a SEO company. Can’t I just use WordPressand some SEO-related plugins for better rankings? That would be a start, but even knowing for sure how to properlyset- up WordPress as well as whichSEO plugins workthe best, without conflictingwith one another, is an involved matter. Evenif this were to take care of your on-site SEO needs, you wouldstill need off-site SEO (suchas gaining links to your site from other websites). For on-site SEO purposes, we highlyrecommendour own SitePressor website designtechnologyandservice! Does Google hate SEO? Not at all. Google evenoffers SEO advice anda plethora of SEO tools. It’s a myth that Google fights SEO’s. In fact, Google employees andSEO practitioners speakat the same conferences and work together as business partners. Is buyinglinks, hidden text, IPdeliveryetc. black hat SEO?Some of these techniques canbe usedethically, but onlythe context candetermine when a particular measure is “black” or “white hat”. (“Blackhat” is a term usedto refer to unethical SEO tactics, while “wh ite hat” is a term usedto refer to honest andethical SEO tactics.) Do nofollowlinks count?It has longbeen knownthat Yahoo doesn’t discount nofollowlinks completely. It alsoseems that Google makes exceptions as well. Do you offer PageRankoptimization, searchengine submission, meta tagoptimization?These things are secondaryor negligible. In the worldof SEO, content andlinking are what matter. 1) HOW DOES SOCIAL MEDIA AFFECT SEO? This is becomingone of the most commonquestions around, andopinions varyquite widely. Althoughsocial media marketinghas beenseeninthe past as a separate entityto search engine optimisation, it is becomingcloselyassociatedwithSEO with the twopractices mu tuallybeneficialto each other. Social media indirectlycontributes to SEO through generating an audience to share content with and who mayeventuallycreate links to your website for you. However, it is becomingapparent that social media alsohassome direct contributionto a website’s search engine ranking. Ma tt Cutts hasgiven us mixed ideas of just howdirectlysocial media affects search engine rankings, and more detail canbe foundat the Nebstone blog. Inshort, both socialmediapopularityandsocialmedia links have some impact ona website’s searchengine ranking, meaning social media re allyis becomingan essential part of SEO and is likelyto playa larger role inthe future. 2) DOES ARTICLE MARKETING STILL CONTRIBUTE TO SEO? This questionis perhaps debatable. Good quality, unique content submitted to qualityarticle sites is probablystill effective. However, it maybe a mistake to fill it with keywordedbacklinks to your website, because this might be flaggedas SEO spamand the potential cred ibilityof the article’s backlinks maybe shot down. Havingsaid this, it is worth noting that Matt Cutts is not a bigfan ofarticle marketing andsuggests leaning awayfrom this (although he doesn’t sayit’s ineffective). 3) HOW DO I INCREASE MY PAGERANK? A lot of people still thinkPageRankis animportant part of attaining highpositions in the SERPs. Thismayhave beentrue 10 years ago but nowadays, there is reallyverylittle correlationbetweenPageRankandsearchengine rankings. Therefore, the answer to this questionis just you don’t needto worrytoo muchabout it. PageRankreallyonlytellsGoogle how frequentlyto crawl that website, soifyou have a low PageRank Google maycrawl your website less oftenyes, but don’t worryabout your searchengine rankings, a webpage withPageRank1 ca n easilyoutrank a webpage witha higher PageRank of6. 4) HOW IMPORTANT IS DOMAIN NAME FOR SEO?
- 24. A lot of people askwhat theyshould use as their domainname and how important it is. Domainname canhelpwith SEO yes, but in future, Google mayput less weight onthis, withnumerous complaints that Google has weighteddomain names tooheavilyinthe past. Don’t get tooworried about domainname though, it’s bynomeans necessaryto have a keywordeddomainname. Inmanycases it maybe muchbetter to have a brandeddomainname, showing customers whoyou are and creating a more personalisedfeel to your website. Insomanycases, websiteswith brandeddomainnames are at the topof the search results, because brand matters, and there are somanyother effective ways to optimise your website for SEO. One more thing to mentionis not to get over cautious about negative SEO and the idea of beingpenalisedbyGoogle. Google is simplytryingto present customers withwhat theyare lookingfor, andare not tryingto look for reasons to penalise everyone! There isn’t oftena black andwhite answer whenit comesto SEO, andeverysooftenyou just have to make a judgement callon whether something is going to be goodor badfor your specific website. .Whyare you leavingyour current job? Sample answers to the interview question"Whydidyou leave your job? I found myselfboredwith the work andlookingfor more challenges. I am an excellent employee andI didn't want myunhappiness to have any impact on the jobI was doing for myemployer. There isn't room for growthwith mycurrent employer and I'mreadyto move onto a newchallenge. I'm looking for a bigger challenge and to grow mycareer and I couldn't jobhunt part time while working. It didn't seem ethical to use myformer employer's time. I was laid-offfrom mylast position when our department was eliminateddue to corporate restructuring. I'm relocating to thisarea due to familycircumstances andleft myprevious positionin order to make the move. I've decidedthat is not the directionI want to go inmycareer and mycurrent employer has noopportunitiesinthe directionI'dlike to head. After severalyears in mylast position, I'm looking for an companywhere I cancontribute and grow in a team-orientedenvironment. I am interestedin a new challenge andanopportunityto use mytechnical skills andexperience ina different capacitythanI have inthe past. I recentlyreceivedmydegree andI want to utilize myeducationalbackgroundin mynext position. I am interestedin a jobwithmore responsibility, and I am veryreadyfor a new challenge. I left mylast positioninorder to spendmore time withmyfamily. Circumstances have changedandI'mmore thanreadyfor fu ll-time employment again. I am seeking a positionwith a stable companywithroomfor growthandopportunity for advancement. I was commuting to the cityandspendinga significant amount of time each dayontravel. I wouldprefer to be closer to home. To be honest, I wasn't considering a move, but, I sawthis jobposting andwas intrigued bythe positionandth e company. It sounds like an exciting opportunityandanidealmatch withmyqualifications. This positionseemedlike anexcellent match for myskills andexperience and I am not able to fullyutilize them in mypresent job. The companywas cuttingback and, unfortunately, myjob was one ofthoseeliminated. Q:What appearedto be the latest update whichGoogle hadandexactlywhat changes would you suggest regarding it? A:Google latelypossessed the Penguinupdate that hasbeen a measure to control web spam. Penguinupdate had penalizedweb sites which usuallyhada spammybacklinking profile and returned more semantic results. Semantic results were being determinedbythe relationship betweenwords present onthe searchquery. Penguintrusted sitesthat hadoriginal and goodcontent, freshcontent, goodsocialmedia presence in additionto excellent organic links. Q:Under what circumstances wouldyou lookto exclude webpages fromsearch enginesusing robots. txt vs meta robots tag? A. UsuallyI woulduse the robots. txt to keep a search engine from indexing an entire directoryon a site. This wouldoftenbe directories dealing with adminfunctions or directorieswhichonlycontainscript or image libraries. Q:What are the other methods to restrict a webpage from the search index? A:we can use noindex meta tagfor the page whichwe dont want to be indexedingoogle searchsothat google will crawl andleave the site without indexing. Q:What exactlydoyou understandfromthe Panda update? A:The Panda update wasdone to improve the qualityof search results inGoogle. Panda update alsoknown as the farmer update appeared tobe done to eliminate content farms which providedless user friendlyexperience. It usedmachine language scalabilityas one of the important metrics for judging relevancyof a webpage. All the focus wastransformedonthe user andnowqualitycontent, proper design, proper speed, suitable use of images andvideos, content to adrationall mattered more after the Panda update. Youshould optimise your site for better clickthroughrate and a a reducedamount of bounce rate. Q:What areas doyou think are currentlythe most important in organicallyranking a website? A:Text on page! Searchengines utilize text and onlytext inproviding search results. That textualcontent canbe found inmanyplace includingthe URL and title ofyour respective pagesas wellas the visible text you place on your webpages. Q:Whyis a Robots. txt File Used? A: Robts. txt File is used to prevent the indexing ofduplicate content ona website or for implementing a no follow rule in anareaof a website. Martijn Koster inventedthis file inthe earlypart of the 90s - the file used more andmore with the development well-knownsearch engines as time
- 25. progressed.Therefore, if a webmaster or anowner of a website wants to direct the webrobots, he must establishthe Robots. txt file andprovide exact guidelinesfor robots to read before accessing other files onthe site. If the fileis not used, the web robots will certainlysimplyconclude that no explicit instructions are available for the site. Also, If the website hasseveral subdomain, thena Robots. txt. file must be usedfor each ofthe subdomains. Q:What is Google Sandbox? A:Google Sandbox is animaginaryarea where new andless authoritative web sitesare kept for a specifiedtime period till th eyestablish themselves of being viewable onthe searchresults. It occurs bymakingtoo manylinks within a short periodof time. Q:What do you think ofusing XML sitemaps? A:Theyare anadditional tool to support the search engines everytime theycrawl a site. There is no requirement for anysitemap andyour webpageswill get indexed without themifyou seriously consider navigationwithin your site. Q:What is CloakingSEO? A:Cloaking is a methodusedbyexperts whopractice black hat SEO to fool the searchengines. In other words, the search engines tendto be shown one kindof versionof a website while the users visitingthe site usuallydonot see similar page. This type ofpractice appearedto be more prevalent around ten years ago when Google’s filters were not as adept at catching the offenders. Typically, cloakingwas usedwhen a website page wasnot ranking all that high. Therefore, another page wasdevelopedfor the bots to be able to crawl. Fortunately, anyone whowants to practice cloaking nowadays willmost likelyget caught, which reallywouldnot be significant, considering that almost all webpages cancertainly obtaina ranking evenwhenless popular keywords are used. Q:What is backlink ? A:Backlinkis simplyanother live link onthe Internet which directs back to the site that is beingpromoted. The ultimate objective of anseo campaignis usually to set upnumerous backlinks, therefore creatinganincrease innotorietyandpresence for the website. Backlinkproduction takes time as well as a hands onapproach to accomplishcorrectly. These backlinks shouldbe produced bywriting press releases, ezine articles, blog posting andforum posting. Q: What do you thinkof PageRank? A: In relationto SEO projects, it is relativelytrival but cangive an indicationof how much work needs to be done ingaining inboundlinks. Q:How Does a Search Engine Work? A:A search engine allows the user to search for specific answers, news, or details bywayof the World Wide Web. Results are calledSERPs - an acronym withregard to search engine results webpages. The infoyou obtaintypicallyis made upof webpagesor images. Updatedinformationis actuallymined bysearch engines as well fromsuch places as directories anddatabases. Real time computing is utilized, whichprovides reliable timelyinformationvia an algorithm runningon a web crawler. Data canalso be attainedbyusing metasearchengines whichoftensendout requests for information to severaldatabasesor searchengines. Q:Exactlyhow Keywords are Choose for Optimization? A:The Successregarding Deciding onKeywords shouldbe to pickthe Keywords that are Popular, related to your content andeffective. Avoidthe exercise of overusing or over stuffing your keywords. Stick to densityof 3-4% for everywebpage on your topkeywords for the best effect. Q:What is 404,301,302 redirect mean? A:404 redirect-It is a server error code which is returned bythe server whena particular webpage or the file is missingfrom the web-host server. 301 redirect -It is a SEO friendlyversionof permanent redirect for the webpages or the domains. 302 redirect -It is a temporaryredirect Q:What is the variance betweenonpage seoand off page seo? A: On page seomeans optimizingyour web blog and making improvements ontitle, meta tags, site structure, site content, solvingcanonicalization problem, managing robots. txt etc. Off page optimizationimpliesoptimizingyour webpresence whichinvolves backlink building and social media promotion. Q:Whymight you needto use Nofollow onaninternal link? A: Manysiteshave shopping carts and member loginor logout links. This type of link is simplyanadministrative function and does nothing to contribute to site's niche. The search engine doesnot needto index those pages. Q:Under what circumstancescanyou look to exclude pages from searchengines employingrobots. txt vs meta robots tag? A:UsuallyI wouldutilize the robots. txt to keepa search engine from indexing a whole directoryon a site. This wouldoften be directories dealing with adminfunctions or directoriesthat onlycontainscript or image libraries. Q:If the companywhose website you've beenworkingfor has decidedto move all of its content material to a newwebsite, what steps wouldyou take? A:I wouldupdate the old website withpermanent redirects to to new page for everypage. ThenI wouldmake an attempt to get ridof oldcontent material fromthe major searchengines to avoidduplicate content issues.
- 26. Q:What is E-Mail Marketing? A:Email Marketing is a component ofInternet marketinginwhich we make a direct mail marketing campaignfor the advertisingof a productor any service provide. It is muchbetter waydue to the fact we cansellour product andservices easilyto a personwhere ever he might be in this world. Also, direct mailcampaignor E-mail campaigncanbe easilytrackable. Q:Could you brieflyclarifythe PageRank algorithm? A: Google uses the gross amount of inboundlinks to a webpage to determine howsignificant the webpage is. This"pagerank" haslittle to dowith actual searchresults but canreallymake a difference onuser behavior. Q:What SEO tools doyou generallyuse? A: Keyword analysis tools, keyword densitytools, index checking, backlink checking, wordprocessor to checkspellingandgra mmar, HTML validationandothers. Q:What is your favorite aspect of SEO? A:If you answer the jobinterviewer that Linkbuilding is your preferred part inSEO, the interviewer wouldhave made up75% of his / h er mind to recruit you. But the certaintyis for most people it isn’t, as LinkBuildingbelongs to the most difficult aspect of SEO. For most SEO’s whoare alsogood Content Writers, Writing Unique Content wouldbe their favorite part.For other people it wouldbe one or more of the following: 1)On-Page Optimization 2)Off-Page Optimization 3)Keyword Research 4)Forums Posting 5)Article Writing 6)Blog Posting 7)ClassifiedPosting 8)Link Exchange 9)Social Bookmarking 10)Blog Commenting 11)Press Release (PR) Submission What ever endup beingyour ownfavorite aspect, it is the feeling of accomplishment andalsothe moneywhichexplains whyan SEO does what he does most effective. Q:What areas doyou believe are currentlythe keyinorganicallyranking? A: Text on page. Searchengines utilize text and onlytextual content inprovidingsearch results. That text is found inmanyplace including the URL and title ofyour pagesas wellas the visible text you place on your webpages. Q: How do you evaluate whether or not an SEO campaign is working? A. The mainindicator is to performwhenyou search onall major searchengines using the keywords/keyphrases I am optimizing for. An analysis of those results will helpto determine ifoptimization has gained inthe results or lost ground. This analysis shouldbe done o ver time as eachsearch engine will update andindex on a varyingschedule. Another aspect shouldbe to use website statistics to determine where traffic is originating. Q:What role Article SubmissionServices playinranking ofyour website? A:Writing QualityArticle andSubmit it to different Article Submission Siteshelpyou to buildqualitylinks for your website which often help in improve ranking ofyour website on searchengines. Q:What makesa goodinternet marketing website? A:A good marketing site contains elements that needto be reckonedwithare: a. Title b. MetatagDescription c. Keywords d. Ad Content When you arrange these simple elements properly, then, and onlythen, are you readyto beginthe quest for a top position. Q:The Difference BetweenSEMand SEO? A: SEO is Search Engine Optimizationand is the process youutilize inimprovingsearch engine ranking final results onyour pages for relevant, targetedkeyword phrases to be able to attainhigher organic listings. SEMis SearchEngine Marketing andinvolves purchasingadvertising space on searchengine result webpages like Sponsoredlistings. Example: SEMvia PaidInclusionintoa search engine/directory, Traditional Ads on SERP’s andvia Pay-Per-Click(PPC) Advertising (Google Adwords, Yahoo Ad Campaign etc). Both tendto be linkedin a waythat both work towards increasing traffic to your site. Nevertheless, SEO must be your ownfirst stepin promotingyour site as GoodSEO wouldavoidyou to spend extra cashonadvertising andpaid placement. Q:What is PPC A:PPC methodof Online Advertisement where you payper clickwhenvisitor type your addisplayedon searchengine Q:What is a landingpage?
- 27. A:A landing page is a page inthe website which is designedto attract the visitors to contact/subscribe/buya service or the product byreadingfew linesof important informationabout that particular service or the product on that webpage. Q:How will you solve canonicalizationissue or what is. htacess file? A:.htacess file is requiredto solve the canonicalizationissue of a webpage. It mayhappenthe fact that home page ofthe website mayperhaps take several urlslike http://www. example. comor http://www. example. com/index. html or http://example. com. The search engines could treat these kinds of url as different andmaydivide the linkjuice gainedbyhaving various backlinks made with anyof these 3 urls. The link juice gets dividedamongthese three urls equally..htacessfile is createdto have a single url of the home page so that the linkjuice is actuallypassed onto single url. Q:Explainvarious steps that you wouldtake to optimize a website? A:Interviewwebsite owner or webmaster to get a good graspof the site's purpose andgoals. 2. Perform a keywordanalysisto findbest performingkeywords that shouldbe usedfor that website andfor individual pagesof the web page 3. Analyze site content to determine usage ofrelevant keywords andphrases. This includes visible text as wellat titles, META tags, and"alt" attributes. 4. Examine site navigation 5. Determine the existence ofrobots. txt andsitemapandexamine those for effectiveness. 6. Make suggestions for changesneededfor the site andeachindividual page. Q:What is Black Hat searchengine optimizationtechniques? A:Black hat SEO, as opposed to white hat SEO, makes use of dissembling inorder to make money. While white hat SEO is directedtowardfollowing guidelinesthat are honest, blackhat SEO concentrates ongetting aroundthe guidelines establishedbyGoogle byspamming or manipulatingthe results. Blackhat SEO makesuse of severalpractices which might be indirect infringement ofthe methods advocatedbythe searchengines for increasinga page’s ranking. For example, one ofthese practicesincludeskeywordstuffing, which now is oftencaught byGoogle and will quickly cause a site to lose its status inthe SERPs. Spammytext is hiddenusingblackhat SEO too. Black hatters onlyinsert all the keywords at the endof a page without making use ofthem inthe content material. Words are invisible at the bottombysimplyblendingthem intobackground. Usingautomatedsoftware for linkinginsteadof creating organic links is yet another practice employedbythose who practice black hat tactics. SEO Interview Questions Part 10 Q:What factor does social media playin an SEO strategy? A. Social media suchas socialnetworking sitesand news websitescanprovide for viral marketing. Viral marketinghas prove nto be powerful if the content of a web-site is appealing. Q:What is the conditions for removing a webpage from Google search index? A:It should returna 404 not found error or it needs to return 301 permanentlyredirected. Q:What are the most crucial features of SEO? A:The Most Important Elements of SEO are Keywords Analysis, Competitors Analysis, Content Quality, BackLinks Strategy, andWebAnalytics Study. Q:.CO vs. Com SEO? A:For both the domains It depends onincoming links andthe wayyou optimize the sitetimize the site. However. COMis highly reliable and. co is actuallyless popular (which doesn’t necessarilymean it will doworse insearchengine ranking results but its unlikelyto do better). It appears that. COM is the most preferable Domain Extensionkeeping SEO inmind. Q:What do you think about website buying? A:I discourage the practice for the most part. There are simpler ways of paidinternet marketing. One exception would be buyinglistings inhighly reputable directories for example Yahoodirectory. Q:What is Phrase BasedandRetrieval Indexingandits role indecidingsearch engine results? A:In regards to search results, it is a methodthat search enginessuchas google utilize to determine relevance of a web page basedonphrases acutallyusedin a document. For example, if you have a webpage educatingpeople onwildlife photography, the search engine wouldcertainly reasonablyexpect to see terms andphrases suchas "selecting a camera", "approaching wildlife", and "low light photoconditions". Related phrases will addto the relevance of a webpage where unrelatedkeyphrases will reduce the relevance of a page. This is one technique that Google is using to weed out "spam" sites. Q:What do you know regarding the Florida update? A:Florida update happenedonNovember 2003. This specific update appliedstemming, maintainedlocal rank, penalizedover optimizedsitesby applyingfilter etc. Inshort, it modifiedthe serp's before presenting it to the customer byapplying filters. Q:What was caffeine update?
- 28. A:Caffeine update was rolled out byGoogle in June 2010 andthe mainpurpose of this update wasto include more freshresults inthe searchindex, at least 50%. Q:What do you suggest byterm Overseo? A:Carrying out over optimizationof website withina specific periodterm to be overseo. It is like that you are buildingtons of links for your website in short spanof time. Q:Some basic and speedymethods to increase the webpage speed. A:-1) Removing the unusedcode andscripts. 2) Replacinginternal andinline CSS withthe external CSS. 3)Using web server’s page compression methods. Using small size images or minimizing the no. of images. Top 10 Google Algorithm Updatesof All-Time #10. Google's Jagger Update - October 2005 - Google continuedto make a series of algorithm updates surrounding link farms, low qualitylinks, reciprocallinks andthe ever discussion-worthypaidlinks. The Jagger Update also lookedat some canonical issues andaccording to SEJ, the Jagger Update consistedof three elements:"The first wasto deal withmanipulative link-networkschemes, sitesgeneratedwithscraped content and other forms of SE-Spam. The secondwas to allow and account for the inclusiona greater number of spiderable documents andfile types. The third was to allow andaccount for newmethods of site acquisition beyondthe use of the spider Googlebot." #9. Google AustinUpdate - January2004 - in the aftermath ofthe Florida Update, Google's subsequent algorithm update "Austin"continuedto focus onspamtactics such as link farms, white onwhite/invisible text, andover optimizationof meta tags (keywordstuffing). Againa number of sites were impacted, but inthe end Google took a huge stepto cleaningup its index. #8. Google BrandyUpdate - February2004 - Ever notice how Google tends to have a lot of updatesinthe months of FebruaryandOctober? This particular update focused onLatent Semantic Indexing (LSI), increasedfocus onanchor text relevance andlinkneighborhoods. This update also placedless emphasis ontagoptimization. #7. Google Vince Update - February2009 - this update couldeasilyrank higher as I thinkthat thisupdate had a profound impact onwhat we now see inGoogle's search results. While Google downplayedthisas a minor update, manyothers didnot feel the same ways as bigbrands were seeingfavorable results. InOctober 2010 this became evenmore evident as brands continuedto see further preferentialtreatment. Where "pizza hut" previouslyhadtwo rankings for a brandedsearch, theynowownedthe SERPwith as manyas eight listings. AgainGoogle attemptedto downplaythe update suggesting that this was not a brandpush. Thishas hada dramatic impact ondirectory-type sitesthat previouslyenjoyed rankings for various brandedterms. #6. Google's Big DaddyUpdate - December 2005/January2006 - more of aninfrastructure update, Google's BigDaddymayhave beenone of the first major algorithm updates to look at duplicate content issues as a large part of thisupdate focusedonredirects (301/302's) and URL canonicalization. Google's Matt Cutts touchedon BigDaddyhere. #5. Google UniversalSearch Update - May2007 - this was a Google update that I reallylikedas it meant that we wouldbe experiencinga rich search results page withthings such as news, imagesandvideo populating Google's searchresults. Gone were the tenblue links (for now). Other engines followedandblendedsearch wasborn. DannySullivandubbedthis Google 2.0, but the results page wouldbegina seriesof changesthat wouldmake it a so-called richer experience. #4. Google MayDay- April / May2010 - this update focusedonlong-tail keyword traffic as manywebmaster noticeda dropintheir long-tail rankings andassociatedtraffic. This update would be the previewto what we wouldsee withthe Google Panda Update. There were a lot ofsites hit byMayDayandthere wascertainlya lot ofdiscussionabout the Google MayDayUpdate, but MayDaywas onlya sample of what was yet to come. MayDaybeganGoogle's quest for higher qualitysites to displayintheir search results. Google toldVanessa Fox that "that it was a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing change, whichseems to implythat sitesgettinglesstraffic still have their pages indexed, but some of those pages are nolonger rankingas highlyas before.." #3. Google Caffeine - June 2010 - what Google began testing in August 2009 became a live update inJune 2010. Caffeine was an infrastructure change that wouldallow Google to crawl the Webmore efficientlyresultingintheir index growingfrom billions of pages to billions possiblyeven trillions more. We are still experiencing the ramifications of Caffeine as Google continuesto cleanuptheir index. As SEOmozsuggests, "Caffeine not onlyboostedGoogle's raw speed, but integrated crawling and indexationmuchmore tightly, resulting in (accordingto Google)a 50% fresher index." Google called Caffeine a more robust foundation that wouldallowthem to provide a richer searchindex. Hmm wellperhaps richer and more spammedif you ask manyinthe industry. #2. Florida Update - November 2003 - this was a big one. I remember being askedmythoughts onthe Florida Update as I was startingmycareer at Enquiro. I remember thinking that this was goingto be huge, I just wasn't sure howmuchof an impact it wouldhave onthe Searchindustryand on how websiteswouldbe performing in the searchresults. This was a goodupdate as tactics suchas keywordstuffing were n olonger acceptable and as a result manysitesdropped off of the face of the searchlandscape. The Florida Update caused millions of pages andsites to be dropped from Google’s results. DannySullivanhada goodreview ofthe Florida Update onlyweeks after it occurred. Looking back it was anobvious effort to improve relevancyfor the sites that were being listed. Or was it? A number of commercial sites suffered. These are sites that you would expect
- 29. to see when doing generic "head-type"keywordsearches. In the endhowever, the Florida Update was necessaryfor the progress ofthe Google Search Engine. #1. Google Panda Update - February2011 - ongoing- We have written numerous times about the Google Panda Update. This one made the topof our list based onthe sheer volume of searchresults (andsites) that were impacted. Wheninitiallyreleased Google statedthat this update would impact nearly12% of Google's searchresults. Twelve per cent? Are you kidding me andthat was just the first phase of Panda. The Panda Update stems froma lot ofthe poor qualityresults that were showingup inGoogle reallyas a result ofGoogle's infrastructure update Caffeine. Google's index grew exponentiallyandas a result, I'm not sure if Google was prepared for all ofthe spamresults that would nowb e part of their index. With all ofthe low qualitycontent, syndicatedandduplicatedcontent out there, it was onlya matter of time before Google crackeddownonthe qualityof their search results. I was in Las VegasattendingPubCon in November 2010 listening to Matt Cutts touch onwebspam andthat Google will be tackingmeasures to deal with a renewedinterest in spam. Little over a monthlater the algorithm updates began... startingwiththe "Farmer Update" andthen leading into Panda. Google's searchresults willnever be the same again. The thing withPanda was the highnumber of "innocent"sitesthat were caught in the crossfire. There were a lot of complaints, infact people are still complaining of the devastationthat their sitesand businesses have sufferedas a result of Panda. Google PenguinUpdate Overview: The Google Penguin Update launchedonApril 24. Accordingto the Google blog, Penguin is an “important algorithm change targetedat webspam. The change willdecrease rankings for sites that we believe are violating Google’s existing qualityguidelines.” Googlementions that typical black hat SEO tactics like keyword stuffing (long considered webspam)wouldget a site introuble, but less obvious tactics (linki ncorporating irrelevant outgoinglinks intoa page of content) wouldalsocause Penguinto flag your site. Says Google, Sites affectedbythis change might not be easilyrecognizable as spammingwithout deep analysis or expertise, but the common threadis that these sites are doing much more thanwhite hat SEO;we believe theyare engaging in webspam tactics to manipulate search engine rankings. Site owners shouldbe sure to check their Google Webmaster accounts for anymessagesfrom Google warningabout your past spam activityanda potential penalty. Google says that Penguinhas impactedabout 3.1% of queries (compared to Panda 1.0’s 12%). If you sawmajo r traffic losses betweenApril 24th andApril 25th, chances are Penguin is the culprit, eventhoughPanda 3.5 came out aroundthe same time. Unfortunately, Google has yet to outline exactlywhat signals Penguin is picking upon, somanysite owners that were negativelyimpacted are in the dark as to where theywant wrongwith their onsite SEO. Manyin the SEO communityhave speculatedthat some contributing factors to Penguin might be things like: 1. Aggressive exact-matchanchor text 2. Overuse of exact-matchdomains 3. Low-qualityarticle marketing& blog spam 4. Keyword stuffing ininternal/outboundlinks It’s important to remember that Panda is analgorithmupdate, not a manual penalty. A reconsiderationrequest to Google won’t make mucha difference–you’llhave to repair your site and wait for a refresh before your site willrecover. As always donot panic if you are s eeinga downturn in traffic, in the past whenthere is a major Google update like this things often rebound. Ifyou dothink you have some sort of SEO penaltyas a result of either the Google Panda or Google Penguin updates, please contact your SEO service provider to helpor start trouble shooting. Google Panda Update Overview: According to Google’s official blog post whenPanda launched, This update is designedto reduce rankings for low-qualitysites—siteswhichare low-value addfor users, copycontent from other websites or sites that are just not veryuseful. At the same time, it willprovide better rankings for high-qualitysites—sites withoriginal content andinformation such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysisandsoon. Basically, Panda updates are designedto target pagesthat aren’t necessarilyspam but aren’t great quality. This wasthe first ever penaltythat went after “thin content,” and the sitesthat were hit hardest bythe first Panda update were content farms (hence whyit wasoriginallycalledthe Farmer update), where users couldpublishdozens of low-quality, keywordstuffed articles that offeredlittle to no real value for the reader. Many publishers wouldsubmit the same article to a bunchof these content farms just to get extra links. Panda is a site wide penalty, whichmeans that if“enough” (nospecific number) pagesof your site were flaggedfor having th incontent, your entire site couldbe penalized. Panda wasalso intendedto stopscrappers (sites that would republishother company’s content) from outrankingthe originalauthor’s content 1. Tell me about yourself: The most oftenaskedquestionin interviews. Youneedto have a short statement prepared in your mind. Be careful that it does not sound rehearsed. Limit it to work-relateditems
- 30. unless instructedotherwise. Talkabout things you have done and jobs youhave held that relate to the positionyou are interviewing for. Start withthe itemfarthest back andworkup to the present. 2. Whydid you leave your last job? Staypositive regardless ofthe circumstances. Never refer to a major problemwith management andnever speakillof supervisors, co-workers or the organization. If you do, you will be the one lookingbad. Keep smiling andtalk about leavingfor a positive reason such as anopportunity, a chance to dosomething special or other forward-looking reasons. 3. What experience doyou have inthis field? Speakabout specifics that relate to the position youare applying for. Ifyou do not have specific experience, get as close as you can. 4. Do you consider yourself successful? You shouldalways answer yes and brieflyexplainwhy. A goodexplanationis that you have set goals, and youhave met some andare ontrackto achieve the others. 5. What do co-workers sayabout you? Be preparedwith a quote or two from co-workers. Either a specific statement or a paraphrase will work. Jill Clark, a co-worker at Smith Company, always saidI was the hardest workers she hadever known. It is as powerful as Jill having saidit at the interview herself. 6. What do you knowabout this organization? This questionis one reasonto do some research onthe organizationbefore the interview. Find out where theyhave beenandwhere theyare going. What are the current issues and who are the major players? 7. What have you done to improve your knowledge inthe last year? Try to include improvement activities that relate to the job. A wide varietyof activitiescan be mentioned as positive self-improvement. Have some good ones handyto mention. 8. Are you applying for other jobs? Be honest but do not spenda lot oftime inthis area. Keepthe focus onthis jobandwhat you can do for this organization. Anything else is a distraction. 9. Whydo you want to work for thisorganization? This maytake some thought andcertainly, shouldbe basedon the researchyou have done on the organization. Sincerityis extremelyimportant here andwill easilybe sensed. Relate it to your long-term career goals. 10. Do you know anyone who works for us? Be aware of the policyon relatives working for the organization. This canaffect your answer even thoughtheyasked about friends not relatives. Be careful to mentiona friendonlyif theyare well thought of. 11. What kindof salarydo youneed? A loadedquestion. A nastylittle game that youwill probablylose if youanswer first. So, do not answer it. Instead, saysomething like, That's a tough question. Canyou tell me the range for thisposition? Inmost cases, the interviewer, takenoff guard, willtell you. If not, saythat it candependonthe detailsof the job. Thengive a wide range. 12. Are you a teamplayer? You are, of course, a team player. Be sure to have examples ready. Specifics that showyou often perform for the goodof the teamrather than for yourselfare goodevidence of your team attitude. Do not brag, just sayit ina matter-of-fact tone. Thisis a keypoint. 13. How long wouldyou expect to workfor us ifhired? Specifics here are not good. Something like this shouldwork:I'dlike it to be a long time. Or As longas we both feel I'm doing a goodjob. 14. Have you ever had to fire anyone?How did youfeelabout that? This is serious. Do not make light of it or inanywayseem like you like to fire people. At the same time, you willdo it whenit is the right thingto do. When it comes to the organization
- 31. versus the individualwhohas createda harmful situation, you will protect the organization. Remember firing is not the same as layoff or reductioninforce. 15. What is your philosophytowards work? The interviewer is not looking for a long or flowerydissertationhere. Do you have strong feelings that the jobgets done?Yes. That's the type of answer that works best here. Short and positive, showing a benefit to the organization. 16. If you hadenoughmoneyto retire right now, wouldyou? Answer yes if youwould. But since youneed to work, thisis the type of work you prefer. Do not sayyes ifyou donot meanit. 17. Have you ever beenasked to leave a position? If you have not, sayno. Ifyou have, be honest, briefandavoid saying negative things about the people or organizationinvolved. 18. Explainhow you would be anasset to this organization You shouldbe anxious for thisquestion. It gives you a chance to highlight your best points as theyrelate to the position beingdiscussed. Give a little advance thought to this relationship. 19. Whyshould we hire you? Point out how your assets meet what the organization needs. Donot mention anyother candidates to make a comparison. 50 Common InterviewQuestions andAnswers © JobsAssist.com (www.jobsassist.com ) andVyomWorld.com(www.vyomworld.com) – Free Student Resources 20. Tell me about a suggestion youhave made Have a goodone ready. Be sure and use a suggestion that was acceptedandwas then consideredsuccessful. One related to the type of work appliedfor is a real plus. 21. What irritates you about co-workers? This is a trapquestion. Thinkrealhard but fail to come up withanythingthat irritatesyou. A short statement that you seem to get along withfolks is great. 22. What is your greatest strength? Numerous answers are good, just staypositive. A few goodexamples: Your abilityto prioritize, Your problem-solving skills, Your abilityto work under pressure, Your abilityto focus onprojects, Your professionalexpertise, Your leadershipskills, Your positive attitude . 23. Tell me about your dreamjob. Stayawayfroma specific job. Youcannot win. If yousaythe jobyou are contendingfor is it, you straincredibility. Ifyou sayanother job is it, you plant the suspicionthat you will be dissatisfiedwith thispositionif hired. The best is to staygenetic andsaysomething like: A job where I love the work, like the people, can contribute andcan't wait to get to work. 24. Whydo you thinkyou woulddowell at this job? Give several reasons andinclude skills, experience andinterest. 25. What are you lookingfor ina job? See answer # 23 26. What kindof personwouldyou refuse to work with? Do not be trivial. It wouldtake disloyaltyto the organization, violence or lawbreaking to get you to object. Minor objections will label you as a whiner. 27. What is more important to you:the moneyor the work? Moneyis always important, but the work is the most important. There is nobetter answer. 28. What would your previous supervisor sayyour strongest point is? There are numerous good possibilities: Loyalty, Energy, Positive attitude, Leadership, Team player, Expertise, Initiative, Patience, Hard work, Creativity, Problemsolver
- 32. 29. Tell me about a problem youhadwitha supervisor Biggest trapof all. Thisis a test to see if you willspeakill of your boss. If you fallfor it and tell about a problem witha former boss, you may well below the interviewright there. Stay positive anddevelopa poor memoryabout anytrouble witha supervisor. 30. What has disappointed youabout a job? Don't get trivialor negative. Safe areas are fewbut can include: Not enough ofa challenge. Youwere laidoffina reduction Companydid not wina contract, which wouldhave givenyou more responsibility. 31. Tell me about your abilityto work under pressure. 50 Common InterviewQuestions andAnswers © JobsAssist.com (www.jobsassist.com ) andVyomWorld.com(www.vyomworld.com) – Free Student Resources You maysaythat you thrive under certaintypes of pressure. Give anexample that relates to the type of position applied for. 32. Do your skillsmatch thisjob or another job more closely? Probablythis one. Do not give fuel to the suspicionthat youmaywant another jobmore than this one. 33. What motivates you to doyour best onthe job? This is a personaltrait that onlyyou can say, but goodexamples are: Challenge, Achievement, Recognition 34. Are you willing to workovertime? Nights?Weekends? This is upto you. Be totallyhonest. 35. How wouldyou knowyou were successful onthis job? Several ways are good measures: You set high standards for yourselfandmeet them. Your outcomes are a success.Your boss tell youthat you are successful 36. Wouldyou be willingto relocate ifrequired? You shouldbe clear on thiswith your familyprior to the interviewif youthinkthere is a chance it maycome up. Do not sayyes just to get the jobif the real answer is no. This can create a lot of problems later on inyour career. Be honest at this point andsave yourself future grief. 37. Are you willing to put the interests of the organizationaheadof your own? This is a straight loyaltyand dedicationquestion. Do not worryabout the deepethical and philosophicalimplications. Just sayyes. 38. Describe your management style. Try to avoid labels. Some of the more commonlabels, like progressive, salesmanor consensus, canhave several meanings or descriptions depending onwhich management expert you listen to. The situational style is safe, because it says you willmanage according to the situation, instead ofone size fits all. 39. What have you learned from mistakes onthe job? Here you have to come up withsomethingor you straincredibility. Make it small, well intentionedmistake witha positive lessonlearned. An example would be working toofar aheadof colleagues ona project andthus throwing coordinationoff. 40. Do you have anyblindspots? Trick question. Ifyou knowabout blindspots, theyare nolonger blindspots. Donot reveal anypersonal areas ofconcernhere. Let them dotheir owndiscoveryon your badpoints. Do not handit to them. 41. If you were hiringa personfor this job, what wouldyou look for? Be careful to mentiontraits that are neededandthat you have. 42. Do you thinkyou are overqualified for this position? Regardless ofyour qualifications, state that you are verywell qualifiedfor the position. 43. How do you propose to compensate for your lack ofexperience?
- 33. First, ifyou have experience that the interviewer doesnot knowabout, bring that up:Then, point out (if true) that youare a hard working quicklearner. 44. What qualities doyou lookfor ina boss? Be generic andpositive. Safe qualities are knowledgeable, a sense of humor, fair, loyal to subordinates and holder of high standards. All bosses think theyhave these traits. 45. Tell me about a time whenyou helpedresolve a dispute betweenothers. Pick a specific incident. Concentrate on your problem solvingtechnique andnot the dispute you settled. 46. What positiondoyou prefer ona team working ona project? Be honest. Ifyou are comfortable indifferent roles, point that out. 47. Describe your work ethic. Emphasize benefits to the organization. Things like, determinationto get the job done and work hard but enjoyyour work are good. 48. What has beenyour biggest professional disappointment? Be sure that you refer to something that was beyondyour control. Showacceptance andno negative feelings. 49. Tell me about the most funyou have hadon the job. Talk about havingfunbyaccomplishing something for the organization. 50. Do you have anyquestions for me? Always have some questions prepared. Questions preparedwhere you will be anasset to the organizationare good. How soonwill I be able to be productive?andWhat type of projects will I be able to assist on? are examples. The Best Answers to ToughInterviewQuestions Tell me about yourself. This is reallymore of a request than a question. But these few words canput you onthe spot in a wayno questioncan. Many quicklylose control of the interview duringthe most critical time-the first five minutes. This is not the time to go intoa lengthyhistoryor wander off in different directions. Your response shouldbe focused and purposeful. Communicate a pattern ofinterests, skills, and strengths that re late to the positionin question. Consider your response to this question as a commercial that sellsyour autobiography. Provide ananswer that includes, what you are gettinga degree in, your major, a fewhighlights from your resume suchas projects or classes that relate to the position yo uare interviewingfor, anywork experience, leadershipexperience, andfinallyinclude whyyou are interestedinthisparticular employer. One of the most effective wa ys to prepare for this question is to develop a 60-second(can extendto 2 minutes)biographic sketch that emphasizes a pattern of interests, skills, and accomplishments. Focus your response arounda commontheme related to your major interests and skills. Take, for example, the following response, whichemphasizes computers. Since I was a teenager, I enjoyed working withcomputers. It was myhobby, mypassion, andmywayof learning. Like most kids I enjoyed computer games. When myparents gave me a computer as a rewardfor making honor roll mysophomore year, I masteredDOS, Windows, andWordPerfect within six months. I thenwent on to teachmyself programming basics. Bythe time I graduatedfrom high school, I knew I wantedto study programming. From that point on, everything fell intoplace. Mylife revolvedaroundcomputing. Bymyjunior year at Syracuse, I decidedI wanted to work for a major software manufacturer. That is whyI hadan internshiplast summer at FastTrackSoftware. I have alsocompleted several great projects including…[list a few here]…I aminvolvedon campus in several organizations such as Beta Beta Fraternitya nd intramural sports teams. I am interestedinworking for COMPANY NAME so I canbe at the forefront ofbreaking trends andnewtechnology. Whenmycollege roommate told me about hisstart in your department, I was persistent in asking himfor detailsuntil he helpedme get a referral, which brought me here today. I feel like this position is a great fit between myaccomplishments andstrengths andwhat you are lookingfor. I am prepared to answer any questions you mayhave about myeducation and experience." This response sets a nice tone for starting the interview. The interviewee is able to saya lot within60 seconds bystaying focused. The message is clear:the interviewee has both passionandfocus relatingto the position. He stays onmessage and concludes byleaving the door openfor additional questions about his education and experience. Unfortunatelysome candidates get offon the wrongfoot byrambling onfor several minutes about their childhood, family, hobbies, travels, andinterests. Repeat KeyAccomplishment Statements Throughout the interview you willbe askednumerous questions about your attitude andabilityto do the job. Whenever possible, talkabout your accomplishments interms ofwhat you did and the results of your actions for employers. Give examplesof your effectiveness, whichshouldinclude specific skillsandstatistics. We're considering twoother candidatesfor this position. Whyshould we hire you rather than someone else?
- 34. Do not be distractedbythe mentionof two other candidates, you don't knowanything about them andtheycould be fictitious. Focus onwhat strengths you bring to the table. These shouldbe consistent withthe four things most employers are lookingfor incandidates during the job interview:competence, professionalism, enthusiasm, andlikeability. Remember, theyare looking for chemistrybetweenyou andthem. Be preparedto summarize in60 seconds whyyou are the best candidate for the job. Also, let the employer know you want the job and youwill enjoy workingwith them. A lack ofinterest inthe jobmayindicate a lackof enthusiasmfor the joband them. Whydo you want to workinthis industry? Tell a storyabout how youfirst became interested inthis type of work. Point out anysimilarities between the jobyou're interviewing for andyour current or most recent job. Provide proof that you aren't simplyshoppinginthis interview. Make your passions for youwork a theme that you allude to continuallythroughout the interview. "I've always wantedto work inanindustrythat makes tools. One ofmyhobbies is home-improvement projects, so I've collecteda number of saws manufacturedbyyour company. I couldbe anaccountant anywhere, but I'drather work for a companywhose products I trust." Tell me what you knowabout this company. Describe your first encounter or a recent encounter withthe companyor its products andservices. What wouldbe particularly motivatingto you about working there as opposedto working the same type of jobina different company? The recruiter will lookfor evidence of genuine interest and more thanjust surface researchonthe company. Reciting the annual report isn't likelyto impressmost recruiters, but feedbackfrom customers andemployees will. "I servedas aninternto a restaurant analyst last summer, soI followedall the steak-house chains closely. What you've done especiallywellis focus on a limitedmenuwithgreat consistencyamonglocations;the business traveler trusts your product anywhere in the U.S. I'm particularly interestedinyour real-estate finance group and expansionplans." WhyshouldI hire you? Don't repeat your resume or employment history. Offer one or two examples to explainwhyyou're talking to this particular co mpany. What's the most compelling example you can give to prove your interest?This questionoftenremains unasked, but it's always inthe back ofthe recruiter's mind. Evenifthis questionisn't asked, you should findanopportunityto use your prepared response sometime during the interview, perhapsin your closing remarks. "My uncle had a companythat wasa small-scale manufacturer in the industry, andalthough he later sold the business, I workedthere for five summers doing all sorts ofoddjobs. For that reason I believe I knowthis businessfrom the ground up, andyou can be assuredthat I knowwhat I'd be gettinginto as a plant manager here." Tell me about a time youdidn't performto your capabilities. This questionforces the candidate to describe a negative situation. Do so in the context of an earlycareer mistake basedoninexperience; then demonstrate the better judgment you now have as a result of that learningexperience. "The first time I hadto give a presentationto our board, I failedto anticipate some of their questions. I was unprepared for anything other than what I wantedto report. Nowmydirector and I brainstorm all the what-ifs inadvance." What color is your brain? Be aware that you'll probablybe askedzanyquestions. The point is not to stumpyou, but to find out what makes you tick. When the standard interview questions are asked, people are prepared, andit's harder for the recruiter to get to know the real person. An advertisingrecruiter, for example, tries to avoidthis. There is noright or wrong answer to this type of question. Infact, the recruiter won't evenreallycare what your answer is. He or she just doesn't want to hear something like, "I don't know, I guess it's blue because that's the wayI imagine it." The point is to see how creative you are and how youthink. Be sure to explainwhyyou answeredthe wayyou did. "My brain is redbecause I'm always hot. I'm always on fire withnew plans and ideas." How will you complement this department? Describe howyour personalityand/or skills would help round out the department. What types of people enjoyworking withyou for hours ata time? How wouldthe company's customers or clients react?Assure the interviewer that there will be no surprises about your work personality. "I enjoyanenvironment in which people bounce ideasoff eachother andhave the flexibilityto askfor helpwhentheyneed it. I'm usuallya great troubleshooter for PCproblems in myoffice, and I'm often going to ask for help proofreading important memos. I believe ingive-and-take." Tell me about aneffective manager, supervisor, or other personin a leadingrole you've known. Talk about a supervisor's management style andinterpersonal skills. Focus onthe positive-how the personworkedrather thanwhat type of work he or she did. Howwas the person able to accomplish somuchandget your support? "The best professor I ever hadalways reviewedthe most important points fromour last class before he movedonto new material. He also watchedour facescarefullyandrepeatedinformationwhenever he sawa blankstare. Sometimes he would just ask for feedback bysaying, 'What are you having difficultywith?'"He never assumedtoo much or made us feel dumbfor not grasping a concept quickly." How do you usuallygo about solving a problem? The interviewer will want to hear the logic you use to solve problems as wellas the outcomes you're able to achieve. Are you decisive? How do you narrow the options andmake decisions? What dopeople sayabout your reasoningskills? What exampleswouldtheycite of your effective decision-making? "When I needto solve a problem, I generallystart bywriting downas manyideas as I canthinkof about possible causes. Next I lookfor relationships amongcausessoI can grouptogether symptoms of bigger problems. Usually, after I studythese groups of problems, the real cause becomes readilyapparent."
- 35. What's your greatest achievement to date? Be sure that the achievement you describe here is relevant to the job you're interviewing for. Also, be careful that your answer doesn't sound as if the best is behindyou. Mentionsomething great that you've achieved, but clearlycommunicate your belief that the best is ye t to come. "I'm proudof the fact that I graduated ontime with a solid GPA while I playedvarsitybasketball for four years. A lot of womenonmyteameither took a reducedcourse load or let their grades suffer. I believe the reasonI got through it all was sheer determination;I n ever even let myself visualize anythingbut finishing ontime and with goodgrades. So I firmlybelieve, as a professional counselor, inthe importance of a positive outlook." Give anexample ofa time whenyou were askedto accomplisha task but weren't givenenough information. How did youresolve this problem? Although this example mayseem trivial, the candidate demonstrates maturityand anabilityto approach work conceptually. The interviewer will want to knowthat you understand that just getting the jobdone isn't enough. Your response should showresourcefulness andinitiative. "At my last internship, mysupervisor, anaccount executive, asked me to assemble five hundred press kits for a mailing. I wasn't sure in what order the pagesandpress releases shouldgo, but mysupervisor had alreadyleft for a client meeting. Afraidof putting the informationtogether inthe wrong order, I managed to track downher cell phone number andcalledher inher car. She explained the order of the materialsover the phone, and inthe endI managedto prevent a mistake that wouldhave cost hours of work anda delayinthe mailing-not to mentiona fewheadaches." Tell me about your least-favorite manager or professor. Answeringthis questionwill be a bit like walking acrossa loadedminefield, sobe aware! Keepinmindthat the interviewer doesn't want to learn about your former supervisors;he or she does want to learn about the wayyou speak about them. Thoughthe interviewer maybait you to make a negative statement about your former employer, doingsocancreate a host of problems. Evenif your claim is completelytrue andjustified, the recruiter mayconclude either that you don't get along withother people or that you shift blame to others. The best wayarou ndthis dilemma is to choose and example that's not toonegative, touchuponit briefly, thenfocus the rest of your answer on what you learned fromthe experience. "Well I've beenprettyfortunate as far as managers go, andI didn't have anyproblems withmyprofessors. Inmyfirst jobout of college I worked with a manager whowas prettyinaccessible. If youwalkedintohis office to aska question, you got the sense that you were bothering him, so we just learnedto get helpfrom each other instead. I wouldn't sayhe was myleast-favorite manager, because he was a good manager ina lot of ways, but I wouldhave preferredthat he'd made himself more available to us andgivenus more direction." What is your biggest weakness? This is a great example of what is known as a negative question. Negative questions are a favorite among interviewers, because they're effective for uncoveringproblems or weaknesses. The keyto answering negative questions is to give them a positive spin. For this particular questionyour best bet is to admit to a weakness that isn't catastrophic, inconsistent, or currentlydisruptive to your chosenprofessional field, and to emphasize how you've overcome or minimizedthe problem. Whatever you do, don't answer this questionwith a copout like "I can't thinko f any," or even worse, "I don't reallyhave anymajor weaknesses." This kind ofa response is likelyto eliminate youfrom contention. "I admit to being a bit of a perfectionist. I take a great deal of pride in mywork and am committedto producingthe highest-qualitywork I can. Sometimesif I'm not careful, thought, I can goa bit overboard. I've learnedthat it's not always possible or even practical to tryand perfect your work-sometimes you have to decide what's important and ignore the rest inorder to be productive. It's a questionof trade-offs. I alsopaya lot of attentionto pacing mywork, sothat I don't get too caught up inperfecting everylast detail." Whyweren't your grades better? It's likelythat ifyou've made it to the interview stage, you fulfill the basic criteriafor the position, includingthe educationrequirements. The recruiter is probablytrying to judge here how well the candidate handles adversity. It's important not to get defensive or to place blame. Instead, try to put a positive spinon the question-for example, byconcentrating onwhat you learned and the extra effort you put in, rather thanon the grades youreceived. "School was a wonderful experience for me. I reallyenjoyedlearning newideas, I studiedconsistently, andI was attentive in class. But I never believedincramming before the night of anexam just to get a higher grade or staying upallnight to finisha termpaper. I reallybelieve I learned just as muchas manystudents whowent for the grades." Was there a course that you foundparticularlychallenging? The interviewer will want to see howwell you respond to difficult situations. Demonstrate that you won't foldinthe face of difficulty, andthat you're willingto put inthe extra effort to meet a challenge. "InitiallyI was completelyoverwhelmedbythe introductorychemistrycourse that I took last year. No matter how hardI studied, I seemedto be gettingnowhere. I failedthe first three quizzes. So I trieda newapproach. Insteadof just studyingbymyself, I askeda friend who's a chemistry major to helpme with mystudies. I also beganto seekhelpfrom the professor after class. AndI found that more time I spent inthe labwas critical. I ended upwitha B-plus in the course andthought I achieved a solid understandingof the material. More thanthat, I learned that tackling a new fieldof studysometimes requires a newapproach, not just hardwork, andthat the helpof others canbe crucial! Whydidn't you participate more inextracurricular activities? The interviewer maybe worried that ifyou don't have manyoutside interests, you mayeventuallysuffer fromburnout. Employers like candidates who are well roundedandhave interests outside ofwork. Ifyou didn't participate informalextracurricular activities in college, you stillmaywant to talk about some of your interests, suchas reading or exercising, that you mayhave a passion for running evenifyou weren't onthe college track team. "I wanted to give as mucheffort as possible to mystudies. I came froma highschool ina ve rysmall town, where I received a lot of A's, but this didn't prepare me wellfor college. So I studiedhard. I have, however, foundtime to explore the cityandmake new friends, and I do socialize formallyon the weekends."
- 36. HOW TO FACE AN INTERVIEW PART- 1 1. GoldenRule: Speak1) Loudly 2) Clearly 3) Slowly 2. You need to make sure that you arrive and are readyto take the phone call about 15 minutes before the scheduledinterview time. Please make sure the phone is not busy(or engaged) about 10 minutes before the scheduledinterview time. 3. Have a penandpaper readyto take notes duringthe interview withyour resume and verifythe resume experience. 4. Be calmandcomposed before andduring the interview. 5. Be enthusiastic during the interview. Smile. Theycandefinitelyhear it inyour voice. Discuss hot buttons for client. 6. Provide direct andcomplete answers to all questions that are askedof you. Always research the client’s website before the interviewto get an idea of the client’s business. 7. If this is aninternational call, there maybe delayacross the phone line. Wait for the interviewer to finishtalking andthenrespondto the question. 8. The interviewer begins the conversationwith“How are you doing?” Youneedto respondback with “Fine. Howabout you?” 9. You need to endthe interview with. “Thanks for your time. It was nice talking to you andI look forward to being a part of your project”. 10. Always call the interviewers bytheir first name only. For example, ifthe interviewer’s name is JohnSmith, make sure you call himJohn. Donot call himMr. John or Sir. Make sure that you write down the names of the interviewers so that youremember to address thembytheir name during the interview. 11. Find out from the salesrepresentative and recruiter about the requirements of the project for which you are beinginterviewedprior to the interview. Tailor your answers to best suit the details of the project for whichyou are beinginterviewed. For example, ifthe project is anaccounting system, make sure that youhighlight anyexperience that you have withanyaccounting systems that you have worked inthe past. Also, for example, if the project requires Sybase as the backend database, make sure that you highlight your Sybase experience, if any. 12. Anticipate what the interviewer is looking for and provide intelligent answers to satisfythe interviewer’s questions. Ifyou have not workedon a particular software or version, do not answer saying “No”. Saythat youhave workedon a similar product or that youare a quick learner and some ofthe other things you wouldbring to the table. 13. Never use the words “involved in”. This impliesthat someone else didthe work and that you were assisting them. Either say“I was responsible for”, ifyou were incharge of the work, or “I carriedout” if you were part of the team carrying out the work. 2 14. Never use the words “we”. Always say“I”. This clearlyindicates that youdidthe work. 15. If the line is bador you can’t hear, never keepsaying“Hello”. Simplysay“I’m sorry, the line is bad, I cannot hear you. Would youplease repeat the question?” Or simply“Would you please repeat your question?” 16. If you do not workfor Xbut for the subcontractor, make sure that you never mention that you work for the subcontractor insteadof X. Always indicate that you workfor Xdirectly, unless instructed otherwise bythe recruiter/ salesrepresentative. Never discuss rates or salarywiththe client. 17. Make sure that you checkwiththe recruiter/sales representative as to what the interviewer’s expectations are andmake sure that you provide a suitable start date. 18. Highlight anyspecial trainingor certifications youhave. 19. Never discusspersonalissueswith the client. InterviewQuestions Q1. Describe your current project? A1. Provide the following information inorder:name/title ofthe project, the client name and location, a functional overviewof the project, the environment (hardware and software)of the project, your specific role and responsibilities andtechnical features of the software that were usedbyyou. However, ifyour most recent project doesnot fit the requirements of the project for which you are beinginterviewedfor, andthenprovide a summaryof your experience and highlight the project which best fits the requirements of the project for whichyou are being interviewed. Q2. Rate yourselfon a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the best) or 1 to 5 (5 being the best)on each area ofexpertise. Example: Rate yourself inPowerBuilder andSybase. A2. Typically, you shouldrate yourself between 8 and 10. Q3. If you ratedyourselflessthana 10, what will it take for you to become a 10? A3. One possible answer is “more experience ina wide range of applications and systems”.
- 37. Q4. Describe whichpart of software lifecycle you were a part of? A4. The mainphasesinthe software lifecycle are specification, design, coding, testing, and implementation. You needto indicate whichareasyou have workedin. For a programmer analyst, it is essential to have experience indesign, coding andtesting. It is always nice to tell the interviewer that you at least have some experience inspecification(interactingwith users) and implementation (installationat the client site). Q5. What percentage ofthe time do you spendin analysis/design, coding andtesting? A5. The industryaverage is 35% inanalysis/design, 35% incoding and30% intesting. Make sure that your answer doesnot grosslyviolate the industrystandard. Q6. How do you estimate time durations for your tasks? A6. You should breakdownyour tasks into smaller pieces, whichhelpyou accuratelyestimate the tasks. Youshoulduse your experience to estimate the durations for the individualpieces as 3 well as anyintegrationtime for joining these pieces. Ifnecessary, you shouldaskyour supervisors and peers to reviewyour estimates. Typically, programmingtasks needto have time assignedfor design, coding, unit testing andif appropriate, system testing (or integratedtesting). Q7. Did you have to prepare the spec or didyou programfrom the spec? A7. It is a plus ifyou have prepareda spec (or specification) but ifyou are a junior programmer, it is acceptable to have programmedfroma spec. Q8. Did you interact withthe end users? A8. It is a plus ifyou have interactedextensivelywiththe endusers of the software. It maybe acceptable to state that you have interactedoccasionallyas the needarose. Q9. Explainanydebugging tools that you have used? A9. Make sure that you are familiar with the debuggingtools inyour area of expertise. You should be able to view valuesof variable, set breakpoint, change variable values inthe debugger. Debugging usingprint statements to the screens is not acceptable method ofdebugging and should never be mentioned inthe normal cases. Q10. ExplainanyCASE toolsthat you have used? A10. If you are not familiar with anyCASE tools, make sure that you at least readup or find out about anysuitable CASE toolsinyour area ofexpertise. ERWIN SQL is a popular data-modeling CASE tool on the PC. Q11. Explainanyversion control tools that you have used? A11. Anysignificant software project will have version control tools to allow concurrent development andso to provide a development trail. Popular versioncontrol tools are PVCS on PC and sccs onUnix. It is not acceptable to indicate that youhave not usedanyversioncontrol tools. Make sure that you are familiar with versioncontrol tools inyour environment prior to the interview. Q12. What are the differences between versions ofthe software inyour area of expertise? A12. Make sure that you find out about the differences between the software versions. This is most important when the software changes fromcharacter mode to GUI mode (suchas Oracle Forms 3.0 to Oracle Developer 2000) or from mainframe to client server (suchas SAPR2 to SAP R3) betweenversions. Q13. What do you dowhenyou are running late on your assignments? A13. You should keepthe project manager or supervisor informedabout your progressat all times. Whenyour tasks are running late, you shouldworklonger hours to tryto catch up. If appropriate, you shouldask your supervisors andpeers for their advice andhelp. Q14. How do you handle problems withpeers? A14. First, you shouldtalk to your peer andsee if youcanresolve the problem betweenthe two of you. If not, thenyou shouldtalk to your manager about the situation. Q15. Do you work long hours? 4 A15. Definitely, sayyes. You shouldstate that you willdo what it takes to get the job done successfullyon time andwithinbudget. Q16. When are you available to start? A16. Make sure that you checkwith the recruiter/sales representative as to what the interviewer’s expectations are and make sure that you provide a suitable start date. Typically, a start date canbe a weekor two from the interview date. Q17. What is your visa status? A17. If your visa hasalreadybeenapproved andyou have a validworkvisa for GTRAS, Inc., then state the visa details. If youdo not knowabout the exact status of your visa, checkwith recruiter/sales representatives as to the status ofyour visa sothat you can appropriatelyanswer this question. Q18. How long canyou stayinthe UnitedStates? A18. Typically, the H-1Bvisa is valid for 3 years andcanbe extendedfor 3 more years. Inmost cases, GTRAS, Inc. will sponsor your permanent residencyfor the UnitedStates, inwhichcase
- 38. you can work indefinitelyin the UnitedStates. Tips for anInterview Go alone. Arrive 10-15 minutesearly. Have a goodhandshake. Maintain eye contact withthe speaker. Dress neatly. Do not waste the employer's time. Do not plead for the job you want. Do not interrupt. Listen well. Do not bring upsalaryissue. Leave when the interviewis over. Thankinterviewer for their time. Send follow-upletter. The keyis feeling comfortable andfamiliar with the materialcoveredduringaninterview. The more familiar you are with information onthe companyandthe position, the more confidence you will reflect inyour interview. Likewise, the more familiar you are speakingof your backgroundand experience, the more comfortable the employer will be. Therefore, preparationis the keyto a successful interview andcommunicatingeffectively. Interviewing canbe an anxious and stressful experience, but it doesn't have to be. Ifyou're well prepared, andyou understand how to make a solid, positive first impression, youcanturn any interview intoa pleasant andfruitful experience. To help make that task a little easier, we offer you a few bits of practical advice basedonwhat works inthe real world. BEFORE YOUR INTERVIEW Do Your Research Learn as muchas possible about the companyyou'll be interviewingwith, andknowas much about the positionas you can. Youneedto do your homework, too. If the companyhas retail outlets inyour area, visit one. Iftheyproduce software products, lookthem over. Talkto people who know the company, explore the business sectionof the libraryto get informationabout the industry, the companyand its management. Lookover annual andquarterlyreports andcheck the trade publications for the latest informationavailable. The more youknow going in, the more informedandintelligent you will seem. Prepare a List of Questions to ask them It's onlynatural for you to have some questions about the position for whichyou are being interviewed. Be readyto ask them. Put together a list of 10-15 questions. Youwon't likelyneed to ask everyone of them, since much ofthe informationmaybe covered inthe interviewprocess itself. But you should be preparedto findout the specifics, like whythe last personleft, or what are the daily, weekly, monthlyandyearlyexpectations of the job, or what are the significant challengesyou wouldface inthe position. Practice, Practice, Practice 8 Much of what will be asked inyour interview will be fairlyobvious aheadof time. Practice your answers to tough questions you're likelyto be asked. Practice your responses, either alone or with someone you cantrust to give you anhonest and candidreaction. Youneed to make an honest assessment ofyour experience andemployment historyandbe preparedto deal directly with bothyour strengths andweaknesses. Dress Professionally Make sure your first impression is a good one bylooking professional andconfident. Evenwhen the corporate culture is more casual, it doesn't hurt to be the best dressedperson inthe room during aninterview. Thisis the time to be conservative indress, not trendyor hip. For a man, it's best to wear a darksuit witha white shirt and a contrasting tie, polished shoesanddark socks. For a woman, the best choice is a dark, skirtedsuit or tailoreddress witha matching jacket, with neutral hose andsimple pumps. A conservative hair style, withclean, neat fingernails is most appropriate, andmakeupandjewelryshouldbe minimal. Arrive FashionablyEarly You shouldbe at your destinationandhave reported to the receptionist well before the interview. Fifteenminutes earlyis a goodrule of thumb. To make sure youdon't arrive at the last minute, go over your travel route inadvance, andeven drive it once to test the route soyou are absolutely confident you know how long it will take. Smile at Everyone
- 39. A pleasant demeanor cango a long waytoward making a good impression, andit will probably release a little ofthe tension for you as well. Bythe time you arrive for your interview, you will likelyhave spokento the receptionist at least twice, andnow is the time to reinforce anyrapport you have with him or her. Inanycase, thisis your opportunityto put your best face forward. Remember, everypersonyou meet here is a potential co-worker. DURING YOUR INTERVIEW Make the First 10 MinutesCount The first tenminutes sets the tone of the entire interview. You canhelp make sure it's a tone that works to your advantage. State everything as a positive, anddisplaygenuine enthusiasm. That shows youare interested, energetic and confident. Maintaina FriendlyandProfessional Demeanor Be accessible andopen, but always professional. Listencarefullyto the questions being asked, and make relevant andconcise responses. Stayon course withyour answers, andprovide specific exampleswhenever appropriate to reinforce the points you are making. Bring Resumes Bring along some extra resumes, ina folder, with your name onthe label. Theywill have use for them if andwhenthe process goesto the next step, andit makes the point that you're organized and prepared. Ask Permissionto Take Notes It implies that you are veryinterestedinthe positionand the company, andit shows clearlythat you are wellorganized, detailorientedandthorough. Answer Questions Confidently Even the toughest questions can be handledwithpoise andconfidence. Don't tryto hide weaknesses inyour experience or difficult relationships inyour work history. Never dwell onthe negative, andput a positive, but honest spinon things. Indescribing eventhe worst experience you've had, you canemphasize what you have learnedfromit, as opposedto that awful things happened. Remember noone is perfect, andthat goes for jobcandidates too. You needto make the most ofwhat you have, and a positive approachwill help immeasurably. Tell Your Story The most effective wayto relate your experience andexpertise is to tellit in a storyform. Tryto create a picture ofyour experience, your abilitiesinworking with others andyour focus on teamwork, results, problem-solving -- whatever qualities the jobyou're interviewingfor requires. Talk about your experience and expectations in terms of what you "feel"andwhat you "think." The more your interviewers feel theyare dealing witha person, instead offacts on a resume, the better. Interviewthem Ask keyquestions. Byasking themto describe the position you’re applying for, you'lllearntheir priorities, andyou'll have some clues about whichpoints on your resume to emphasize. Ask them about the first twoor three projects you'll be involvedwith. Askabout their goalsfor the personin this position. Thisis what you preparedyour list of questions for. Closing the Interview Now is the time to be candid, but polite. If you like what youheard inthe interview, let themknow that. Reiterate how you can contribute to their organizationandhowyou canhelpthem meet their stated goals. Let them knowhowyou think you would fit inwiththe corporate culture, andhow interestedyou are inthe position, now that you know more about it. Askthem what's next. This let's them knowthat you're interestedenoughto want a secondinterview, or to go to the next step. Leave the room onanupbeat, friendlyand comfortable note. Youmayhave just made some newfriends andcolleagues. Dress Professionally Again, what sounds cliché is so important inmaking a first impression. Dressto what is appropriate for the job, companyand industryculture. Avoidheavymakeup, perfume or cologne. WritingYour Resume Get your resume andcover letter writtenbyprofessionals whichwill be more enticingto the eye and “reader-friendly” to hiringmanagers.
- 40. IntroducingYourself While your resume explains your skills andexperience, the personal introductionyou make of yourselfis equally, if not more important. Be confident! Start witha firmhandshake, a smile and look the interviewer in the eye. Be prepared to answer questions about yourselfbut remember - Be concise! Listenattentively, don't interrupt andbe sure to answer the question. Relate Your Own Experience Find out as muchas youcanabout the positionandthe company's philosophy. Relate that with specific examplesto your ownwork experience. Focus onresults. Share your knowledge of the industry, whether it's personal contacts or knowledge of the latest news inthe field. Ask Relevant Questions 14 It's important to remember that while you're the one beinginterviewed, aninterview is alsoyour opportunityto findout if the jobor companyis right for you, too. Askrelevant questions regarding the companyandposition, what the responsibilitiesare, management practices, etc. Don't bring up salaryinformation inthe first interviewunless youare specificallyasked. Don't ask about vacationtime or personal days, etc. Telephone Interview A companymaywishto meet you for the first time over the telephone. This type of interview is just as important as a personal interview, if not more important, because if it doesn't go well, you won't get a chance to meet face-to-face withthe company. Tryto find a quiet place where you can speakfreelyandwithout interruption. Don't interrupt for call waiting! If the interview is coming to a close andthe employer has not scheduleda personal meeting, ask politely"What is the next step?" or "Where do we go fromhere?" Send a thank younote. Personal Interview Be enthusiastic, confident andbuild your case. Start bybrieflyintroducing yourself andyour background, link your abilities with the company's needs, andlet them know how interested you are in the position. InterviewQuestions Tell Me about Yourself Make sure your first words impress favorably. Speakslowly, clearlyandconcisely. Answer the question and don't ramble. Relayyour educationandworkexperience honestly. WhyAre You On The JobMarket? Be honest - even if you were fired. Don't saynegative things about your former employer. What Are Your Strengths? Team player? Enthusiasm?Assertiveness? Decisive?Flexible? Adaptive? What Are Your Weaknesses? Overuse ofstrengthis best, for example, "Some people mistake mydecisivenessfor impatience. I've learnedto watch howI express things." What Are Your Most Significant Accomplishments? Be preparedandbe specific. Closing the Interview Let them know how interestedyou are inthe job. Better to get a joboffer that you maychoose to decline thanno offer at all. Get a commitment on the next step - where dowe go from here, etc. Let them know that you are happyto provide references at their request. Finally, thankthe interviewer for their time inmeeting withyou. Always senda prompt thankyou note and follow up with your recruiter. For More Information, Please Visit