SEO Interview Questions

1. What is an SEO, SEM and how important are they for an organization? Explain briefly.

By not being able to answer the acronym and explanation - you can decide whether you can proceed further or not. This question saves lot of time for the interviewer as well the candidate.

2. What is google spamdexing?
3. Could you briefly explain pagerank algorithm?
4. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
5. Ask questions on advance HTML (like why not to use nested tables, what is light weight html, what is image alternate attribute is used for, META tags purpose) and how important the site needs to be w3c compliant.
6. Who are the two key people - who started Google?
7. How and what does msn, yahoo and google search looks for in a website?
8. What are all the different ways to do marketing for a website? (PPC, Ads, Backlinks, etc.,)
9. What is an Organic search?
10. What is Web2, give few examples.
11. Name few popular sites and how do you think they become popular?
12. Why google ranks Wikipedia for most of the topics?
13. Are you aware of Signals, Classifiers and Topicality?
14. How much are they technically strong? (.NET, Java, etc.,)
15. How does a search engine work and what is the future?
16. Can you get “xyz” company listed for the keyword “google” in the first page?
Tricky question though, he can say “Yes” only if he mentions that the company “xyz” should discuss about “google” in their website only if it is related to google in someway - person had to say “No” otherwise - providing the same explanation. This will give a clue that the person is aware of spamming as well and does not want to do that.

… more questions to come

But if you are recruiting a senior person, after initial interview you can ask him/her to give a half an hour seminar on the topic. This will give freedom for that person to give his perspective and for others to ask questions on the spot. As for an SEO manager - he have to discuss with clients, give seminars, etc., - so making a person talk for half an hour will bring a lot of great qualities in him and real chance to prove himself - rather asking few questions and making decision on that.