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I’ve been tasked with adding an additional member to our team so I am posting about the process. These are the questions I’ll be asking in the first interview. If you’re looking for an SEO position, these might be some questions to be familiar with before you head into it.

1) Give me a description of your general SEO experience.

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

3) Where do you think the SEO industry is headed?

4) What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?

5) Have you attended any search related conferences?

6) What SEO tools do you regularly use?

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

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

9) Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?

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

11) What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?

12) Are you familiar with any blackhat SEO techniques, search arbitrage, and affiliate marketing?

13) Are you familiar with enterprise web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?

14) Are you familiar with A/B testing and multivariate testing?

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

16) Are you experienced in managing PPC campaigns? To what extent and on what platforms?

17) Do you have experience in bid management tools, API tools, and click fraud issues?

18) Do you have experience in extensive competitive analysis and what techniques do you use?

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

20) Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?

21) Do you know who Matt Cutts is?

42) What is the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?

Thanks to Rand at SEOmoz.org for this post on SEO hiring. It helped quite a bit in assembling this list. Any additional questions anyone can think of?

*** UPDATE ***

I got several excellent questions from a couple forum postings. These get into the more complicated end of SEO.

22) What is page segmentation? (ever heard of VIPS?)

23) What’s the difference bewtween PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?

24) What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI – Indexing)?

25) What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?

26) In Google Lore – what are ‘Hilltop’ Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?

*** UPDATE ***

For in-depth answers to some of these questions, visit SEO Interview Questions Part II.

Anytime you hire someone to provide a service, you need to ask questions to determine if that person or company is right for you. Here are some questions I found that are important in the SEO interview and my answers to those questions:

1. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
   A. My experience is mainly with my own site at www.afreshpath.com and one other site www.qualitymotorsreno.com. So far, my site is on page one for narrow search terms involving outdoor recreation in Nevada. The other site has gone from not being listed at all in the first 10 pages of any search result to being in pages 2 and 3 of a couple of search engines. That work is ongoing at this time.
2. Can you write HTML code by hand?
   A. Yes I can. I do use some WYSIWYG editors and then modify the code by hand as needed.
3. Could you briefly explain the PageRank algorithm?
   A. In simple terms, Google uses the gross number of inbound links to a page to determine how important the page is. This “pagerank” has little to do with actual search results but can make a difference on user behavior.
4. Have you created any SEO tools either from scratch or pieced together from others?
   A. No, I do make use of many tools already available on the internet as well as SEO programs that I have purchased.
5. What do you think of PageRank?
   A. In relation to SEO projects, it is relatively unimportant but can give an indication of how much work needs to be done in gaining inbound links.
6. What do you think of using XML sitemaps?
   A. I use them. They are an additional tool to help the search engines when they crawl a site. There is no requirement for any sitemap and your pages will get indexed without them if you pay close attention to navigation within your site.
7. What SEO tools do you regularly use?
   A. Keyword analysis tools, keyword density tools, index checking, backlink checking, wordprocessor to check spelling and grammar, HTML validation and others.
8. Under what circumstances would you look to exclude pages from search engines using robots.txt vs meta robots tag?
   A. Usually I would use the robots.txt to keep a search engine from indexing an entire directory on a site. This would often be directories dealing with admin functions or directories that only contain script or image libraries.
9. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
   A. Text on page! Search engines utilize text and only text in providing search results. That text is found in many place including the URL and title of your pages as well as the visible text you place on your pages.
10. Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
    A. My experience in “copywriting” is limited to my site at www.afreshpath.com. It is a blog about outdoor recreation in Nevada and so far is placing well in search results.
11. Have you ever had something you’ve written reach the front-page of Digg? Sphinn? Or be Stumbled?
    A. Not yet! I am not particularly worried about it but I do try to write in such a way that others would be inticed to submit my articles.
12. Explain to me what META tags matter in today’s world.
    A. The most important META tag for SEO is your page description. Search engines do make use of this tag but it does not outweigh the title or visible text. The META keywords tag is not much of a factor in the major search engines but should not be overlooked.
13. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
    A. 1. Interview website owner or webmaster to get a good grasp of the site’s purpose and goals.
    2.     Perform a keyword analysis to find best performing keywords that should be used for that site and for individual pages of the site
    3.      Analyze site content to determine usage of relavant keywords and phrases. This includes visible text as well at titles, META tags, and “alt” attributes.
    4.      Examine site navigation
    5.      Determine the existence of robots.txt and sitemap and examine those for effectivenes.
    6.      Make recommendations for changes needed for the site and each individual page.
14. If the company whose site you’ve been workind for has decided to move all of its content to a new domain, what steps would you take?
    A. I would update the old site with permanent redirects to to new page for every page. Then I would attempt to remove old content from the major search engines to 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 then be page titles
    # 3 is navigation and “alt” attributes for navigation items and link text.
    # 4 would be “alt” attributes for images and other media presented on pages.
16. What do you think about link buying?
    A. I discourage the practice for the most part. There are more effective means of paid marketing. One exception would be purchasing listings in highly reputable directories such as Yahoo directory.
17. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI Indexing)?
    A. LSI indexing ries to overcome the limitations of “literal” search term matching . For example, if someone is searching for “hiking in Norhter Nevada” a literal search would only match the words used without taking into account words such as “hike”, “hiked”. LSI can give more relevant results because it does take word usage and context into account determining what a page is “about” rather than a strict reliance on literal wording.
18. What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
    A. In regards to search results, it is a method that search engines such as google use to determine relevance of a page based on phrases acutally used in a document. For example, if you have a page instructing people on wildlife photography, the search engine would reasonably expect to see terms and phrases such as “selecting a camera”, “appraoching wildlife”, and “low light photo conditions”. Related phrases will add to the relevance of a page where unrelated phrases will reduce the relevance of a page. This is one technique that Google is using to weed out “spam” sites.
19. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
    A. Seo is search engine optimization and is the process you use in getting your pages to place well on search results. SEM is search engine marketing and involves purchasing advertising space on search result pages. Sponsored listings are SEM. Both are related though! When using Google Adwords, the better you optimize your pages for search, the less you will be paying for your selected keywords in the PPC campaign and the better placment your ads will get.
20. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks?
    A. I check the competitors backlinks to find hightly relevant sites and request a link from them. If reciprocal linking is required, I may be able to place a lik back to them in a relevant portion of a page on the site but if not, I will state so and may not gain that link. Another method I use is to submit press releases to relevant media.
21. What role does social media play in an SEO strategy?
    A. Social media such as social networking sites and news sites can provide for viral marketing. Viral marketing has proven to be powerful if the content of a site is appealing.
22. What things wouldn’t you to do increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?
    A. I would avoid any site with the appearance of a link farm. I would also avoid any “spam” practice such as unsolicited email campaigns, certain affiliate advertising sites, sites that re-direct visitors to your site, and anything resembling the practices of Zango.
23. Why might you want to use nofollow on an internal link?
    A. Many sites have shoping carts and member login or logout links. This type of link is simply an administrative function and does nothig to contribute to site content. The search engine does not need to index those pages.
24. Are you familiar with web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?
    A. Yes I am and the tool I use most frequently is Google’s webmaster tools. I also use the available Yahoo hosting tools for my own sites. Knowing what search terms your visitors are actually using to find your site as well as where those visitors are coming from will help refine SEO efforts. The amount of time each visitor spends on your site will help in determining if content changes are needed.
25. From an analytics perspective, what is different between a user from organic search results vs. a type-in user?
    A A user coming into your site from an organic search usually has never visited your site before or is performing a general search for a specific product or topic. These visitors are trying to find the site that most suits thier needs. A “type-in” user is specifally interested in your website. They may have found your URL in print advertising or from a friend. Often, these users are familiar with what you are offering and are coming back to your site as a repeat visitor.
26. How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?
    A. The main indicator is to perform a search on all major search engines using the keywords/ keyphrases I am optimizing for. An analysis of those results will help to determine if optimization has gained in the results or lost ground. This analysis should be done over time as each search engine will update and index on a varying schedule. Another aspect is to use website statistics to determine where traffic is originating.
27. What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?
    A. Competitive analysis means taking a close look at websites that rank highly in search results and comparing those sites to the one you are optimizing. They have employed methods that are working and are a valuable source for ideas.
28. If you’ve done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven’t been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?
    A. I might approach the problem as if it were an entirely new project. Again taking a look at the keywords and phrases that I am attempting to optimize for and again taking a close inspection of top ranking competition. If the site is indexed and does show up in the irst 10 pages of a search but on in the top three, I would look into modification of major areas such as page titles, on page text, and page descriptions. If the site is not yet indexed or has been dropped from an index, there are major problems and the site may require a total re-work and re-submission.
29. How many target 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 weighting the HTML LAYER tag very heavily in ranking the relevance of its results – how does this affect your work?
    A. It doesn’t unless the rumor proves to be fact. Yes, I check on the rumor but as with all rumors, it can have detrimental effects if you “jump on the band wagon” and it proves to be just a rumor with no basis in fact.
31. Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?
    A. Wikipedia is an established authority! As such, it is referenced by huge numbers of other documents with relevant text associated with links back to Wikipedia.
32. If salary and location were not an issue, who would you work for?
    A. Myself and only myself if those conditions existed.

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