55 SEO Interview Questions

55 SEO Interview Questions


Interviewing and hiring SEOs has been on my mind recently as my team has been actively looking to expand. Such thoughts are part of what prompted me to update and re-publish an old post of mine on why a career in SEO may be a bad move. I'm not sure that all of the people that read my article also read my counter argument on why a career in SEO can also be a good move, but it certainly inspired some discussion, mostly disagreement. If you're inclined to pursue an SEO career either in-house or at an agency, one of the most important obstacles you'll need to get through is the barrage of interview questions that will be thrown at you.

About a third of these 55 interview questions are ones I thought of. The rest I picked from various postings around the web from people I think are worthy of attention. Credits are at the bottom.

Technical / Tactics
Every SEO prefers certain tactics over others, but familiarity with many could indicate a deeper understanding of the industry. And while every SEO doesn't need to have a web developer background, having such skills can help set someone apart from the crowd.

Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
Can you write HTML code by hand?
Could you briefly explain the PageRank algorithm?
How you created any SEO tools either from scratch or pieced together from others?
What do you think of PageRank?
What do you think of using XML sitemaps?
What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
What SEO tools do you regularly use?
Under what circumstances would you look to exclude pages from search engines using robots.txt vs meta robots tag?
What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
Have you ever had something you've written reach the front-page of Digg? Sphinn? Or be Stumbled?
Explain to me what META tags matter in today's world.
Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
If the company whose site you've been working for has decided to move all of its content to a new domain, what steps would you take?
Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important "on page" elements
Review the code of past clients/company websites where SEO was performed.
What do you think about link buying?
What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI Indexing)?
What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
What kind of strategies do you normally implement for back links?
What role does social media play in an SEO strategy?
What things wouldn't you to do increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?
What's the difference between PageRank and Toolbar PageRank?
Why might you want to use nofollow on an internal link?