Darrell Freeman’s Internet Marketing Blog

I was asked for advice by somebody the other day, who was going for their first SEO job interview and it got me thinking about my previous experience of SEO job interviews. I’ll try and sum up my experiences of SEO interviews and hopefully provide some handy links to possible questions.

In my experiences of SEO interviews if your going for a starter role I would be surprised if you got asked anything more technical than 301 redirects, on-page factors and some basic link building questions.  Going into the mid level roles you may have to give examples of link building in a competitive market place that actually had a positive effect on the rankings and show good social skills (particularly if applying to an agency role).

I would also stick my neck out and say that somebody who is committed to learning SEO could be in a starter role within 3 months of starting to learn SEO and a lot of places would take you on anyway if you knew the basics and sounded keen to learn more.

The common questions that regularly come up do revolve around how you keep up to date in the industry (e.g. read SEOmoz, SEObook, various forums etc…), past work on different websites and a few technical questions along the lines of ‘What is a 301 redirect and give me an example where you would use it’?  I’ve always found the interviews to be pretty chilled out affairs and sometimes there may not even be an SEO person interviewing you.  It is not unknown in some companies to get interviewed by the head developer who wouldn’t know a title tag from a robots.txt file.

Below are a few links to different sites with some example questions.  I would advise if your attending an SEO interview (depending on the level) make sure you know the answers, have a good range of examples of past SEO work completed and be able to talk about the industry indepth at ease.  Last thing is that if you do know basic on-page optimisation you will probably be ahead of 75% of other applicants straight away - unless this has changed in the last few months since I was interviewing for an SEO.

Some of these below are quite extensive, remember for starter SEO roles, your interview will only be around 45 minutes so after the usual introductions you may only be asked a few questions.

http://www.themadhat.com/search-marketing/seo-job-interview-questions/

http://www.allthingssem.com/seo-interview-questions/

http://www.justmeandmy.com/80-seo-job-interview-questions

Today I needed to buy a train ticket for next week so I went to the Trainline website and after picking the correct route, finding suitable times and fares I was ready to checkout.  I was at the last screen and got presented with the following screen:

You see the problem, I can either pick up the train tickets from the nearest station or pay for next day delivery (£7.50).  Ok, my journey starts from Capenhurst which is 1/2 mile from my house but nearest train station I can pick up the tickets is Chester, which is 16 miles roundtrip - not really suitable.  Also I’m not in a rush for my tickets (as I’m travelling next week) so therefore don’t require next day delivery at £7.50 (over 50% the costs of my actual train tickets).  So where is the 1st class post option for a £1??

Done a bit of digging around QJump is exactly the same.  Also Trainline charge a booking fee and credit card fees as well so they always make a few quid on every booking.  If like me you want 1st class post (free!) for your tickets, no credit card fees and no booking fee then use the service by First Great Western, they also don’t select travel insurance for you by default.

The marketing/usability guys at Trainline need shooting, for people in the same situation as me the cart abandonment will be really high and as they have deleted the option to have your tickets sent by 1st class post I can see their conversion on a big downturn - good work guys!

Ok every week or two I log into Google Adwords and download a search query report - normally do this to find new negative keywords and find new keywords for new ads and landing pages.

Whilst looking through a report for the last month I noticed that a match type which appears is ‘Broad (session-Based)’.  Maybe I haven’t been paying attention but I’ve only just noticed this.  Anyway it is quite alarming to find that the search phrases users are using for ‘Broad (session based)’ are nothing to do with the keywords I am targeting.  Whereas nearly all the search phrases for ‘Broad’ match are relevant they are not relevant for ‘Broad (session based)’.

A solution would be for Adwords to give advertisers the option to disable ‘Broad (session-based)’ however to do this I would need to disable ‘Broad’ match type and I do not want to do this.  The problem with ‘Broad (session-based)’ is that it shows adverts from a users previous search, for example if I type ‘holidays’ into Google and my next search is for ‘car rentals’ there is a good chance that due to ‘Broad (session based)’ match type a few ads for the 1st search term (holidays) will still appear in the results for the 2nd search term.

It is a good idea in theory from Google as many users may enter a generic phrase to start with (e.g. tv) before drilling down into more detail so the 2nd phrase maybe ‘lcd tv’ and then maybe a model number ‘32lg2000′ as the user moves along the buying cycle - but Google needs to recognise when search phrases are related and when they are not.  Then they can effectively implement ‘Broad (session-based)’ match type.

In the algo for organic results, LSI (Latent semantic indexing) is where Google recognises keywords which are related (e.g. Google knows that both keywords ‘mobile phone’ and ‘nokia’ are be related) and a strict version of this needs to be implemented into the algo for Adwords to stop ads appearing for totally unrelated search terms on ‘Broad (session-based) match types.

A solution for me is to maybe stop ‘broad match’ and go back and see what search phrases generate ‘broad’ match ads and start to move these into ‘phrase’ and ‘exact’ match.  Here is some info nearer the bottom of this article from Google on Broad (session-based).

Ok I’ve applied for a programme, the merchant or their agency who deal with Aff marketing for them as had a look at my profile in AWIN and rejected me.  No complaints as the primary site url listed in ‘Account details’ in the Awin interface has nothing to do with the programme I was applying for.  But why do Awin just allow you to enter 1 url, obviously they know many affiliates have various sites in different niches therefore you should be able to enter as many urls as possible.

So first suggestion is that Awin changes the ‘promotional tab’ in ‘Account Detail’ to allow affiliates to enter more than 1 site.

Secondly when you have been rejected by a merchant why isn’t there a way to ‘appeal’ in the interface, could send the merchant a simple explanation of why I am applying for their programme and also the url I am using to promote the site.  These changes are quite simple and would benefit the affiliate, the merchant and also the network.

I only login to Webgains every few months.  Don’t promote any of their merchants anymore (actively) so don’t expect any commissions.  Today I seen this on my Webgains dashbaord.  Ha ha I need 1p to get my next payment from Webgains.  Wish Argos and their crap reserve and buy (a.k.a scamming affiliates) 25p offer was on Webgains rather than CJ.

What a pain in the arse.  Firstly you have to download your Google Adwords campaign, I did it via the Adwords Interface.  Then I tried to upload it to Yahoo’s ‘Convert Third Party Campaigns’ and it didn’t upload properly.

After a bit of messing around I found it was because of the negative keywords so I deleted them and uploaded it again and it converted the file and I then had to download the converted file save it and upload it again for the import.  However when I tried to upload the converted file it had errors!!  How can a file Yahoo converts have errors??  Finally after a lot of tweaking got rid of the errors and finally uploaded the campaign.

I don’t understand why Yahoo and MSN don’t have a simple 1 step upload feature which will take an upload of your Adwords campaign and convert it with one click of the mouse.  It seems one of the most obvious features to make sure is 100% correct and is easy peasy for the customer otherwise they won’t bother and just stick with the king that is Google.  Rant  over - Yahoo’s customer service is much better than Google’s - they answer the phone!

One of the most important things for a PPC affiliate is to track keyword performance.  You need to know which ads are getting you the sales and which are simply costing you money and not performing.  By cutting the non performing keywords you can increase your profit margins.

I’ve been tracking sales with unique sub ids in the destination url with are passed into the affiliate link and then generally track the cost of adgroups in Adwords against the sales they produce in Excel.  As least I’m not pissing in the dark but it does mean quite a bit of admin.  Anyway I’ve recently came across Tracking 202 Pro (no its not an affiliate link) which I hope if they integrate the networks I operate on it will replace my Excel spreadsheets, save on the admin time and maybe give me even a greater insight and let me track at the keyword level rather than the adgroup level (or when I’m lazy the campaign level).

Anyway I’ve signed up so I’ll let you know how it goes…..

No doubt Google are miles ahead of their main search competitor’s Yahoo and MSN.  I think the latest release from MSN of Bing.com just shows how desperate MSN are becoming to close the gap between Google.  I can’t see any search engine currently rivaling Google.  Looking at Bing.com the results seem the same and it simply seems a rebranding exercise by MSN.  Surely they can come up with something better than this.

I would love another search engine to come along and get a significant share of the market.  The joys of SEO’ing for 2 search engines but can’t see this happening anytime soon.  Boooo….

Been wondering recently the best way to link to sites that I am a affiliate for - I want to mask my affiliate links.  For Wordpress Al Carlton pointed me towards his Automatic Affiliate Links plugin which is great as you do not have to put your affiliate link into the blog post but put the normal product url and they are automatically made into affiliate links.  Great stuff.

However what if I’m not using Wordpress?  There are also meta refresh redirects but keep hearing Google doesn’t like these so not used these so far but seem a nice script on Hayley Quince’s blog so I’ll give that a try.

I think most SEOs will admit that link building is one of the hardest aspects of the job. Basically get some good links and you should be on your way to getting good rankings. Depending on the market it may take a lot more and a lot of other things come into play like age of site etc…

Anyway as I work on quite a few sites in competitive markets I would love to outsource the link building side of SEO. I’ve recently had a few chats with Indian link building companies and the guys I’ve spoken to I would not touch with a barge pole - basically too many spammy links too quickly. It is a quick route to a Google penalty. One of them wanted paying $3.50 per link and suggested I started with 50 links!! That is probably 50 spammy links which would raise a flag on the site and may trip an automatic penalty.

I know that I need to keep the quality side of link building up and it does take a long time to get those valuable links but there must be a better way to outsource this than to Indian companies who use methods that would have worked well 5 years ago but nowadays will knock your site out of the SERPs.

With UK agencies generally charging between £75 - £125 per hour, freelance SEOs charging about £35 p/hour there must be a market for knowledgable Indian SEO companies to charge about £10 p/hour and produce some really good results. I also don’t want to pay per link as then they get too many links.

Anyway, does anyone outsource their off-page optimisation to India and get good results? Maybe 30 backlinks a month from a variety of sources (some articles, in content links, forums, no follows, authoritive links) with varying anchor text would be great.  Maybe worth taking someone on in India and training them up via Skype?