10 Questions to Ask When Hiring an SEO Expert

The 10 Interview Questions I Now Like to Ask SEO Experts

1) What Search-related blogs/forums do you read and enjoy? This is my favorite and a way to casually start conversation. It will hopefully spark discussion and you will get a sense of whether or not they just do SEO because it’s their day job or whether or not they are truly interested in their profession. If they are having a lot of trouble with this (at the very least they should name a Search forum) it is highly possible they are going through the motions and don’t really have much passion. Side note: On the flipside, beware of the SEO enthusiast who is just a lot of talk and gives you the sense that all they do is read blogs all day long. They might be a lot of talk, and sadly, no action behind their words. Needless to say, this is bad too. See SEO question #4 to help eliminate this risk.

2) Can you tear this website apart? Best question to ask. Grab a laptop, pull up any website, hand it over to him or her. Ask the person to tell you what’s wrong with it and how can it be improved, right there. Make it a random site that has nothing to do with your own site. Does this person start looking at the code? Does he or she talk through the process? Does this person identify elements on the site’s pages that should be optimized? Does this person pull up search engines and do some link checks and page checks? Can they identify URL/domain issues, redirects or any technical problems right off the bat? Does this person stare at the screen like a deer frozen by some headlights?

3) How would you pursue links for your website? Linkbaiting, SMO, looking at competitor’s links, blogs, PR, directories, spam and bad link farms? Not everyone is a linking expert, but they should have a good clue on how to obtain them.

4) How do you track results to prove success? Is this person just going to name that they have achieved a #1 ranking for a brand name term? Or are they also going to talk about the importance of long-tail keyword traffic and how it can offer both relevant and higher converting search engine traffic? Are they going to discuss the increase in conversions for the website? Are they going to mention different ways they were able to substantially increase and generate new traffic to the website that was never there before?

5) Can you describe or produce a recent successful SEO campaign? If this person truly did succeed, they should have a good story to tell.

6) Do you have any technical skills you are confident about or any type of website programming/design experience? I think this is one of the things that many search marketers are often missing from their skillset. I am not saying it is the absolute most important skill to have to be a great SEO (because I’ve worked with some great non-technical SEO marketers and strategists that were phenomenal), but I think it can definitely put a candidate over the top and this person will probably identify and resolve triple the amount of issues that a non-technical SEO professional will. Do they know how and why they should use

7) Name tools that you use for SEO: for keyword research (if they name Overture Tool, I’d run)? Tracking keyword rankings? Tracking links? Identifying bad redirects and problematic JavaScript. Do they do it by hand? How and what do they use is important here.

How many SEO campaigns have you been involved with and what was your role? Was this person a strategist for some real important accounts? What were they? Did they get their hands real dirty and concentrate on identifying and resolving issues? Depends on what you want or need, preferably, you’d want both.

9) Do you own your own website or blog? Some employers would be scared off by this, especially since they would fear that their SEOs would optimize on their company time, but screw that. The fact is, the more exposure that an SEO has with websites (especially their own), the more tricks of the trade he or she will be able to develop and fire off as part of their arsenal. This will lead to them finding the latest that truly works real well for their own site to generate traffic, and then introducing it to your site with proven results.

10)  What are the most important on-page elements for search engine performance and how would they rank it in order of importance? E.G. Is it Title tag first? Description tag? Headers? Text? Extra geek points if they can tell you exactly what each of the search engines like specifically.

I am certain some of you have your own good SEO questions and interview experiences with SEO candidates but these are just some of the ones that I’ve encountered. Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on these.

April 4th, 2008 Posted by Frank Antonellis | Search Engine Marketing | 34 comments

If You’re Not Cheating Digg for Traffic, You’re Not Trying

No questions about it, Digg, StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites deliver great traffic. Depending on how viral your post may be, you can expect either a handful of visits or if the content proves to be viral or even controversial enough, tons of it.

I have been doing a lot of experimenting with both Digg and StumbleUpon for the past few months, submitting the best articles that I could find and also voting for other people’s submitted posts. In recent weeks I have received thousands (in some cases tens-of-thousands of visitors a day) swarming to view a particular post of mine if it grew in popularity. Some of these posts have been truly newsworthy, while admittedly, others have been a bit more on the informational and “tips” related side, which still works to a certain degree. The fact is, regardless of how many people you have visiting your sites, by simply submitting your latest posts or articles to social sites, you will see an increase in backlinks coming from these sites and others. These backlinks are quickly spotted in Yahoo! and other search engines and helps establish your site as an authority on a particular subject.

Getting Greedy: Greed is good, right? Well, like any popular site or search engine, there are aggressive marketers and spammers, whether white or black hat that will naturally either try to toe the line for increased results, or downright spam the hell out of what they might consider a loop hole in the system. We’ve seen it in the past with SEO, in the beginning, the basic white-on-white text on HTML pages stuffed with important keywords, that eventually led to more sophisticated cloaking/doorway pages to actually feed search engines a neatly “stuffed” page of content, while showing a visitor something else that looked less spammy. That was all fun until you realize that it really isn’t worth it. Creating the best user experience is what will ultimately get a user to keep coming back to your site.

The same greed is encountered with Digg, where marketers, jerks, spammers (and myself, I guess I fit into one of these categories, maybe all three?) are looking for a way to get their posts to appear on Digg’s valuable homepage for optimal traffic. Digg introduced a “Share” button where you converse with “friends” and “shout” out stories that are of interest. Well, if you have a good amount of friends associated to your Digg account, it is only natural and instinctual for a beast like myself to start wondering what would happen if I shouted out to 500 people everyday to check out my latest post. This will work for a little while, but eventually, people get annoyed, and more importantly to someone like myself, Digg does too. The bastahds actually seemed to take away my ability to “shout” to other Digg users for a few hours, until finally giving back the capability to shout again. Warning sign? Maybe, which is comedy in itself, but a lesson learned. I still receive the Diggs and traffic that I believe I deserve, but I am being extra careful with the way I approach it.

Overall, the moral of this story is that in a time of always pushing the envelope, having beloved football coaches caught cheating (just a little bit though, but no one was/will be stopping the Patriots this year anyways), and having familiar phrases like ”if you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying” being all too familiar, when dealing with social sites, it’s best to remember the consequences and truly concentrate on what matters most with a website: delivering the best and most relevant content possible for qualified visits.

I still think that shouting out to 500 people was fun while it lasted though.

November 20th, 2007 Posted by Frank Antonellis | Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Social Networking, Social Media Optimization, Digg, StumbleUpon, Spam | one comment

Hakia Search Engine Rolls Out New “Mo” Peer-to-Peer Feature

Hakia, the semantic search engine, now features a new peer-to-peer feature dubbed “Mo” (yes, just like our loveable friend from the Three Stooges) where a person searching for any type of information on Hakia will also have the opportunity to connect with other Hakia search engine users that entered similar search queries.

For example, if you happen to search for “best SEO in Boston” on most search engines, you might be flooded with outdated and spammy sites. Well, Hakia now allows you to talk to another person looking for the same thing by clicking on a “Meet Others who asked the same query” button, and you’ll arrive at a message board where someone already claims that Frank Antonellis is the greatest of all SEOs (okay, it was me, but you get the idea from this example).

It is a clever way to get people to interact with each other and to boost the social aspect and popularity of the search engine so it isn’t just “another” search engine. Bravo!

Now, I wonder if someone is searching for “best looking SEO” for me to spam?

November 1st, 2007 Posted by Frank Antonellis | Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engines, Hakia | no comments

Tony Soprano Was Never Whacked & Social Media Optimization Rocks

Two things: one Search, one Sopranos. We’ll start with the most important:

According to ‘Sopranos’ creator David Chase just now, after breaking his long silence after the controversial ending that gave most Americans “agita,” he is now saying that Tony Soprano was never murdered on the hit cable tv show. He also sticks up for the fictional mob boss after seeing how all of America was outraged that he never got whacked.

According to Chase, the people ”had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ‘justice’… The pathetic thing — to me — was how much they wanted HIS blood, after cheering him on for eight years.”

I think David Chase is getting a little excited here over something that people aren’t talking about anymore, and who cares what people thought about it then. I thought it was brilliant to leave the whole country hanging and banging their TV sets because of the black screen. Though I will say, Tony Soprano could have used a guy like Chase in his own crew, come to think about it.

Search - Been doing a lot of aggressive social media optimization with sites, and I have seen some significant results. My conclusion at this point is that a social media campaign can generate relevant traffic, create backlinks, and should co-exist with your existing SEO strategy. Producing Digg-worthy content and optimizing it is a lot more fun than setting good 301 Redirects and all of the technical things that a good SEO needs to do, but this is definitely one of the next phases after cleaning up a site and creating relevant content that adds a lot more fun to the never-ending process.

If you have a blog (add one to your site if you don’t), and are not sure how to begin, I would recommend choosing two social networking sites to focus on, and it would be Digg and StumbleUpon to submit to. There are other ways to boost the amount of votes and diggs as you go along, and creating “Digg-worthy” copy is just one of them. Testing and monitoring results can show you a lot of data and significant results. Feel free to drop a line if I can help with any tips.

As Journey best said, “Don’t Stop Believin”. Okay, that was lame.

October 23rd, 2007 Posted by Frank Antonellis | Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engines, Social Media Optimization, The Sopranos | one comment