Ten Questions to Ask Your SEO
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
Rand Fishkin pleasantly knocked the wind out of the sails of a the crowd of SEO pretenders with a quick ten question SEO quiz.
Rand believes that anyone selling SEO should be able to answer these questions:
- What four search engines comprise 90%+ of all general (non site-specific) web search traffic?
- Explain the concept - "the long tail of search."
- Name the three most important elements in the head section of an HTML document that are employed by search engines.
- How do search engines treat content inside an IFrame?
- What resource and query can you use to determine which pages link to any page on SEOmoz.org and contain the words "monkey" and "turnip"?
- What action does Google threaten against websites that sell links without the use of "nofollow"?
- What is the difference between local link popularity and global link popularity?
- Why is Alexa an inaccurate way to estimate the traffic to a given website?
- Name four types of queries for which Google provides "instant answers" or "onebox results" ahead of the standard web results.
- Describe why a flat site architecture is typically more advantageous for search engine rankings than a deep site architecture.
- BONUS (Answer this one and I'll be very impressed): Name twelve unique metrics search engines are suspected to consider when weighting links and how each affects rankings positively or negatively.
I was able to answer all of them apart from local link popularity and global link popularity and managed ten of the twelve metrics quickly.
Of course concerning link popularity I know the concept, but think of it as topical links rather than local link popularity.
How did you do? Check your own answers here.
