10 SEO Questions - Important SEO Questions

1. Question: What four search engines comprise 90%+ of all general (non site-specific) web search traffic?
   Answer: The most correct answer would be Google, Yahoo!, MSN/Live and Ask, though AOL would also be acceptable (AOL, however, pulls its search results from Google and is thus more of a portal that includes Google's search engine than a true search engine itself).
   
   
2. Question: Explain the concept - "the long tail of search."
   Answer: The long tail is an economic theory of demand. It posits that in the modern American economy, there are popular products and unpopular products in every sector and segment of demand and that, in any of those given sectors, a demand curve exists with a few popular products that have high demand and a great number of unpopular products that have a much smaller amount of demand per product. Long tail theory says that in any given demand curve, the "tail" or unpopular products, when combined, will have a greater amount of demand than the popular products at the "head.'Here's how this applies to search:The above graphic does a good job of visually explaining the concept - popular queries in the head have thousands of queries, while unpopular queries in the "long tail" are rarely searched for. However, that "long tail" is actually, when taken together, a far greater amount of demand than the few popular queries. This theory seems to be vindicated by statements like those from Udi Manber of Google suggesting that 25% of queries have "never been seen before."
   
   
3. Question: Name the three most important elements in the head section of an HTML document that are employed by search engines.
   Answer: Title, Meta Description and Meta Robots are the big 3. Although Meta Robots isn't essential to have, it's certainly able to control spider and search activity. Meta keywords is another common answer, but it would rank as a distant 4th, as our experiments show that none of the major engines will rank a page for a keyword that is listed only in the meta keywords tag.
   
   
4. Question: How do search engines treat content inside an IFrame?
   Answer: The engines all interpret content in an embedded IFrame as belonging to a separate document from the page displaying the IFrame content. Thus links and content inside IFrames refer to the page they come from, rather than the page they are placed on. For SEO, one of the biggest implications of this is that links inside an IFrame are interpreted as internal links (coming from the site the IFrame content is on) rather than external links (coming from the site embedding the IFrame).
   
   
5. Question: 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"?
   Answer: Use Yahoo! and search for linkdomain:seomoz.org monkey turnip.
   
   
6. Question: What action does Google threaten against websites that sell links without the use of "nofollow"?
   Answer: Google's Matt Cutts has noted that pages and sites caught selling links for manipulative purposes may have their ability to pass PageRank (or other link juice weighting factors) removed.
   
   
7. Question: What is the difference between local link popularity and global link popularity?
   Answer: Local link popularity refers to links from sites in a specific topical neighborhood (as identified by algorithms such as Teoma - now used by Ask.com), while global link popularity doesn't discriminate and counts all links from any site on the web.
   
   
8. Question: Why is Alexa an inaccurate way to estimate the traffic to a given website?
   Answer: Alexa receives data from only those users who have the Alexa toolbar installed. As such, the sampling is massively skewed towards webmasters and technology buffs, who are more likely to use the toolbar than the population at large.
   
   
9. Question: Name four types of queries for which Google provides "instant answers" or "onebox results" ahead of the standard web results
   Answer: Flight searches, such as "Seattle to Chicago"; recipe searches such as "chicken recipes"; image searches such as those for "Hopper paintings"; stock quotes like "GE stock quote" and many more. Google lists them all on their features page. Of course, they neglected to mention our favorite (and I believe there a few more that aren't covered publicly).
   
   
10. Question: Describe why a flat site architecture is typically more advantageous for search engine rankings than a deep site architecture
    Answer: Flat architectures on websites allow spiders to crawl a large amount of pages without having to spider through many "clicks" or different pages to reach those links. A deep site architecture will force bots to crawl to many pages before being able to reach all of the content on a site. Flat site architecture provides three primary bonuses - first, search spiders are more likely to visit all of the content; second, the spiders are more likely to discover and index new content more quickly (as they don't have to visit as many pages to be exposed to new content); third, PageRank and link juice is more effectively passed with fewer pages and more links rather than more pages with fewer links, helping to keep content ranking and out of the (now defunct) supplemental results.