How Well Do You Know Your Seo?

I thought that it would be a good idea to spend some time reviewing what you’ve learned in the past few months through the SEO Elite newsletter. One thing to remember in any learning process is that unless you apply what you’ve picked up on a daily basis, you’re not going to benefit from your investment. It doesn’t matter how expensive or valuable that advice is; even simple, common sense tips are rendered meaningless by a lack of application. To help you recap what you’ve learned so far, I’ve prepared a short quiz (20 questions) on the most important SEO topics. I hope that at the end of it, you will be able to better evaluate your current SEO efforts, and should be able to pinpoint the areas where you need to improve. The quiz is divided into 3 sections (On-page optimization, link building and general SEO), and is geared towards the basics - so hopefully you should all be doing pretty well in it. The answers are at the end, but please don’t peek: Let’s get started.

SEO Elite Refresher Quiz #1
On-Page Optimization

1. Your website sells Green Widgets - what is the best Title tag for your main page?
a. Get Green Widgets, Buy Green Widgets, Green Widgets, Green Widget
b. We have Cheap Green Widgets with great prices and selection
c. Buy Green Widgets | Discount Widgets
d. Home | Greenwidgets.com

2. Your site map has more than 100 links to your pages. Do you:
a. Create a hierarchy of links, and split up the site map into multiple pages.
b. Keep adding new links, no problem.
c. Add a second page to your site map and add new links to that.
d. Stop adding links to your site map completely.

3. How many words should you consider writing in a page of pure content (such as an article, a blog post or a product review)?
a. 100-200
b. 500-800
c. 200-400
d. 800+

4. What is the optimum keyword density you should aim for?
a. 2%-5%.
b. Keep the content normal, but stuff the page with hidden text in alt tags, meta tags and “white-on-white” text to maximize keyword density.
c. As much as possible, while keeping the content human-readable.
d. Forget keyword density - search engines pay very little attention to it any more. Just focus on writing content that people will want to link to.

5. What should you put inside meta tags?
a. Put your full keyword list in the meta keywords tag, and put your most important keywords in the meta description tag.
b. Ignore the meta tags - search engines don’t use them.
c. Write a short description of your website in the meta description tag, and put your most important keywords in the meta keywords tag.
d. Put your most important keywords in the meta keywords tag and don’t use a meta description tag.

6. How should you use images on your site?
a. Use the alt tag to accurately describe the each image, and include descriptive content around each image.
b. Put your most important keyword in an alt tags followed by the word “graphic”.
c. Just use them wherever it is necessary from an aesthetic perspective, without regard for alt tags because they aren’t really that important.
d. Use alt tags to “hide” your full keyword list so you can increase your page’s keyword density.

7. Which style tag is preferred by the W3C for emphasizing important text?
a. <b>
b. <strong>
c. <heavy>
d. <bold>

Link Building

8. What types of websites are most trusted by search engines (authority sites)?
a. High PR websites.
b. .edu and .gov websites.
c. Low PR websites with lots of backlinks.
d. Medium to High PR websites with lots of backlinks from other high ranking websites.
e. Both b and d

9. Which of these sites will provide the most valuable link?
a. A PR 7 website.
b. A PR 5 site closely related to your niche with strong backlinks from .edu and .gov (trusted) domains.
c. A website with hundreds of pages of duplicate content that is banned in the search engines.
d. A PR 6 website loosely related to your niche but with few ‘trusted’ backlinks.

10. Suppose that you were offered the following 4 choices as a link - which one would be the most valuable?
a. An optimized contextual link (a link as part of a page’s content with proper anchor text) from a closely related PR 5 site’s main page content.
b. A link on the links page of an unrelated PR 7 site - shared with 50 other links (and their two line descriptions).
c. A link on the links page of closely related PR 6 site - shared with 20 other links.
d. A PR 6 link from a directory page with 10 other links only.

11. If you were building links for greenwidgets.com, what would be your strategy in choosing anchor text?
a. Buy high PR links from closely related sites that offer traffic as well as link wealth.
b. Use organic marketing tactics to encourage natural link growth using your site’s content.
c. Submit articles to article directories and link to your site’s inner pages in those articles to build ‘deep’ links.
d. All of the above.

12. Which of these four is the most important in assessing a link?
a. The anchor text.
b. The PR of the page you’re getting the links from.
c. The number of outgoing links on the link page.
d. The title tag of the link page.

13. How many links should you get for your site in the first 6 months (on average)?
a. 50-70 links a month.
b. 100+ links a month.
c. As many quality links as you can.
d. 25-40 a month.

General SEO

14. What does PageRank technically measure?
a. The linking power carried by a particular link.
b. How many external, inbound links point to a particular page.
c. The number and quality of the links pointing to a particular page.
d. Your ranking position in the search engines.

15. What does the term “Sandbox” describe in reference to Google’s SERPs?
a. The ranking factors affecting all new websites that are targeting highly competitive keywords before targeting less competitive keywords.
b. Google’s system for penalizing sites exhibiting an overly-optimizing back-link structure.
c. Google’s penalty for building too many links too quickly.
d. Google’s play area for their staff during lunch break.

16. What is the best way for websites with very little content (like ecommerce stores) rank highly for competitive product terms?
a. They have a lot of natural links (one-way, contextual) with optimal anchor text from a wide variety of websites.
b. Their pages are stuffed with keywords and “white text”.
c. They use content-generating software to spam the search engines and attain false rankings.
d. They pay a lot of money to get high PR links.

17. Which of these will NOT get your site penalized in Google?
a. Thousands of automatically-generated pages built only for the search engines.
b. Building quality links at a steady pace.
c. Scraping (stealing) content from other websites.
d. Getting links from websites that Google considers to be from a ‘bad’ link neighborhood.

18. Which of these five methods will not give you an accurate estimate of the search demand in a niche?
a. Overture search term figures
b. WordTracker.com numbers
c. Nichebot.com
d. Statcounter.com

19. When designing the site structure of a website, which of the following statements is NOT a good idea?
a. Make a site map that points to each page on the site.
b. Attempt to make all pages accessible from the home page by at most 3 clicks.
c. Link all of your inner pages to all of your other websites.
d. Create a category structure that goes from broad to narrow.

20. Which is the best method of getting traffic to your site?
a. Pay-per-click ads.
b. Pay for high PR links so that you get a PR yourself, which will help boost your own search engine rankings.
c. Submit your website to search engines and popular directories, and focus on creating content.
d. Create quality content that people in your niche would want to link to, and then promote that content through article syndication, blogs and forums.
e. All of the above.

Ok, now that you’ve answered all the 20 questions, compare your answers to the answer sheet below. This was a fairly basic quiz, so if you get less than 10 right, you should seriously consider reviewing the material in this newsletter. However, if you got more than 15 right, congratulations - you’ve got the basics right. Make sure that you apply these principles to your websites as well, otherwise you wont see good rankings.

Answers Key:
1-c; 2-a; 3-b; 4-d; 5-c; 6-a; 7-b; 8-e; 9-b; 10-a; 11-d; 12-a; 13-c; 14-c; 15-a; 16-a; 17-b; 18-d; 19-c; 20-e.