How to Get Data In and Out of SiteCatalyst?

How to Get Data In and Out of SiteCatalyst — Part II

ANALYTICS · By Brent Dykes On September 12, 2012 · Add Comment

In the pre­vi­ous post in this two-part series, I described the var­i­ous meth­ods of get­ting data into Site­Cat­a­lyst. Once you’ve col­lected the nec­es­sary data for your busi­ness needs, you’ll next be inter­ested in putting the data to use for report­ing, analy­sis, or opti­miza­tion pur­poses. There may be many dif­fer­ent ways you’d like to lever­age your Site­Cat­a­lyst data so I think it’s impor­tant to under­stand what options you have at your dis­posal so that you can achieve your busi­ness objec­tives as effi­ciently as possible.

Out­put Options

After exam­in­ing the input options in the first part of this series, let’s switch to look­ing at how you get data out of Site­Cat­a­lyst. Again there is a dashed line between the var­i­ous out­put alter­na­tives. The first four options focus pri­mar­ily on data visu­al­iza­tions while the remain­ing two out­put options are geared towards serv­ing up raw data.

Adobe DMS Interface

The most obvi­ous way to access your Site­Cat­a­lyst data is through the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Suite (DMS) inter­face. Within the inter­face you have the abil­ity to view and inter­act with your data in var­i­ous ways and via dif­fer­ent types of devices – desk­top, tablet, mobile phone, or HD dis­play. Data can be dis­played, down­loaded directly, or sent to other co-workers in var­i­ous file for­mats such as PDF, Excel, Word, CSV, etc. The handy Data Extract fea­ture (found in most reports under More Actions > Extract Data) lets you cus­tomize a default report with var­i­ous val­ues for the X and Y axes. You can also book­mark cus­tom reports and build interface-based dash­boards. The menu struc­ture and reports can be cus­tomized to meet your spe­cific busi­ness needs. In addi­tion, if you have Adobe Dis­cover or Adobe Insight, you can per­form deep-dive, ad hoc analy­sis on your Site­Cat­a­lyst data in these advanced ana­lyt­ics tools.

Sched­uled Reports

In Site­Cat­a­lyst, you’re able to sched­ule reports to be sent out to dif­fer­ent busi­ness users on a recur­ring basis. You can con­trol the recip­i­ents, for­mat, time frame (fixed or rolling), deliv­ery fre­quency (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.), and so on. The pub­lish­ing list fea­ture enables you to dis­trib­ute data from var­i­ous report suites to dif­fer­ent groups or sets of email addresses. For exam­ple, you could send out an exter­nal search report to mul­ti­ple stake­hold­ers, which would be based on their unique location/report suite (France vs. Canada). You also have the option of pub­lish­ing a Report­Builder (cus­tom Excel-based) report rather than a Site­Cat­a­lyst report or dash­board. You also have alerts that can be con­fig­ured to send out a report when a par­tic­u­lar con­di­tion or thresh­old is met.

Excel Inte­gra­tion

Adobe pro­vides Site­Cat­a­lyst users with the oppor­tu­nity to pull data directly into Excel using the Report­Builder add-in. This pow­er­ful tool enables you to build cus­tomized data requests from Site­Cat­a­lyst, which can be inserted into your Excel work­sheets and dynam­i­cally ref­er­ence spe­cific cells. Using ReportBuilder’s data fil­ters, you can extract and com­bine data points into highly cus­tomized reports. Once an advanced dash­board has been cre­ated, it can be man­u­ally refreshed or auto­mat­i­cally pub­lished with the most up-to-date infor­ma­tion. For more infor­ma­tion on Adobe Report­Builder, down­load the Report­Builder Man­ual within the Site­Cat­a­lyst Prod­uct Doc­u­men­ta­tion page.

Report­ing API

If you would like to insert Site­Cat­a­lyst data and reports into third-party appli­ca­tions such as an intranet or company-branded appli­ca­tion, you can use the Report­ing API for pro­gram­matic access to SiteCatalyst’s core report data. Through the Report­ing API, you’re able to cre­ate cus­tomized reports that include cal­cu­lated met­rics and for­mat­ting options. If you’re using Site­Cat­a­lyst 15, you’ll be able to gen­er­ate reports based on seg­ments. Recently the Report­ing API was updated and given the abil­ity to per­form multi-level break­downs across reports. For more infor­ma­tion on this method, go to the API doc­u­men­ta­tion within the Adobe Devel­oper Con­nec­tion.

While not as pow­er­ful or flex­i­ble as the Report­ing API, the Site­Cat­a­lyst Wid­get is a sim­ple way to insert Site­Cat­a­lyst reports into a web page, intranet page, or other HTML-based appli­ca­tions. This wid­get will pull in your book­marked reports and dash­boards from the Site­Cat­a­lyst inter­face into a des­ig­nated loca­tion. While the pop­u­lar­ity of wid­gets has waned some­what, you might still find some use­ful sce­nar­ios for these report­ing snip­pets. You can down­load this wid­get tool directly from the Site­Cat­a­lyst interface.

DataWare­house Reports

If you have DataWare­house enabled for Site­Cat­a­lyst, you can gen­er­ate ad hoc data reports on your his­tor­i­cal Site­Cat­a­lyst data, which are deliv­ered as CSV files via email or FTP. With DataWare­house Reports, you build a query to fil­ter your Site­Cat­a­lyst data and iso­late spe­cific data points. Before Dis­cover was intro­duced, DataWare­house Reports were the pri­mary way to per­form multi-level break­downs and seg­ment analy­sis on Site­Cat­a­lyst data (rest in peace ASI slots). The vast major­ity of requests take less than a day to process, but depend­ing on the com­plex­ity of your query and the amount of data it can take longer to process. DataWare­house has a request man­ager inter­face and API to help man­age and pri­or­i­tize DW reports. For more infor­ma­tion on DataWare­house Reports, go to the Site­Cat­a­lyst Knowl­edge Base and down­load theDataWare­house: Cre­at­ing Cus­tomized Reports with Seg­mented Data (KB arti­cle # 587).

DataWare­house Data Feeds

Your com­pany might want to com­bine its click­stream data from Site­Cat­a­lyst with other data in an inter­nal Enter­prise Data Ware­house (EDW). The click­stream data feeds pro­vide the stream of raw, partially-processed server calls from Site­Cat­a­lyst in a delim­ited data set. The data feeds are con­fig­ured at the report suite level and deliv­ered on a daily basis (con­tain­ing the hit data for the pre­vi­ous day). Depend­ing on the aver­age amount of data col­lected for the report suite, you can choose to have it deliv­ered via FTP in a sin­gle zipped file or mul­ti­ple zipped files (rec­om­mended). For more infor­ma­tion on DataWare­house Data Feeds, down­load the Click­stream Data Feeds White Paper within the Site­Cat­a­lyst White Papers page.

Gen­e­sis Third-Party Integrations

If you’re con­sid­er­ing inte­grat­ing third-party appli­ca­tions with Site­Cat­a­lyst, Adobe’s Gen­e­sis inte­gra­tion plat­form rep­re­sents a stream­lined way of import­ing and export­ing data out of Site­Cat­a­lyst. The var­i­ous pre-built Gen­e­sis inte­gra­tions (email, sur­vey, ad serv­ing, social media) sim­plify the process of import­ing data from other mar­ket­ing appli­ca­tions and also give you con­trol over what Site­Cat­a­lyst data is shared with these third-party ven­dors. Adobe Gen­e­sis lever­ages all of the afore­men­tioned input and out­put mech­a­nisms to auto­mate the process of cap­tur­ing and shar­ing data with other systems.

From read­ing this two-part blog post, I hope you have gained a clearer under­stand­ing of the dif­fer­ent means avail­able to you for get­ting data in and out of Site­Cat­a­lyst. There may be some mech­a­nisms that you may be cur­rently under­uti­liz­ing or hadn’t con­sid­ered for spe­cific sce­nar­ios. If you would like to find out more infor­ma­tion on the var­i­ous meth­ods, I’ve tried to high­light links to dif­fer­ent resources in the blog posts. I’d love to hear if you have applied any of these meth­ods in cre­ative ways that weren’t cov­ered in this arti­cle. I’m sure other read­ers would love to hear about your suc­cesses with these cre­ative approaches as well.

How to Get Data In and Out of SiteCatalyst?

How to Get Data In and Out of SiteCatalyst — Part I

ANALYTICS · By Brent Dykes On September 6, 2012 · 1 Comment

One of the key ben­e­fits of using Adobe Site­Cat­a­lyst for dig­i­tal ana­lyt­ics is the vari­ety of options you have for mov­ing data in and out of the tool. On the input side, your com­pany may have a vari­ety of dig­i­tal prop­er­ties and ini­tia­tives that it would like to track with dig­i­tal analytics—websites, mobile apps, web-based kiosks, cam­paigns, etc. It may also want to com­bine its dig­i­tal data with use­ful meta­data and offline data to enrich the analy­sis of its vis­i­tors. Adobe gives you dif­fer­ent options for col­lect­ing, group­ing, and append­ing data, which pro­vides your busi­ness greater flex­i­bil­ity and more action­able insights.

On the out­put side, data that is locked up in silos won’t drive your busi­ness for­ward. Your dig­i­tal data needs to be shared, ana­lyzed, inte­grated, and ulti­mately used to improve busi­ness per­for­mance. Adobe gives you mul­ti­ple ways to unleash your dig­i­tal data.

In this two-part post, I’ll pro­vide a high-level overview of the var­i­ous input and out­put options that you have with Site­Cat­a­lyst. I’ll also share use cases for each option so you can bet­ter eval­u­ate how each can be best applied within your orga­ni­za­tion. In addi­tion, I’ll try to point you to places for fur­ther infor­ma­tion on each input/output method.

Input Options

On the left side of the dia­gram above, there is a dashed line which sep­a­rates the two main types of input alter­na­tives. The first two options are the real-time/live data col­lec­tion meth­ods for Site­cat­a­lyst. The sec­ond two options rep­re­sent post-collection meth­ods for import­ing addi­tional data into Adobe’s ana­lyt­ics platform.

JavaScript Tags

Today most dig­i­tal ana­lyt­ics plat­forms use this method to col­lect data from web­sites and other web-based sys­tems. This approach involves plac­ing client-side JavaScript code within your web pages, which sends page, browser, and vis­i­tor data to Site­Cat­a­lyst. Most Site­Cat­a­lyst imple­men­ta­tions lever­age this “web bea­con” approach. More and more orga­ni­za­tions are now using tag man­age­ment solu­tions such as Adobe Tag­Man­ager to deploy and man­age their var­i­ous JavaScript tags, includ­ing their Site­Cat­a­lyst page code. Another way of mak­ing the deploy­ment of JavaScript tags eas­ier on your devel­op­ment team is the intro­duc­tion ofcon­text vari­ables and pro­cess­ing rules, which give both the devel­oper and the mar­keter more flex­i­bil­ity and con­trol over their implementation.

App­Mea­sure­ment Libraries

Besides the stan­dard JavaScript tag­ging, com­pa­nies also have the option of using Adobe’s App­Mea­sure­ment libraries. These mea­sure­ment libraries pro­vide a mech­a­nism for data col­lec­tion when the JavaScript tag method isn’t com­pat­i­ble with the device, appli­ca­tion, or sys­tem to be tracked. Adobe has released App­Mea­sure­ment libraries for mobile devices (iOS, Android, Win­dows Phone), rich media (Flash-Flex, Sil­verlight), and other languages/frameworks (Java, .NET, PHP, XML). All of these libraries lever­age the Data Inser­tion API to pass data to Site­Cat­a­lyst, which can also be used for batch uploads or delayed data collection.

Here are some of the inter­est­ing use cases for the App­Mea­sure­ment libraries:

• Col­lect data on mobile apps and non-JavaScript sup­ported elec­tronic devices
• Send order con­fir­ma­tion server-side from a back­end trans­ac­tional sys­tem to reduce order count dis­crep­an­cies cre­ated by client-side browser issues
• Mea­sure tele­phone call sys­tems and intranets
• Track actual file down­loads rather than clicks on down­load links
• Use as a workaround for the IE URL lim­i­ta­tion (IE has a 2083 char­ac­ter lim­i­ta­tion that can trun­cate your Site­Cat­a­lyst image requests if they exceed this threshold)

In order to link a visitor’s behav­iors across JavaScript and tag­less data col­lec­tion, you may need to gen­er­ate your own vis­i­tor ID (unique iden­ti­fier for a par­tic­u­lar vis­i­tor) so that the App­Mea­sure­ment and JavaScript val­ues match. With­out a tie to a com­mon vis­i­tor ID, App­Mea­sure­ment data is typ­i­cally col­lected in a sep­a­rate report suite. For more infor­ma­tion on the App­Mea­sure­ment libraries, go to the Devel­oper & Imple­men­ta­tion sec­tion within the Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Suite Help Cen­ter.

SAINT Clas­si­fi­ca­tions

As one of Adobe’s more cre­ative acronyms (Site­Cat­a­lyst Attribute Import­ing and Nam­ing Tool), SAINT enables you to upload meta­data for Site­Cat­a­lyst cus­tom vari­ables (prop or eVar). Meta­data is data about data or attrib­utes about your data. For a par­tic­u­lar cam­paign track­ing code, arti­cle ID, or prod­uct ID, you can assign mul­ti­ple clas­si­fi­ca­tions to define or aggre­gate your data in var­i­ous ways. For exam­ple, for each cam­paign track­ing code you can spec­ify the mar­ket­ing chan­nel, offer type, fea­tured prod­uct, ad place­ment, cre­ative type, etc. Each clas­si­fi­ca­tion gen­er­ates its own unique report in Site­Cat­a­lyst, which can be bro­ken down by other attrib­utes or dimensions.

A great fea­ture of SAINT clas­si­fi­ca­tions is the fact they are retroac­tive. If you want to re-classify or change some meta­data val­ues, you can sim­ply replace the SAINT file with an updated ver­sion. While many attrib­utes are just text-based (brand, color, size, etc.), a spe­cial form of clas­si­fi­ca­tion (Numeric 2) allows you to cre­ate met­rics (cost of goods sold) that can have dif­fer­ent val­ues for dif­fer­ent time peri­ods. For more infor­ma­tion on SAINT, down­load the SAINT Clas­si­fi­ca­tions Man­ualwithin the Site­Cat­a­lyst Prod­uct Doc­u­men­ta­tion page.

Data Sources

In Site­Cat­a­lyst, you have the abil­ity to import other forms of time-based data. The data sources fea­ture is often used for upload­ing offline met­rics but it can also be used to import data from other dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing sys­tems such as your email or ad serv­ing ven­dor. In the upload process, you spec­ify and map the met­rics and data dimen­sions to par­tic­u­lar cus­tom events and eVars for report­ing and analy­sis purposes.

There are two main types of Data Source uploads that you need to be aware of. First, you have the abil­ity to upload sum­mary data, which attaches offline met­rics to a sub­set of spec­i­fied reports (eVars). Sec­ond, the Trans­ac­tion ID method enables you to link an offline event to an online event through a unique trans­ac­tion iden­ti­fier that is set when an online event occurs such as a lead form being sub­mit­ted. The advan­tage of trans­ac­tion ID data is that your uploaded met­rics are fully inte­grated with the rest of your Site­Cat­a­lyst reports rather than a few des­ig­nated reports with sum­mary data uploads.

Here are some com­mon exam­ples of how com­pa­nies use Data Sources:

• Upload cam­paign met­rics (ad impres­sions, cam­paign cost, etc.) via sum­mary data tied to cam­paign track­ing codes
• Import cost of goods sold data via trans­ac­tion ID to ana­lyze gross mar­gin performance
• Tie prod­uct returns via trans­ac­tion ID to close the gap between gross sales and net sales
• Upload closed offline sales via trans­ac­tion ID to under­stand what online tac­tics and behav­iors close busi­ness deals not just gen­er­ate leads
• Bring in finan­cial loan approvals, declines, and loan value from offline pro­cess­ing via trans­ac­tion ID
• Import CRM data for data that may change over time such as cus­tomer life­time value, cus­tomer type (silver/gold/platinum), loca­tion, etc. via trans­ac­tion ID

A third type of Data Source upload is known as fully processed data, which is used in lim­ited cases for post-collection batch uploads (tied to vis­i­tor ID or IP/user agent) and is han­dled as if it were received by Adobe’s data col­lec­tion servers at the time spec­i­fied. An impor­tant aspect to know about Data Sources is that the uploaded data is indis­tin­guish­able from your nor­mal Site­Cat­a­lyst data, and there is not a mech­a­nism to delete the data if it is erro­neous (so be care­ful!). For more infor­ma­tion on Data Sources, down­load the Data Sources User Guide within the Site­Cat­a­lyst Prod­uct Doc­u­men­ta­tion page.

In sum­mary, I’ve cov­ered four key meth­ods for col­lect­ing or import­ing data into Site­Cat­a­lyst. In thenext arti­cle in this two-part series, I’ll review the mul­ti­ple ways you can extract data from SiteCatalyst.

Omniture Site Catalyst: Props ,eVars and events

Omniture Site Catalyst: Props ,eVars and events

Omniture SiteCatalyst is one of the most advanced web analytics solutions available in the market today. SiteCatalyst's advanced reporting capabilities generate over 150,000 report combinations. Traffic reporting lets you analyze all aspects of visitor activity, such as traffic patterns, popular channels, referred technology and finding methods used .

 So How does SiteCatalyst collect data?

The SiteCatalyst data collection process is fairly basic. After proper development time, the SiteCatalyst code (or Code to Paste) is placed in the HTML source code on the desired pages of their production web site(s).

When a visitor enters your web site, your landing page loads in their browser window. As the page loads, the SiteCatalyst Code to Paste sets certain variables, for example, the pageName variable, and the SiteCatalyst JavaScript Include file. The variables (and other identifiers) are used to facilitate the data collection process, and can be dynamically populated with server or application variables.

The JavaScript Include file builds an image request, or web beacon. The image request uses a transparent 1x1 pixel image to pass data from the web page to the Omniture data center. No personal data about the visitors is ever passed to Omniture. The process is repeated every time the visitor accesses a page that contains SiteCatalyst code.

The image request contains a query string that passes the data variables that are collected on the page. Some of these variables are set specifically in the Code to Paste, and some variables are set automatically within the JavaScript file. Additionally, the image request contains a number of variables in the HTTP header. All of these variables constitute the sum of the data collection elements.



Props, eVars and events :

At the heart of SiteCatalyst's data collection methodology are Props, eVars and events. Props and eVars are variables that store data and pass them on to the data collection server, whereas events help in triggering data collection by these variables. Let's look into the variables in a little more detail:

Props and eVars:

Custom Insight Variables, also called props or property variables, are counters that count the number of times each value is sent into SiteCatalyst. They also enable you to correlate custom data with specific traffic-related events. s.prop variables are embedded in the SiteCatalyst code on each page of your website. Through s.prop variables, SiteCatalyst allows you to create custom reports, unique to your organization, industry, and business objectives. For example, if you are an automobile manufacturer you may be interested in seeing "Most Popular Car Model" to complement your "Most Popular Pages" report. You can accomplish this by allocating one of your traffic properties to represent car model and then implement your code to pass in car model on the appropriate pages.

There are endless business questions that can be answered through the Custom Insight Variables, depending on what you are capturing from your website. The following list contains a few common goals and objectives.

§ Understanding user navigation through the web site

§ Understanding internal user search behavior

§ Segmenting traffic by navigation or category

§ Segmenting visitor behavior by demographics

An important thing to note is that Props are non persistent variables. The values that are populated in these variables last only within the context of the particular page.


eVars (or Custom Conversion Insight Variables) are used to identify how well specific attributes or actions contribute to success events on your site. For example, for a media site, eVars may be used to identify how well internal promotions bring visitors to register. When a visitor clicks on the internal promotion, an eVar can be used to store a unique identifier for that promotion. When the same visitor completes registration and a custom success event is fired, the original unique identifier will receive credit for the registration event.

eVars are persistent variables and can be used to store a particular value throughout a session unless over written. They can be used to tie success events to custom variable.


Events are triggers that help in collection of data. For example in case you want to check how many time a certain product has been viewed, you can use an event that is fired each time that product page is viewed. Omniture offers predefined and Custom events which will discussed a later post.

Seo Interview Questions and Answers

 Useful list of Tricky Seo Interview Questions and Answers. These interview questions are useful for the role of Seo trainee, Seo Analyst, Seo Executive, Seo Manager, Social Media executive, Social Media Manager etc. Read them below and prepare for your Seo interview.
SEO INTERVIEW QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 
1-  Tell me something about yourself?

Seo Job Interview 
(Image Source:- Voguemarieflickr )

You should brief your interviewer about your family, your educational background and your work experience.

2-  What was the recent update which Google had and what changes would you suggest for it?

Google recently had the Penguin update which was a measure to control web spam. Penguin update had penalized websites which had a spammy backlinking profile and returned more semantic results. Semantic results were based on the relationship between words present on the search query. Penguin trusted sites that had original and good content, fresh content, good social media presence and quality organic links.

3- What all verticals have you handled in your SEO career so far?

Verticals means on what themes of websites have you worked so far- this may include education, real estate, IT, travel, Shopping, jobs etc.


4- What do you understand by the Panda update?

The Panda update was done to improve the quality of search results in Google. Panda update also known as the farmer update was done to eliminate content farms which provided less user friendly  experience. It used machine language scalability as one of the important metrics for judging relevancy of a web page. All the focus was transformed on the user and now quality content , proper design, proper speed, proper use of images and videos, content to ad  ratio all mattered more after the Panda update. You need to optimize your site for better clickthrough rate and a less bounce rate.

5- What is Google Sandbox in SEO?

Google Sandbox is an imaginary area where new and less authoritative sites are kept for a specified time period until they establish themselves of being displayed on the search results. It happens by building too many links within a short period of time. 


 6- What is the difference between on page seo and off page seo?

On page seo means optimizing your website and making changes on title, meta tags, site structure, site content, solving canonicalization problem, managing robots.txt etc.

Off page optimization means optimizing your web presence which involves backlink building and social media promotion.

7- How will you solve canonicalization issue or what is .htacess file?

.htacess file is used to solve the canonicalization issue of a website. It may happen that the home page of the site may take several urls like http://www.example.com or http://www.example.com/index.html or http://example.com . The search engines might treat these url as different and may divide the link juice gained by having various backlinks made with any of these 3 urls. The link juice gets divided between these three urls equally. .htacess file is created to have a single url of the home page so that the link juice is passed onto single url.

 8- What is keyword stemming in SEO?

Keyword stemming is the process of finding out the root word from the search query. A query having the word “ playful” would be broken down to the word “play” with the help of stemming algorithm. The search results returned would be having the word ” play” in it.

  9- What is LSI?

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It is a data retrieval technique which finds connection between words and the use of synonyms while fetching data from the index.

  10- What do you know about the Florida update?

Florida update happened on November 16th 2003. This update applied stemming, maintained local rank, penalized over optimized sites by applying filter etc. In short, it modified the search results before presenting it to the user by applying filters.

  11- What are the limitations of title and description tags?

Title tag can be between 66-70 characters and meta description tag can be between 160-170 characters. 

 12- Does Google uses keyword tags?

No, Google does not make use of keyword tags.

 13- What is 301 redirect?

It is a method of redirecting user from the old page url to the new page url. 301 redirect is a permanent redirect and is helpful in passing the link juice from the old url to the new url.

 14- What was your exact job profile in your previous company?

Provide a suitable explanation about your job profile which would include your job responsibilities and the amount of work you have handled so far.


15- What do you understand by Cloaking?

Cloaking involves using deceptive techniques which presents the user with a different version of the webpage than that presented to the search engines.

16- What tools do you use for doing seo?

I use Google webmaster tools, Google Analytics, Open site explorer, Alexa, Website grader etc.

See:- List of free seo tools 

17- What are your good qualities?

You will have to answer here about your good qualities like- I am hardworking, sincere, punctual, love to accept challenges etc.

18- What is the difference between Seo and Sem?

        Seo stands for Search Engine Optimization while Sem stands for Search Engine Marketing. Seo provides organic traffic to a website with the help of search engines while Sem involves the use of Google adwords and other paid channels of advertising. 

19- What is PPC? 

      PPC stands for Pay Per Click. It is a form of advertising methodology in which the advertiser pays for every click on their ads. Google uses this form of advertising in its channel of advertising called Adwords.

20- Which is better Robots.txt or Meta Robots Tag?

       Meta Robots tag is much better as it helps in forcing the search engine crawlers not to index and display the hidden pages in your server.

21- Do you use separate Seo strategies for Google,Yahoo and Bing?
        Yes I use separate strategies for Google,Yahoo and other search engines.More backlinks are required for Google .It pays more attention to backlinks and site authority while Yahoo and Bing pays more attention to title and Meta tags. Hence, a site takes time to rank on Google as compared to Yahoo and Bing. 

22- How will you increase the Pagerank of a page?

        By building more backlinks from authority sites and high page rank webpages. 

23- How will you check the number of backlinks of your competitors site?

        With the help of the link operator on Google and by using various external tools like Alexa, Backlink Watch , Open Site Explorer, Backlink finder etc.

24- Which is more important- Building backlinks to a website or building great content?

        Both are important. Building great content is necessary as it is your first step towards ranking ;and building backlinks helps to build authority to your website and is an important metric for ranking well. Hence both should go parallel and both are equally important.

25- Who is Matt Cutts?

        Matt Cutts is the head of Google's web spam team.

26- If a website has a search engine saturation of 40% , what does that mean?

        It means 40% of web pages from that particular website are indexed by the search engine.

27- What do you mean by anchor text?

        Clickable text written on an hyperlink is known as anchor text. It is of great value to the search engines and is used for evaluating the relevance of web pages with respect to search queries.  

28- How will you treat Web standards while optimizing a website?

        Google loves web standards hence I will apply the web standards provided by W3C while optimizing a web site. 

29- What methods would you apply for decreasing the loading time of a website?

        I would use external style sheets, less images (unless necessary), optimize the images and decrease the file sizes of the image without reducing the quality of the image, use CSS sprites to reduce HTTP requests etc.

30- Which tools do you use for choosing keywords?

        I use Google Keyword tool, Wordtracker tool, Wordstream, Seo book keyword tool etc.

        *Remember certain tools are paid but you may use the trial version for some days.

 31- What blogs and sites do you regularly visit to update yourself?

        I follow Matt Cutts blog. Seomoz blog, Seochat forums, Searchengineland.com,Seo book, Seosandwitch etc.

 32- What are doorway pages?

        These are pages that are specially created to rank high on search engines using deceptive techniques.Doorway pages do not provide useful content but instead redirect users to the main page.

33- What are the Social Media channels you have used for marketing?

       I have used blogs like blogger,wordpress,typepad etc, social bookmarking sites like Digg,Jumptags,Delicious etc., social networking sites like Facebook,Linkedin etc., Video Sharing sites like Youtube,Vimeo etc.

34-  What would you suggest to the client who has a website made on Flash?  How would you do Seo for that site?

    Search engines find it harder to parse the contents presented using Flash. I would suggest the client to use an alternative to flash like HTML 5. 

35- What do you understand by Frames in HTML?

     A frame is a HTML technique which divides the content of a page onto several parts. Search engines see Frames as completely different pages and as such Frames have a negative impact on Seo. We should avoid the usage of Frames and use basic HTML instead.

36- Which is the popular search engine in Russia?

      Yandex is popular in Russia.

37- If the meta robots tag has a value of "no index, no follow" what does it mean?

     It means the search engine crawlers would not index the contents and would not follow the links present on the page.

38-  Who is Rand Fishkin?

Rand Fishkin is the CEO and Co founder of Seomoz, the most popular seo software in the world. He started the informative "White Board Friday" series for explaining the concepts related to Seo and search engines.

39- How will you restrict the search engine crawlers from indexing a folder named "Secret" that is present in the root?

The following code when added on the robots.txt text file would restrict the crawlers from accessing the folder

User-agent:*
Disallow: /Secret/

40 - What do you understand by Google Dance?

Google Dance happens when major updates happen on the database maintained by Google. Constant shuffling leads to unstable rankings of the Web Pages.This continues for some days and is known as Google dance. It was witnessed in the past before the real time searching happened. Now, Google updates its index almost everyday and changes are witnessed narrowly.

41- Which are the top 3 social media websites that you will suggest to your client for SMO work?

I would suggest Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

42- How does Google Plus helps in Seo?

Google Plus helps the promoted web pages to get plus ones which are considered as genuine votes by Google. More plus ones helps to enhance our search engine rankings. Moreover,it helps to get high rankings in personalized search results where our friends can see the web pages shared and promoted by us.

Read more here:- Using Google Plus for Seo

43- What is a Pizza Box in terms of Google?

Google server comes in a standard case which is commonly known as "Pizza Box".

44- How important is to have a keyword in a domain name?

After the recent EMD update, the weightage on the presence of keyword on a domain has reduced. It is therefore important to go for a domain name that can focus on building a brand rather than using only keywords which could make a domain look spammy. Although having keywords in the domain helps but it would work only if the combination comes out as brandable. Some popular examples of website which succeded without having keywords in it are flipkart.com, myntra.com, ebay.com, digg.com, reddit.com and ofcoz google.com etc. But, there are some themes where the presence of keywords becomes necessary like the presence of the keyword "recipes" in allrecipes.com or the presence of the word "food" in the domain foodnetwork.com . Hence, its important to take decisions based on the theme you need to target.

45- What do you understand by "Engagement Metrics" with relation to social media?

Engagement metrics comprises of information which is used to measure the importance of user (customer) engagement with respect to a particular social data.Some example includes  likes, retweets, plusones, clicks, favorites,repins,comments etc.

46- What are your favorite ways of attracting natural backlinks to your site?

Having user friendly content on the site is the best way to attract natural backlinks but one of my favorite ways of attracting natural backlinks is by offering free widgets and free infographics to my audience.

47- Have you heard about ASO?

ASO stands for App Store Optimization which is a process of improving the visibility of mobile apps on app stores like iTunes and Google Play.

48- How can you search with the exact keywords you type on Google without using quotes?

We can use the Verbatim tool in order to search with the exact keywords entered on Google.

49- What do you understand by Google Authorship and how can you use it for Seo benefits?

Google Authorship allows you to link your Google Plus Profile to the content you create. This is a way to enhance the overall user experience and stop spamming. Results containing content from original and reputed authors are valued highly by Google and chances of spamming are also reduced. Hence, implementing Google Authorship is really useful for Seo as it helps a webpage to rank higher based on the author rank.

Read more:- How to Make Full Use of Google Authorship Profile

50- How can you make a website mobile friendly?

I will create a mobile friendly version of the website for Googlebot-Mobile, use meta.txt for specifying special instructions to mobile search engine crawlers, use mobile.xml sitemap and will have mobile optimized content on the site.

Read more:- Mobile Seo

Latest SEO interview questions and answers

1. Which are the most important area to include your keywords? – Page title and Body text are the most important areas where we can include keywords for the SEO purpose.
2. What are webmaster tools? – Webmaster tools is a free service by Google from where we can get free Indexing data, backlinks information, crawl errors, search queries, CTR, website malware errors and submit the XML sitemap.
3. What is the best way to maximize the frequency of crawling of your website by search engines? – Frequently adding new, original and quality content on the website.
4. Do you know who is Danny Sullivan? – He is a Journalist who covers the field of web search, considered as search engine guru and editor at searchengineland.com
5. Who is Matt Cutts? – He is the head of web spam team at Google. Read more about Matt Cutts here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
6. What is the best criterion to identify the value of a backlink? – The authority of the domain, quality of the content on the page where the backlink is provided and then the page rank of the website.
7. What is keyword proximity? – Keyword Proximity is a measurement criteria of the closeness of the keywords within the Page Title, Meta Description and Body Text.
8. What is keyword prominence? – Keyword prominence is the location of the keywords in the page title, meta description and body text…..Read more about prominence at: http://www.seoglossary.com/article/64
9. Difference between exit rate and bounce rate? – Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leaves a particular website just after visiting a single page on this and exit rate refers to the percentage of people who leaves from a particular page….read more herehttp://www.blindfiveyearold.com/bounce-rate-vs-exit-rate
10. What is the Panda update and which is its current version? – Panda is a search algorithm update by the Google to take on the content farms, low quality websites and the websites getting low quality backlinks, Google removed a lot of the webpage from the higher search index during this update and the current version of Panda is 2.5.3 updated on October 19/20th Oct. 2011…read here for latest panda updateshttp://www.seroundtable.com/tag/panda

Update: 12 Latest Technical SEO Interview Questions & Answers

11. What was caffeine update? – Caffeine update was rolled out by Google in June 2010 and the main purpose of this update was to include more fresh results in the search index, at least 50%..read more about caffeine update here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
12. A customer can give you an access to only one tool, which one will you choose, Webmasters or Analytics? – Of Course Webmaster tools, because these are almost the essential tools for the search engine optimization, we can have some analytics data in the webmasters as well.But now due to the inclusion of webmaster data in Analytics, we would like to have access to Analytics.
13. What is 404? – It is a server error code which is returned by the server what a particular webpage or the file is missing from the webhost server.
14. What is 301 redirect? – It is a SEO friendly version of permanent redirect for the webpages or the domains. Read more about 301 redirect herehttp://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php
15. What is 302 redirect? – It is a temporary redirect. Read more herehttp://www.internetofficer.com/seo/302-redirect/
16. What is robots.txt? – Robots.txt is a text file used to give instructions to the search engine crawlers about the caching and indexing of a webpage, domain, directory or a file of a website. Read more herehttp://www.robotstxt.org/
17. What are the other methods to restrict a webpage from the search index? – we can use noindex meta tag. Read more herehttp://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html
18. What are Google Webmaster Tools crawl errors? – Crawl errors provides the information about the URL’s of your website which are not accessible but linked from somewhere. Read more herehttp://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35120
19. What is a landing page? – a landing page is a page in the website which is designed to attract the visitors to contact/subscribe/buy a service or the product by reading few lines of important information about that particular service or the product on that page. Read more about landing page herehttp://www.copyblogger.com/landing-pages/
20. What is the recent change in Google Analytics? – Real time visitors info, visitors flow, webmaster tools SEO data and website speed data. Read more here http://analytics.blogspot.com/
21. How to handle the duplicate page in the website? – using canonical tag. Read more here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
22. What are the types of CSS and which is better for SEO? – 3 types, Internal CSS, inline CSS and external CSS. Read more about CSS types here at http://www.expression-web-tutorial.com/Types_CSS_Styles.html. The external CSS is best for SEO purpose. Read why to use external CSShttp://www.basictips.com/tips/article_64.shtml
23. How many heading tags are there in HTML? – 6 tags, from H1 to H6
24. Can we use more than one H1 on a single webpage? – Of course, if there is a need of describing two related topics on the same page then we can use, but using more than 2 or 3 will not provide any credit to the search engines.  Matt Cutts advise on using more than one H1 taghttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM
25. Italic or Bold, which is more useful? – Both are almost same but Italic have a slight more better for keyword targeting on the webpage. Read more herehttp://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

What are top SEO ranking factors? – Quality of content on the webpage, quality and quantity of backlinks to the webpage, anchor text used in the backlinks, domain authority, social sharing metrics and some other traffic metrics like page CTR, bounce rate and

Top PPC Interview Questions

PPC Interview Questions

1     What is the difference between search engine marketing and Internet marketing?

Search Engine Marketing is specific to marketing your brand/service/products through search engines. It can be in the form of organic search results where landing pages are aimed for higher ranking, or in paid search results, where ads are aimed to display at maximum exposure for targeted keywords at minimal cost possible.
Internet marketing covers a broader range of channels. It includes search engine marketing, email marketing / EDM, social media, and so on.

2      What is Quality Score and how does it affect your work as paid search specialist?

State the definition of Quality Score without being too bookish. It’s important to understand what it is, rather than remembering what it literally means.
Quality Score’s a part of Google’s way of determining ranking of AdWords ads. This can be achieved by, among others, improving relevance between ad copies and keywords, improving quality of landing pages. By obtaining high quality score for my keywords, I can reduce expenses for my PPC campaigns.
Reducing operating costs is what clients have in mind, right?

3     If we rank high on our brand terms in organic results, do we need to rank well on paid search?

Yes, you may need to rank well on paid search even if you have high rankings within your organic search keywords. That’s because ranking high on organic search, even for your selected terms does not mean automatic success in achieving your business goals. If the ROI for paid search campaign is better than the organic search campaign, it makes more sense to do so. Also, paid search ads on top reinforce the presence of top organic search results. They make your brands/products/services look more credible.

4     How do you manage large set of keywords (hundred thousand to millions)?

It is prerequisite to mention automatic bid tools to manage this huge paid search campaign. But merely saying so does not mean you’re off the hook. It helps to explain classification of keywords, grouping them according to priorities, business objectives and target audience so that if business strategies change, campaigns can easily be modified.
Can also mention classification of keywords according to importance such as “high”, “medium” or “low” and those that are of secondary importance, low performance, and those keywords that are candidates for removal.
Explaining clearly how the number of keywords grew tremendously by stating methodologies for keyword research, usage of match types, negative keywords and describing timing phases helps, too.

5     How do I reduce costs of my paid search campaigns?

Don’t immediately answer open-ended questions that lead to answers based on multiple assumptions. Costs of acquisition? Cost per click? You can’t answer accurately a question that isn’t accurate itself. When in doubt, you should also have the freedom to ask question before you release your thoughts.
Some interviewers are fond of tricky questions.

6   How do you respond if your client’s competitor bought the same trademarked keyword?
     
      Perhaps you did contact that offending party, stated the violation terms, but it still refuses to budge to your polite request.
Answers may vary according to where a campaign is going to take place. In certain markets such as the UK (update: now more), Google allows bidding for trademarked keywords. But if you’re sure that you’re not covered by this policy and feel that a violation has been committed, lodging a complaint to Google is the next logical option.

7   Describe the structure of a Google AdWords paid search campaign

Google AdWords PPC advertising structure is composed of one or multiple accounts (if necessary). An account can handle up to 25 campaigns. Each campaign can handle up to 100 ad groups. Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns can have up to 1,000 keywords and 20 ads within an ad group.
Of course, we don’t have to know these max keyword numbers as we don’t need to fill each ad groups to the max. We only need to fill our ad groups with the most targeted keywords available.

8 How do you differentiate paid search programs of Google, MSN and Yahoo?

One way to differentiate these three are through presentation of strengths and weaknesses of each.
Google AdWords
Advantage: Most robust and corners majority of all paid search traffic
Disadvantage: Due to its big number of advertisers, cost per click is generally more expensive
Yahoo! Search Marketing
Advantage: Lower pay per click cost compared to Google AdWords
Disadvantage: Way behind Google AdWords in terms of reporting features
MSN adCenter
Advantage: Studies show that users of adCenter are more likely result to conversions
Disadvantage: Weakest PPC interface compared to Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing

9  How do you describe building your keyword list?

Building a list of keywords used for any organic or paid search campaign should be systematic:
Identify your audience
Who are the target audience of this campaign? What would they probably be using to look for my products and services? Knowing your audience is the first sign of a successful paid search campaign.
Review your existing offerings
Based on what search terms people are using, do I have these terms? What are the possible landing pages? Does my website have content voids?
Look at your competitors
Look at competitors and analyze how they position themselves. Are they using the same terms as I do? Broader or more specific?
Check web analytics results
History will be recorded on web analytics tools: keywords used, their effectiveness in driving sales or leads and other useful information. Such data should give us idea on which keywords yielded better ROI.
Expand keywords using various tools
Based on keywords gathered so far, expansion is made possible through various tools available: Google AdWords keyword tool, WordTracker, KeywordDiscovery, and so on. From this big list, we can sort, prioritize and group these keywords according to importance, timing or other segmentation methods.

10.   What’s your methodology in creating ad copies?

This question wants to find out how you would come up with ad copies. Are they compelling and paint an accurate picture of the intended message? You may answer it based on the following guidelines:
Find out why your ad copy should be more effective than others
Your ad’s ability to answer basic questions
Testing the ad copy; we’ll never know how effective it is until we put it to the test
What’s your take on bidding for competitor’s trademark keywords?
This is a tricky question that should be addressed properly. PPC Hero has good guidance on this: citing the issue of legality and best-practice because it’s either you can or you can’t bid on a competitor’s trademark terms. Recent development in Google AdWords paid search has paved way for non-trademark owners to bid for previously exclusive trademark keywords. By being active on what’s going on in the industry, this means you’ll always be on top of things as they happen. And that’s a good thing for prospect employers.

11.   What is your strategy on geo-targeting ads?
The question will seek answer on how you’d approach ads that are displayed for specific locations. Is it just based on IP filter or should you extend it? For example, if I want to advertise for “seo hong kong” keyword only to users who are located in Hong Kong, an IP targeting methodology will only display the ads if their location (IP address) is associated with Hong Kong.
But what if someone from UK wants to find a Hong Kong SEO agency to optimize its Traditional Chinese content? An extension of this IP targeting should also be based on the keyword itself so that if someone else outside of Hong Kong uses the exact match of the phrase, the ad should still be displayed.
I hope these PPC interview questions and answers list are fairly helpful and assists you in formulating possible answers on questions that relate to the ones I highlighted in this post.

(Q) Based on which Google places ads in first place?
(A) Google decides to give rank 1 in ads depending upon CTR(quality score) x CPC bid.
(Q) What is CTR?
(A) CTR – Click through rate. It is number of times your ad is clicked.
(Q) How many campaigns can I run in one adwords account?
(A) 25 Campaigns
(Q) How many adgroups can I run under one campaign?
(A) 2000 adgroups
(Q) How many ads can I run per adgroup?
(A) 50 ads per adgroup
(Q) How much characters can I place in one ad?
(A) For one ad 4 rows are given
25 characters for headline
35 characyers per text row(including URL)
(Q) How can you Improve Conversion Rates?
(A) Creating and testing campaign with different keywords and choosing that perform well.
(Q) IS PPC effective advertisement for search engine rankings?
(A) Google or any other search engine don`t mix PPC ads with search rankings.
(Q) What is Quality Score?
(A) Quality Score is Score give to your ads that attain by keywords. The Higher the quality score the less you need to pay for a Top Position of your ads. It is given upon CTR.
(Q) Which companies are offering PPC advertisement?
(A) Yahoo, MSN and Google are among top most PPC advertisers.
(Q) What is Page rank? Explain it?
(A) Google page rank algorithm helps search engines to realize the value of a page. It ranks your website on basis of quality links it has. It is given by Google depending upon keyword, backlink sites, and content.
(Q) Why I need to go for adwords for PPC?
(A) Because Adwords assures that 80% of internet users sees your product or service.
(Q) How to achieve good CTR?
(A)Here are few things that need to be kept in mind for CTR
Target your ads to right audience
Select correct keyword matching
See that you target your ads by location and language
Create different Ad Groups for different search phrases/keywords
Calculate how much you can afford for the day
test your ads on daily basis, change if you don`t get any response from users
Give google users a good reason to click your ad