SEO exam questions: A sample

I’m working on a set of SEO test questions at my company. The objective: Figure out each SEO analyst’s strengths and weaknesses, then tailor training to them. I thought I’d share a few. They’re supposed to start off pretty easy and get more difficult:

1. TRUE or FALSE or BOTH: The ‘nofollow’ attribute is good for SEO.
2. When are drop-down menus bad for SEO?
   1. Always
   2. Never
   3. If they cause unnecessary pagerank ‘leaks’.
3. How many times should you repeat a key phrase on a page?
   1. Come off it, Ian, there’s no right answer to that.
   2. 3% of the total words on the page.
   3. 5% of the total words on the page.
   4. GO FOR IT. KEY PHRASE MANIA BABY!
4. What’s the most important on-page SEO element?
   1. The DESCRIPTION meta tag
   2. The TITLE tag
   3. If they cause unnecessary pagerank ‘leaks’.
5. What’s the best choice for a server response code if a page no longer exists on your web site?
   1. Not here
   2. 404
   3. 302
   4. 200
6. What’s the correct way to redirect visiting browsers and bots from a page that is permanently gone to a replacement page?
   1. 301
   2. 200
   3. 302
   4. 666
7. Under Google’s Panda update:
   1. The overall quality of an entire web site no longer matters.
   2. A site with 10 great pages and 1,000 lousy ones is in trouble.
   3. We should all have pictures of bamboo on our web sites.
8. TRUE OR FALSE: Site performance can impact search rankings on Google and Bing.
9. Pick the most important SEO performance indicator, if your client is an e-commerce site:
   1. Rankings.
   2. Sales from organic search.
   3. Visits from organic search.
10. Pick the most important SEO performance indicator, if your client is a lead generation site:
    1. Rankings.
    2. Leads from organic search.
    3. Time on site.
11. What are the first 3 things you check when doing an SEO audit?
12. List five things that impact a site’s authority.
13. You got something totally wrong. What do you do?
    1. Hide it at all costs.
    2. Find the solution, then tell your manager what happened and how you’re fixing it.
    3. Call the client right away and tell them you screwed up.
    4. Blog about it.
14. A client’s confused as heck. You’ve tried explaining something to them 3 times via e-mail. What do you do?
    1. Call them on the phone.
    2. Keep e-mailing.
    3. Stop e-mailing and have someone else at Portent give it a try.
15. What’s a fast way to add links to a web site’s link profile that won’t violate the Google and Bing Terms of Service?
    1. Buy links.
    2. Start a content campaign.
    3. Fix broken incoming links.
16. Define canonicalization.
17. Describe blended search.
18. A client is panicked. They’ve just fallen out of the rankings for the phrase “foo bar”. That was their top traffic generator. They want to shut down all onsite content and technical SEO and focus 100% on links. What do you tell them?
19. Tell me what you think PageRank is.
20. What’s a “headless browser”?
21. What’s a reverse index?
22. To you, the One Ring is:
    1. Sauron’s jewelry.
    2. A horror film.
    3. A movie starring Orlando Bloom.

And, of course, if you have additional questions you’d like to give me for free, please stick ’em below in the comments: