SEO Interview Questions and Answers 2023
What is SEO and introduce its types?
Search engine optimization or SEO is a process of keep changing the position of a web page or website in a search engine results by using keywords or phrases.
Two Types of SEO are:
- On Page Optimization
- Off Page Optimization
What are the SEO Techniques available?
Two SEO Techniques are: White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO which is also called as Negative SEO.
What is On Page Optimization?
On-page optimization gives outcome to a web page or website ranking on Search Engine Results Page. This will regulate your webpage by page coding or by you.
What is Off Page Optimization?
Off Page Optimization is a type of SEO which is not regulated by your page coding. Link building, Image Sharing, Blog posting, Document Sharing, Info graphics submission, Video Sharing, Increasing Page Authority or Page Rank, Getting high quality links from relevant sites and Article submission are the few examples of Off-page optimization.
What do you mean by Page Rank or PR?
For every web page, Google will give a rank, which is called as Page rank. Normally page rank ranges from 0 – 10. Google Web Search Engine algorithm is responsible for calculating the page rank of every web page.
What is a Back link?
Back links are the incoming links to your webpage or website and getting these back links from good PR and relevant site is always better for your site.
What is an out bound Link?
An outgoing link or outbound-link is a link from your own webpage or website to another webpage or website.
What is a keyword?
Keyword is a particular term used for searching through Search Engines like Google in order to get outcomes related to your searched question
What is Anchor Text?
Anchor text is also known as link text or link label or link title, which is a clickable hyperlink. This is used to increase your webpage ranking by receiving the incoming links after clicking the contained keyword.
What are organic results?
Organic results are the page views which come directly via SERP and not from any Off Page Optimization.
What is Googlebot?
Googlebot is a kind of software used by the Google as a search bot to index a webpage. This software collects the information from every webpage by doing the crawling, caching and then indexing of a webpage.
What is a Meta Tag?
You can observe many Meta tags being used in HTML coding, but the important ones are the four Meta tags. They are: Meta Title, Meta Keywords, Meta Description and Robot tags.
What tools do you use for doing SEO?
Most common tools used in SEO are: Google Analytics, Google webmaster tools, Alexa, Open site explorer and Website grader. Nowadays you can also find some paid SEO tools like spydermate, seo Moz and bulkdachecker in market.
What is Google Sandbox?
This is the place where the fresh and less authoritative sites were kept for a certain time period, till their establishment in the search results. This may happens due to the building of so many links within a short time span.
What are the limitations of title and description tags?
Title tag can be normally between 50-55 characters and Meta description tag can be around 140 – 150 characters.
How will you increase the Pagerank of a page?
To increase the page rank of your webpage, you must build more backlinks from high page rank websites and authority sites.
How will you treat Web standards while optimizing a website?
I usually apply the web standards from the W3C while optimizing the webpage, which help that site to get more points from Google to improvise page rank.
What is 301 redirect?
It is a kind of process to redirect the user from an old page URL to a new page URL.
What is Cloaking?
Clocking is the procedure of using some deceptive techniques which allows the user with a different version of the website than that presented to the search engines.
What methods would you apply for decreasing the loading time of a website?
We can use the external style sheets, minimum images, decrease the file size of the images that we use, without compromising on the quality and use the CSS sprites to regulate the HTTP requests.
What are webmaster tools?
It is a free service provided by the Google to get the information about the indexing data, backlinks, search queries, crawl problems, malware complaints and XML site map.
What is robots.txt?
It is a kind of text file utilized to provide the instructions to the crawlers about the caching and indexing of a website, directory, domain or a file of a webpage.
What is Keyword Density?
It is a very important factor to increase your webpage ranking. Keyword density is the percentage density of a particular phrase or keyword available on a website compared to the total number of words on the particular page.
What is Cross Linking?
It is considered as one of the best strategy that can come in handy to yield high search engine rankings, by leveraging several domains owned by you.
What do you know about LSI?
LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. This technique is established to obtain the data by relating the word to its closest counterparts or to its similar context. For example, if you are searching something with a keyword “CAR” it will show all the related things like classic cars, car auctions, Bentley car, car race etc.
How will you cross-check whether your SEO campaign is working or not?
To check whether your SEO campaign is working or not, the first approach is to check the websites statistics, which tells you about the origin of traffic. The other way of checking is to make a search based on the relevant keywords and key phrases and look for the search result. The number of search result will tell you whether your SEO campaign is working or not.
What is the meaning of competitive analysis?
Competitive analysis does the comparison, between the website I am optimizing, and the website that is ranked highly in search results.
What will be your next steps if your SEO methods or technique does not work?
My first attempt would to try analysis the problem and resolve them step by step
- Firstly I would try to see whether it is a new project, and then like to re-check the key words.
- Also, I would look for relevant key-words that can be helpful.
- Even though the webpage and website has been indexed well and still not appearing on the first 10 pages of search engine result page, then I would make some changes in page text, titles and description.
- If website is not indexed well or dropped from the index, than it might comprises serious issues and re-work might be required.
What is PPC?
PPC stands for Pay Per Click and is an advertisement campaign hosted by Google. It is segmented into two modules CPC ( Cost per click) and CPM ( Cost per thousand impressions) through flat rate and bidding respectively. In CPC, if the user clicks on the advert, only then the advertiser will be charged.
What is 301 redirect?
It is a method by which the user is redirected to new page url to old page url . It is a permanent redirect and it is also useful in directing link juice to new url from old url .
What are Webmaster tools?
Webmaster tool is a service provided by Google from where you can get backlink information, crawl errors, search queries, Indexing data, CTR etc.
What is keyword density and what is the formula for knowing keyword density?
From SEO point of view, keyword density will definitely help to stand out your content from others. The formula to know the keyword density is ( Total number of keyword/ total number of words in your article) multiply by 100.
What is robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a text file. It is through this file, it gives instruction to search engine crawlers about indexing and caching of a webpage, file of a website or directory, domain.
What will you do, for the company website you are working for, decides to move all the contents to new domain?
The first step would be to update the previous site with a permanent redirect to new page for all the pages. After that, I will remove the previous content from search engine in order to avoid duplicate content issues.
Can you optimize the website which has pages in millions?
From SEO point of view, for dynamic website, special additional SEO stuffs have to be implemented.
- Good Internal link structure
- Generation of dynamic title and description
- Dynamic XML sitemap generation
What is the latest update in SEO?
The latest updates in SEO are:
- Panda
- Penguin
- Hummingbird
What are the key aspects of Panda update?
Panda is to improve the search in Google. The latest version has focused on quality content, proper design, proper speed, proper use of images and many more.
What are the key aspects of Penguin update?
Penguin is the code name for Google algorithm. Its main target is to decrease the ranking of that website that are violating the Google Webmaster guidelines. These guidelines are violated by using black hat techniques like cloaking and stuffing.
How will you neutralize a toxic link to your site?
Through Backlink Quality Checker you can know who links to your website. Now, you have to go to ‘ Toxic link’ report, where you will find all the links, that are harmful to your websites. If there is any link in ‘ Toxic link report’ that matches with the link on your website, then you can remove it by using ‘Google Disavov tool’.
What are the SEO tools do you use?
The SEO tools that I use are Google analytic, keyword search, Alexa, open site explorer, Google Webmaster.
What do you mean by Backlink?
The incoming links to your website or webpage is referred as Backlink.
What are out bound Links?
The outbound links are our website links to other webpage or website.
Can you tell me something about Googlebot?
To index a webpage Google uses the Googlebot software. Caching, Crawling and indexing of a webpage are done through Googlebot by collecting details from that webpage.
What was the recent update which Google had and what changes would you suggest for it?
Google recently had the Hummingbird update which was a change in the core search algorithm. Google moved from keyword based searching to concept based searching. It included semantic level analysis in order to find out real answers and searcher’s intent behind the user query. I would add comprehensive and fresh content to my site after the Hummingbird update.
Prior to the Hummingbird update, Google 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.
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.
What do you know about Google 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does Google uses keyword tags?
No, Google does not make use of keyword tags.
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.
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.
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.
What tools do you use for doing seo?
I use Google webmaster tools, Google Analytics, Open site explorer, Alexa, Ahrefs,Website grader etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 tobacklinks 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.
How will you increase the Pagerank of a page?
By building more backlinks from authority sites and high page rank webpages.
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.
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.
What is the difference between PR (page rank) and SERP (Search engine result page)?
Page rank is calculated on the basis of quality inbound links from other website or webpages to our webpage or a website.
SERP (Search Engine Result page) is the placement of the website or web-pages which is returned by the search engine after a search query or attribute.
Why the Title Tag in website is valuable?
Title tags are very essential in SEO, as it tells about the contents on that web page. Through title tags only the search engine will tell the user, what is there in the page.
What is considered as more significant, creating content or building backlinks?
Both are necessary, creating quality content is equally important to building backlinks. Although, building backlinks are useful in building authority to a site and for ranking as well, quality content is the first element that is considered to be more responsible for ranking.
Can you mention the difference between SEO and SEM?
SEM (Search Engine Marketing), it is used for the promotion of website through Search Engine Result Page (SERP) , while to optimize the search result of your webpage or website SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is used.
Who is Matt Cutts?
Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s web spam team.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, Seroundtable, Seobythesea, seochat etc.
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.
What are the Social Media channels you have used for marketing?
I have used blogs like blogger,wordpress,typepad, tumblr etc, social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Stumbleupon, Delicious etc., social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc., Video Sharing sites like Youtube,Vimeo etc.
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.
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.
Which is the popular search engine in Russia?
Yandex is popular in Russia.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
What is a Pizza Box in terms of Google?
Google server comes in a standard case which is commonly known as “Pizza Box”.
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.
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, plus ones, clicks, favorites, repins, comments etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What is the difference between clicks and visits in Google Analytics?
Clicks indicates the number of times any user clicks on an ad while visits indicates the number of unique sessions each visits create.
How can you track Facebook likes using Google Analytics?
We can do this with the help of social interaction web tracking. I will add a custom script using FB.Event.subscribe function to start tracking clicks.
How will you plan an Seo strategy for a website already affected by Penguin update?
Penguin update deals with scanning through the link profile of a website. I will scan the links pointing to the site using tools like ahrefs and prepare a list of low quality links. I will make every effort to get those links removed like emailing the webmaster. If somehow, I am unable to remove some links then I will use the disavow links tool to devalue the remaining links from harming the site. Apart from this, I will plan a link bait strategy to get some high authority links in order to increase the reputation of the site. This will surely help a site to recover from the effects of the Penguin update.
What is the difference between HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps?
HTML sitemaps are created for the user and contains a basic structure for displaying all the pages of the website in a hierarchy. XML sitemaps are created for the search engines and helps a search engine bot to easily cache, index and discover new pages.
How many keywords do you think are enough to target on a web page?
There are virtually no limits on the number of keywords that we can target on a web page. Best approach is to focus on our main keyword and all the secondary keywords would find way for itself in the search engines. The old method of targeting 3 keywords per web page does not works any more. You can have 10-15 keywords or even more to target on a single web page.
What is the difference between soft 404 and 404 errors? How will you find and remove these errors?
A 404 error is returned when the browser requests a resource from the web server and the server is unable to find that resource so it returns 404 file not found error. On the other hand, soft 404 error is returned when the browser requests a resource from the web server and the server returns 200 OK response for a file that does not exist on the server. Hence, in both the cases, file is not present on the server but in case of soft 404 the server returns 200 OK response code by mistake. We can find out these errors with the help of Google Webmasters Tool and we can either remove them by adding proper redirects and by creating a custom 404 page for helping the user in proper navigation while browsing the site.
Is there a limit to robots.txt file?
Yes, googlebot reads the first 500 KB present in the robots.txt file.
What is Cross linking and what are the function of Cross linking?
- Cross linking is used to refer the process of linking one site to another site and provide a way to allow the accessing to it.
- It provides the users with reference sites that consists the content related to the search.
- It doesn’t need to be owned by the same person as it provides the methods that have been built on the Internet.
- It serves the purpose to display the page on the search engines using search engine optimization techniques and methods.
- The site ranking is calculated on the basis of the relevance of the sites and then it is reflected on the search engine.
- It uses SEO tools that provide reciprocal links and inbound links that can be used as our SEO.
What is the main purpose of using keyword in SEO?
Keyword is a single word, and while a combination of those keywords makes phrases. These keywords or phrases are used by the search engines to populate the subjects over the internet. Search engine stores keywords in the database, and when search is done, it will come up with the best possible match.
Can you mention the functions of body content relevance?
Whenever there is a text that does not have images on the web page is referred as body content relevance or non-image text. It helps in good optimization of the sites and also to improve your ranking in the search engine.
What are Spiders, Robots and Crawlers and what are their functions?
Spiders, robot and crawler, they are all same and referred by different names. It is a software program that follows, or “Crawls” different links throughout the internet, and then grabs the content from the sites and adds to the search engine indexes.
What does it mean if nothing appears on doing search on the domain?
On doing search on your domain and if nothing appears then there are three possibilities.
- May be the site is banned by search engines
- May be no index by search engines
- Some canonical issues
What is keyword stemming?
The process of finding out the root word from the search query is referred as keywords stemming.
Name some SEO blogs that you frequently read?
- Jimboykins
- Search Engine Land
- SEOSmarty
- MOZ
- Search Engine Journal
What do you mean by Cloaking?
Cloaking is a deceptive way of optimizing search. In this technique a different content will be searched by the search engine than what is presented or searched by the users.
How many types of Meta Tags are there in SEO and what are their characters limits?
There are two types Meta tags in SEO.
- Description Meta tag with 150 characters limits
- Keyword Meta tag with 200 characters limits
How many characters limits in Title tag?
We can add 70 characters in title tag.
What is Google Sandbox?
Google sandbox is an imaginary area where new websites and their search rating are put on hold until they prove worthy for ranking. In other words, it checks the standard of the website.
Tell me something about Black Hat SEO?
In order to get a high ranking in search engine result page, websites go for various methods and techniques which are characterized by two categories. One method that is acceptable by search engine guidelines is known as White Hat SEO, while the other method which is not acceptable by search engine guidelines is known as Black Hat SEO.
Name few Black Hat SEO techniques?
- Link Farming
- Hidden text, etc.
- Gateway or Doorway pages
- Cloaking
- Keyword Stuffing
Can you differentiate between ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’ link?
Nofollow links are not passed by search engines bot and therefore cannot be cached or indexed. Dofollow link is a kind of hyperlink and it passes through all search engines and it puts an impact over page rank.
