Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Interview Questions

1 .

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” In simple terms, it means the process of improving your site to increase its visibility for relevant searches. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business. It shows unpaid results which are also referred to as “free”, “organic”, “natural” or “earned” results.

The importance of SEO starts with the desire of the companies to gain more traffic for their websites. The ranking over search engines matter because users pay more heed to the first 5 searches on Google. Moreover, users tend to trust Google’s refined search results because they consider these searches to be more authentic and specific.

2 .

What are the different types of SEO?

There are three different types of SEO :

On-page SEO : On-page or on-site SEO includes practice strategies to optimize an individual page on a website and improve the rankings of a website, and earn organic traffic.

Off-page SEO : This process also refers to techniques for improving a website’s position in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).

Technical SEO : Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website for crawling and indexing, and help search engines access, crawl, interpret, and index the website in a hassle-free manner.

3 .

Differentiate between on-page and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is used to regulate the site to be optimized through page coding, whereas off-page optimization is not regulated by page coding.

4 .

What is Cross-linking? What is the function of Crosslinking?

Cross-linking is the process of linking one site to another site.

It provides users with reference sites that contain the content related to the search.

The 2 websites cross-linking do not be owned by the same person.

In other words, cross-linking is a barter wherein I link to you, and you link to me.

It could be a 2-way link or 3-way link. In a 2-way link site A links to site B and site B links to site A. In a 3-way link, site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links to site A.

5 .

What is a canonical issue?

A canonical issue happens when you seem to have duplicate content. (Google penalizes for duplicate content.) This might happen if you have different versions of a URL pointing to the same webpage, for example, http://exampleURL.com and http://www.exampleURL.com.

6 .

What is web crawling?

Web crawling is the process where search engine bots crawl websites for indexing. Those are called a spider or spider bot. Crawlers use hyperlinks to visit other pages, documents and bring information back to the web servers for indexing. Once the crawler visits a page, it makes a copy of it and adds it URLs to indexing.

More fresh content you produce, more frequent your website will be crawled from search engines.

7 .

Why SEO is so important to businesses?

SEO is important because it keeps the search results fair. It reduces the ability to manipulate these results as much as possible, so that the sites appearing for each search are there because they deserve to be there. Hard work and a website that appeals to visitors correlate with high search engine rankings, so if your site meets these criteria, you’ll have a better chance at showing up in the results.

8 .

What is SERP?

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. When you search anything on search engines, this is the page where you can see all the results. SERP includes PPC listings and organic listings. Listings are available in multiple formats based on the keyword.

9 .

What is White Hat SEO?

White Hat SEO refers that work within search engines terms of service to improve a site’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings while maintaining the integrity of your website and staying within the search engines’ terms of service.

White hat SEO is a set of by-the-book, ethical, technical, and aesthetic practices that an individual or group of individuals employ in the attempt to improve search engine results for a website or group of websites. White hat SEO describes the bulk of SEO best practices by reputable companies.

10 .

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black hat SEO refers to a set of practices that are used to increases a site or page’s rank in search engines through means that violate the search engines’ terms of service. The term “black hat” originated in Western movies to distinguish the “bad guys” from the “good guys, ” who wore white hats (see white hat SEO). Recently, it’s used more commonly to describe computer hackers, virus creators, and those who perform unethical actions with computers.

11 .

Difference between White Hat and Black Hat SEO?

The list of methods which are following Google’s guidelines are called White Hat SEO.

The list of methods which are not following Google’s guidelines are called Black Hat SEO.

12 .

What is a PBN?

Private Blog Network is a website built on dropped or auctioned domain. Some black hat SEOs build them to link to their important website and transfer authority.

13 .

What is link building and why does it matter?

Google exists to serve the searcher. That means Google is constantly trying to determine which results are most relevant to any given searcher and any given time. In addition to relevance, Google considers credibility too. So the search engine looks to see if other websites have linked to yours. If so, that means your content is worth linking to and is, therefore, more credible when compared to a website not linked to externally. In a nutshell, link building is what SEO professionals do to try and get links to their websites in order to improve search results.

14 .

What are backlinks?

A backlink is what we call the links into a website from an external source, as mentioned in link building.

15 .

Which meta tags matter?

Meta tags have changed since SEO became a common practice, but two remain critical : The page title and the meta description. Stick to these when answering your interview question. The page title (Sometimes called SEO title) plays an important role in ranking but it is also important because it is the title that shows on the Search Results Page (SERP). It must use a keyword to rank well with Google but it must also be compelling so a user will want to click on it. The meta description does not affect ranking, but it also plays a role in the SERP because it also must make the user want to click on the search result. You should also mention that Google recently increased the character length limit of meta descriptions to around 280 to 320 (no one is sure of the actual limit yet).

16 .

What is on-page vs off-page SEO?

On-page SEO : On-page SEO involves all the on-site techniques you can employ to ensure a webpage will rank on a SERP, On-page SEO it’s easy to convey the relevancy and quality of your content for both readers and search engines. In search engine optimization, like google, yahoo, bing on-page optimization refers to a factor that has an effect on your website and web pages listing in the natural search results.

Off-page SEO : Off-page SEO (also called "off-site SEO") refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs). The main agenda for Off-Page SEO is to create quality, relevant and trustworthy backlinks.

17 .

What is the relationship between SEO and SEM?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. The biggest difference between the two is that SEO is free and SEM is paid. SEM includes pay-per-click advertising and display ads that are purchased. Despite the major difference between the two, they work best in unison.

18 .

What is page speed and why is it important?

Page speed is the measure of how fast the content on your site loads for a user. It is important because the pages that load faster are more efficient and offer a better on-page user experience. Google also considers page speed while ranking websites.

Many factors that affect or relate to page speed :

* Page size

* Images, video, and heavy files

* Excess code and Javascript

* Load time

* Time to First Byte (TTFB)

* Round Trip Time (RTT)

* Last Contentful Paint

19 .

What is an outbound link?

Any link on a website that links to another web page or website is known as an outbound link. Outbound links help to extend the relevancy signal of the webpage and boost SEO rankings if they come from authority sites. It is also called an external link.

20 .

What is Page Rank?

PageRank is one of the algorithms used by Google, where it gives a page rank to determine a web page’s relevance or importance.

21 .

What is keyword difficulty?

Keyword difficulty or competition defines how difficult a keyword is to rank in Google’s organic search results. Keyword’s difficulty depends on multiple factors, like content quality, domain authority, and page authority.

22 .

What is a landing page?

A web page that serves as the entry point for a website or a particular section of a website.

23 .

What is a long-tail keyword?

Long-tail keywords are phrases containing over three words that make search results highly specific. They have relatively low search volume, but a higher conversion value because they are more specific.

24 .

What is Googlebot?

Googlebot is the web crawler software used by Google as a search bot to index a webpage. There are two types of Googlebot crawlers:

* A Desktop crawler

* A Mobile crawler

25 .

What is robots.txt?

robots.txt is a text file that instructs web robots (search engine robots) about how to crawl pages on their website. It is used to manage crawler traffic to the website.

26 .

What is XML Sitemap? How is it important?

XML (Extensible Markup Language) Sitemap is a list of your website’s URLs. It is created to facilitate the functionality of search engines. A good XML sitemap informs the search engines about the number of pages present on a specific website, the frequency of their updates, and the time of the last modifications performed on them, which helps in proper indexing of the website by the search engines.

27 .

Explain rich snippets.

Rich snippets refer to the featured text that appears at the top of the organic search results. These snippets have a higher click-through rate. They are not part of SEO but provide better results on the SERPs. If the click-through rate of a snippet rises, it will get more traffic from the search result.

28 .

Explain keyword stemming.

Keyword stemming is the process of finding out new keywords from the main keyword from the search query. This is achieved by adding a prefix, suffix, or pluralization.

29 .

What is body content relevance?

Body content relevance or non-image text refers to a text that does not have any images on the web page. It helps to achieve a higher ranking in search engines and ensures good page optimization.

30 .

What is the main purpose of using keyword in SEO?

A 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 a search is done, it will come up with the best possible match.

31 .

Explain Spiders, Robots, and Crawlers

Spiders, robot and crawler, they are all the same and referred by different names. It is a software program that follows or “Crawls” various links throughout the internet, and then grabs the content from the sites and adds to the search engine indexes.

32 .

Explain the term LSI

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. This technique is established to obtain the data by relating the word to its closest counterparts or its similar context. For example, if you are searching for something with a keyword “CAR” it will show all the related things like classic cars, car auctions, Bentley car, car race, etc.

33 .

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.

34 .

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.

35 .

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.

36 .

What are Google Ads?

Google Ads are ads on Google’s advertising system, where the companies/advertisers bid on a set of keywords and get their ads to appear on search results. This is the most commonly used PPC advertising system.

37 .

What is Google My Business?

Google My Business is a service offered by Google, where a business can be listed on the Google search engine to have improved visibility. It requires :

* Adding and updating business information

* Adding photos of the business
* Managing business information

* Interacting with consumers

* Responding to Google reviews, on time

38 .

Explain what is CTR?

In search engine optimization, CTR (Click-Through Rate) is calculated by dividing the number of times a link emerges on a search engine result page by the number of times it is clicked by users. The higher number of clicks, the higher will be the CTR. It is one of the important metrics in PPC Ads that help the users to measure the results and finds how adequate the campaigns are.

39 .

What is Alexa Rank in SEO?

Alexa Rank is a measure of the popularity of a website. It a metric that ranks websites in a particular order based on their popularity and website traffic in the last three months.

40 .

Explain Mobile-First Indexing?

Mobile-first indexing means that Google uses the mobile version of the content for indexing. If there are two separate mobile and desktop URLs of your websites, Google will show the mobile URL to mobile users and the desktop URL to desktop users. However, Google will use the mobile version of the content for indexing.

41 .

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free service that enables you to maintain and evaluate your website’s performance in search results. It helps to identify issues with your webpage that need to be fixed and updates you if your website has been infected with malware.

42 .

What is HTTPS/SSL Update?

In HTTP protocol, the data is transferred between the site server and the browser as plain text. So, it is easy for anyone to read your data.

By installing an SSL Certificate on a website server, one can migrate from a non-secure ‘HTTP’ protocol to the secure ‘HTTPS’ protocol.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a protocol used for secure communication on the World Wide Web. With the help of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), we can add a layer of security to the standard HTTP connection. It encrypts all the available data or communication between the server and the browser.

Websites that consist of sensitive data like credit card details and personal information use HTTPS instead of HTTP. An HTTPS connection offers the following benefits:

* Data Integrity

* Website Authentication

* Data Encryption

43 .

Who are the founders of Google?

Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California.

44 .

What does Google stand for?

There is no official abbreviation for Google. One suggestion is, it’s a misspelling of Googol which means a really large number. Otherwise, there’s plenty of ideas floating around but nothing confirmed.

45 .

What is a domain?

Every website has an IP address, which is the location of the website. Rather than having to remember different strings of numbers for every website you want to visit, we allocate a name to each domain which is easier to remember.

46 .

What is web hosting?

Web hosting is access to space on a server to store a website. The server needs to be connected to the internet, which usually is through a data center.

47 .

What are inbound links?

Inbound links or IBLs are links coming to your domain from another. It’s the phrase used by the person receiving the link.

48 .

What is Guest posting?

In SEO, guest posting is a form of link building and content marketing where you contact another webmaster (usually via email) and offer to write for them, and when you do, add a contextual link back to your website/blog. This “agreement” could be for free or you might be asked to pay a small admin fee. Some sites will even create the content for you, for a fee.

49 .

What is a 301 Redirect?

A 301 redirect will permanently redirect one specific URL to another URL, either from a typed search or from search engine results.

50 .

What are SEO-friendly URLs?

URLs that are easily understandable by both search engines and users are SEO-friendly URLs. They will typically include keywords, and they are mostly self-explanatory and future proof so that they will not become obsolete over the years).

51 .

What is NAP?

NAP (name, address, phone number) helps search engines to identify the list of businesses to be displayed for location-based searches.

52 .

What is an HTML sitemap?

This is again a sure-shot SEO interview question. When on a page all the subpages of your website are listed, it is called an HTML sitemap. It is helpful for the navigation of big websites with a lot of subpages. Generally, HTML sitemaps are placed in the footer of websites.

53 .

What is Google algorithm?

Google algorithm is a set of rules, helping the search engine to find on the web the relevant search results to a search query by a user. It uses several factors to rank a web page for specific keywords. They are updated every year.

54 .

What is cloaking?

Cloaking is a black-hat SEO technique used to display to users the content that is not what is presented to search engine crawlers to manipulate search engine rankings for certain keywords.

55 .

What are doorway pages?

Using a doorway page (gateway pages/portal pages/entry pages) is another means of implementing black-hat SEO to manipulate search engine rankings by creating low-quality web pages for particular phrases while sending visitors to a different page. Cloaking and redirecting pages are forms of doorway pages.

56 .

What is Google Fetch?

Google Fetch allows one to see whether a Googlebot can access a web page, how it renders the page, and whether any page resources are inaccessible to the bot.