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150+ SEO Interview Questions With Answers

150+ SEO Interview Questions With Answers (2018 Updated)

SEO is one of the growing fields of online business today. It will continue dominating in the coming years, therefore will generate enough job opportunities in Online Marketing. Before the interview, you must stay aware of all Search Engine Optimization (SEO) interview questions and answers.

We offer a list of possible SEO interview questions and answers. These questions are usually asked to both experienced as well as fresher candidates. This Search Engine Optimization interview questions will help you to prepare for the interview, whether you are appealing for a SEO fresher’s job or SEO executive.

Why should you read this blog?

We would recommend you read this blog because it gives an insight of the following:-

      1. A significant Search Engine Optimization Interview Questions and Answers which will be very helpful for those who are seeking for a job in this field.
      2. Commonly expected analytical Search Engine Optimization Interview Questions and answers
      3. Customized Interview Questions for Freshers as well as Search Engine Optimization Executive.

1. What is SEO & why is it so important?

Ans:- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the method used to increase a website’s position on search engine results pages (SERPs) on sites such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Developing an SEO strategy for your business can help draw consumer traffic to your website as well as grow your sales and revenue. To get you started on your SEO strategy development, here is a little background to understand how search engines, such as Google, use metrics to rank organic search website placements.

2. What is a Search Engine?

Ans:- A search engine is a web site that collects and organizes content from all over the internet. Those wishing to locate something would enter a query about what they’d like to find and the engine provides links to content that matches what they want.

Top Search Engines:- Google.com, Bing.com and Yahoo.com

3. What is a Domain?

Ans:-domain name is your website name. A domain name is the address where Internet users can access your website. A domain name is used for finding and identifying computers on the Internet. Computers use IP addresses, which are a series of number. However, it is difficult for humans to remember strings of numbers.

4. What is a website?

Ans:-website is a collection of related web pages, including multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name, and published on at least one web server.

5. What is Crawling?

Ans:- A crawler is a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a “spider” or a “bot.”

6. What is Indexing?

Ans:- Indexing is the process of adding webpages into Google search. Depending upon which meta tag you used (index or NO-index), Google will crawl and index your pages. A no-index tag means that that page will not be added into the web search’s index.

7. Difference between Crawling & Indexing?

Ans:- Crawling means the search robot crawl or fetch the web pages while Indexing means search  robot crawl the web pages, saved the information and it appear in the search engine result page.

Crawling Indexing Ranking

8. What is SERP?

Ans:- SERP is the page displayed by a web search engine in response to a query by a searcher. The main component of the SERP is the listing of results that are returned by the search engine in response to a keyword query, although the page may also contain other results such as advertisements.

9. What is On Page SEO?

Ans:- On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a pagethat can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.

10. What is Off Page SEO?

Ans:- Off page SEO refers to techniques that can be used to improve the position of a web site in the search engine results page (SERPs).

Off page Factors,

Forum Submissions, Article Submissions, Question & Answers, Image Submission, Video Submissions, Infographic Submissions and Guest Blogging.

11. What is the definition of keyword?

Ans:- A keyword, in the context of search engine optimization, is a particular word or phrase that describes the contents of a Web page. Keywords are intended to act as shortcuts that sum up an entire page.

12. What is long tail keyword?

Ans:- A long-tail keyword is a keyword phrase that contains at least three words (though some say two or more is considered long-tail). Long-tail keywords are used to target niche demographics rather than mass audiences.

13. What are LSI keywords?

Ans:- LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. These are keywords that are similar to synonyms and related keywords, but not entirely so. They are the words a normal human would use when talking about the keyword topic.

14. What is Canonical URL?

Ans:- A canonical tag is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs.

15. What are backlinks?

Ans:- Backlinks are also known as inbound or incoming links, and they are links to your website from another place on the internet. They are extremely useful to search engines, because they give a good indication that a website is popular.

Backlink

16. What is a Do-Follow link?

Ans:- Dofollow links allow google (all search engines) to follow them and reach our website. Giving us link juice and a backlink. If a webmaster is linking back to you with this link both Search Engine and Humans will be able to follow you. The best way to give someone dofollow love is allowing keyword in the anchor text.

17. What is No-Follow link?

Ans:- “Nofollow” provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.” Originally, the nofollow attribute.

18. What is internal link?

Ans:- An internal link is a type of hyperlink on a webpage to another page or resource, such as an image or document, on the same website or domain.

Internal Linking

19. What is external link?

Ans:- External Links are hyperlinks that point at (target) any domain other than the domain the link exists on (source). In layman’s terms, if another website links to you, this is considered an external link to your site. Similarly, if you link out to another website, this is also considered an external link.

External Link

20. Difference between Internal & External link?

Ans:- 

In summary:

  • External = links that point to a separate domain
  • Internal = links that point to content within the same domain

21. What are the most important Google ranking factors?

Ans:- 

  1. Content
  2. Backlinks
  3. Mobile-first User Experience

22. What is robots.txt?

Ans:- Robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct web robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl pages on their website.

23. What is .htaccess file?

Ans:- .htaccess is a configuration file for use on web servers running the Apache Web Server software. When a .htaccess file is placed in a directory which is in turn ‘loaded via the Apache Web Server’, then the .htaccess file is detected and executed by the Apache Web Server software.

24. What is XML Sitemap?

Ans:- An XML sitemap is a bit of Extensible Markup Language (XML), a standard machine-readable format consumable by search engines and other data-munching programs like feed readers. XML sitemaps convey information about one thing: the URLs that make up a site.

25. Difference between XML Sitemap & HTML Sitemap?

Ans:- XML and HTML Sitemaps are designed for different purposes as XML sitemap is specially designed for the search engines as it is submitted to the webmaster tools for crawling the website. Whereas, HTML sitemap is designed for humans as they can clearly see it on the website as an extra web page and all the visitors of the website can make use of it for understanding the website.

26. What are doorway pages?

Ans:- Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spam indexing. This is for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending visitors to a different page.

27. What are 404 errors?

Ans:- A 404 page is the webpage served to a user who tries to access a page that is unavailable. The 404 error indicates that the server where the page should reside has been contacted but that the page is does not exist at that address. 404 errors can result when pages or files are moved or deleted or when URLS are mistyped.

28. Difference between 404 & Soft 404 errors?

Ans:- The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with a given server, but the server could not find what was requested.

Basically, Soft 404 is a page that looks like a 404 but returns a HTTP status code 200. I mean, the website might show a “Page Not Found”-style page, but search engines such as Google will see the page and think that it’s an actual live page.

29. What is anchor text?

Ans:- Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. SEO best practices dictate that anchor text be relevant to the page you’re linking to, rather than generic text. The blue, underlined anchor text is the most common as it is the web standard, although it is possible to change the color and underlining through html code.

30. What is Image Alt Text?

Ans:- Alt text or alternate text is an attribute added to an image tag in HTML. This text appears inside the image container when the image can not be displayed. It helps search engines understand what an image is about. Alternate text is also very helpful in case images on a page cannot be found.

31. What is Google Webmaster Tools?

Ans:- Google Search Console is a no-charge web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites.

32. What is Google Analytics?

Ans:- Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin. Google Analytics is now the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet.

33. What is 301 Redirect?

Ans:- A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances, the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website

34. What is 302 Redirect?

Ans:- A 302 redirect means that the move is only temporary. Search engines need to figure out whether to keep the old page, or replace it with the one found at the new location.

35. What is Google PageRank?

Ans:- PageRank (PR) is a calculation, famously invented by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, which evaluates the quality and quantity of links to a webpage to determine a relative score of that page’s importance and authority on a 0 to 10 scale.

36. What is Domain Authority?

Ans:- Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). … Domain Authority is calculated by evaluating linking root domains, number of total links, MozRank, MozTrust, etc

37. What is Page Authority?

Ans:- Page Authority (PA) is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a specificpage will rank on search engine result pages (SERP). Page Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.

38. What is Search Engine Submission?

Ans:- Search engine submission is an effective tool of web promotion. It refers to the direct submission of a website to a search engine. It is a form of internet marketing that helps a webmasters increase the rankings of a web pages or pages.

39. What is RSS Feed?

Ans:- RSS is a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format. These feeds can, for example, allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator.

40. What is Google Panda?

Ans:- Google Panda is a change to Google’s search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of “low-quality sites” or “thin sites”, in particular “content farms”, and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.

41. What is Google Penguin?

Ans:- The update is aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using now declared black-hat SEO techniques involved in increasing artificially the ranking of a webpage by manipulating the number of links pointing to the page.

42. What is Google Hummingbird?

Ans:- The Hummingbird is what Google is calling the latest (greatest?) algorithm that they slipped in under our radar in August. If the rumors are true, the Hummingbird will take a search engine query using long-tailed keywords and try to decipher the context of the question rather than chase the specific keywords within the question. The goal is to provide results that actually answer the question.

43. What is Mobile Geddon?

Ans:- The main effect of this update is to give priority to websites that display well on smartphones and other mobile devices. The change does not affect searches made from a desktop computer or a laptop

44. What is Google Pigeon?

Ans:- The Google Pigeon is the code name given to one ofGoogle‘s local search algorithm updates. This update was released on July 24, 2014. The update is aimed to increase the ranking of local listing in a search. The changes will also affect the search results shown in Google Maps along with the regular Google search results.

45. What is Google Penalty?

Ans:-Google penalty is the negative impact on a website’s search rankings based on updates to Google’s search algorithms and/or manual review. The penalty can be a by-product of an algorithm update or an intentional penalization for various black-hat SEO techniques.

46. What are Google Sitelinks?

Ans:- The links shown below some of Google’s search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for

47. What is structured data in Webmaster tools?

Ans:- Structured data report. If Google understands the markup on your pages, it can use this information to add rich snippets and other features to your search result. … It also provides information about errors in page markup that may prevent rich snippets (or other search features) from being displayed.

48. What is Rich Cards in Webmaster tools?

Ans:- These “rich results” are facilitated by the addition of structured data markup to web pages, either in the form of content items (“such as articles, recipes, or movies”) or lists of items (“such as recipes and events)

49. What is Data Highlighter in Webmaster tools?

Ans:- Data Highlighter is a webmaster tool for teaching Google about the pattern of structured data on your website. You simply use Data Highlighter to tag the data fields on your site with a mouse.

50. What is Google Knowledge Graph?

Ans:- The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base used by Google and its services to enhance its search engine’s results with information gathered from a variety of sources. This information is presented to users in a box to the right of search results.

51. What is Google My Business page?

Ans:- The Google My Business is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses and organizations to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps. By verifying and editing your business information, you can both help customers find you and tell them the story of your business.

52. What is Accelerated Mobile Pages(AMP)?

Ans:- The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open source initiative that makes it easy for publishers to create mobile-friendly content once and have it load instantly everywhere.

53. What is cloaking?

Ans:- Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user’s browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page.

54. What is keyword density?

Ans:- Keyword density is the percentage of times akeyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of search engine optimization, keyword density can be used to determine whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.

55. What is Keyword proximity?

Ans:- The keyword proximity refers to the distance between the search term’s individual keywords. For example: a website contains the keywords that make up the search term “dentist Boston implant” in the heading “Your professional dentist in Boston; dental practice for minimally invasive implants”.

56. What is Keyword Prominence?

Ans:- In search engine optimization (SEO), this refers to the prominent placement of keywords or phrases within a Web page. Prominent placement may be in the page header, meta tags, opening paragraph, or start of a sentence.

57. What is Google sandbox effect?

Ans:- The Google Sandbox is an alleged filter placed on new websites. The result is that a site does not receive good rankings for its most important keywords and keyword phrases. Even with good content, abundant incoming links and strong Google PageRank, a site is still adversely affected by the Sandbox effect.

58. What is Disavow tool?

Ans:- Google’s link disavowal tool allows publishers to tell Google that they don’t want certain links from external sites to be considered as part of Google’s system of counting links to rank web sites.

59. What is Google Dance?

Ans:- Google Dance is an out-dated slang term used to describe the period of time in which Google used to rebuild its rankings, and as a result of this rebuilding, rankings of Web sites on Google’s SERP may fluctuate in order during a several day period

60. What is Google’s Rich Answer Box?

Ans:- The first obvious step to get your site featured in Snippets is performing a Question Research. That’s because people are typing questions directly in Google and the whole point of “snippets” is to answer their queries.

61. What is Black Hat SEO?

Ans:- The black hat SEO refers to the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus only on search engines and not a human audience, and usually does not obey search engines guidelines.

62. What is White Hat SEO?

Ans:- White hat SEO refers to the usage of optimization strategies, techniques and tactics that focus on a human audience opposed to search engines and completely follows search engine rules and policies

63. What is contextual backlink?

Ans:- Contextual backlinks are links to external websites that are placed within the main or primary content of a web page. Contextual backlinks come naturally within content. They are not links that are placed within the navigation, sidebars, widgets, footer or ads.

64. What is CTR and how to boost it?

Ans:- Click-through rate (CTR) is a measure of the percentage of clicks advertisers receive out of total ad impressions. “Impressions” refers to the number of times your ad is viewed.

65. What is bounce rate?

Ans:- Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to your website and leave without viewing any other pages on your website. If you look into your Google Analytics, you will see a percentage.

67. Difference between Bounce Rate & Pogo Sticking?

Ans:- Pogo-Sticking refers to a search engine user clicking through to a site, and going back to the search results to click through to other pages. Where bounce rate is known as the percentage of visitors who visit a single page on your website and left quickly.

66. What is Pogo-Sticking in SEO?

Ans:- Pogo sticking occurs when a user performs a search, clicks on a result, very quickly clicks back to the search result page, and clicks on a different result.

67. Difference between Bounce Rate & Pogo Sticking?

Ans:- Pogo-Sticking refers to a search engine user clicking through to a site, and going back to the search results to click through to other pages. Where bounce rate is known as the percentage of visitors who visit a single page on your website and left quickly.

68. What is Alexa Rank in SEO?

Ans:- The algorithm according to which Alexa traffic ranking is calculated, is simple. It is based on the amount of traffic recorded from users that have the Alexa toolbar installed over a period of three months. … The reach refers to the number of Alexa users who visit a particular site in one day

69. What is referral traffic?

Ans:- Referral traffic is Google’s method of reporting visits that came to your site from sources outside of its search engine. When someone clicks on a hyperlink to go to a new page on a different website, Analytics tracks the click as a referral visit to the second site.

70. What is Google Trends?

Ans:- Google Trends is an online search tool that allows the user to see how often specific keywords, subjects and phrases have been queried over a specific period of time. … Results are displayed in a graph that Google calls a “Search Volume Index” graph.

71. What is RankBrain in SEO?

Ans:- Rank Brain is an artificial intelligence (AI) program used to help process Google search queries. RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities, called vectors, that the computer can understand.

72. What is Schema in SEO?

Ans:- Schema markup is code (semantic vocabulary) that you put on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for users. If you’ve ever used rich snippets, you’ll understand exactly what schema markup is all about.

73. What is Spiders in SEO?

Ans:-spider is a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a “crawler” or a “bot.” … Spiders can crawl through a site’s pages in several ways.

74. What is a parasite SEO?

Ans:- Parasite SEO is where you use someone elses site that has a large authority to build pages on and then rank using links you normally wouldn’t be able to use on your own domain.

75. Differentiate between bounce rate and exit rate in SEO?

Ans:-

Bounce Rate:

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who landed on a page and immediately left. Bounces are always one page sessions.

Bounce Rate = Total Number of Bounces / Total Number of Visits

Exit Rate:

Exit rate is the percentage of people who left your site from that page. Exits may have viewed more than one page in a session.

Exit Rate = Total Number of Exits / Total Number of Page Views

If You want More SEO Interview Questions – SEO Interview Questions & Answers – Part II