Web optimization Interview Questions and Answers

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SEO Interview Questions

SEO is an abbreviated form of “Search Engine Optimization”, it is a process of getting traffic from the “organic”, “free” and “natural” search results on search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, WolframAlpha, etc.). It helps to ensure that a website is accessible to a search engine.

If you are looking for an SEO interview questions, you are in the right place. While finding a job with as much demand as SEO, respondents undergo evaluations that not only demonstrate their experience but also their capabilities in solving problems that search engines pose.

Advantages of Search Engine Optimization

It targets quality traffic
It gets more clicks than PPC
It helps in PR
Better Conversion Rates
Build Brand Awareness
It helps to increases sales and leads
It helps to decrease your cost per acquisition
It helps to increase our website referrals

Most Frequently Asked SEO Interview Questions

1. What is SEO?

Promoting your website or business on the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are called Search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is an abbreviated form of “Search Engine Optimization”, it is a process of getting traffic from the “organic”, “free” and “natural” search results on search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, WolframAlpha, etc.). It helps to ensure that a website is accessible to a search engine. There are various SEO techniques named Audit Your Site Framework, Data search via a keyword, Implement Latent Semantic Indexing, and Double your infographic Power, etc.

SEO interview questions for 3 years experienced or freshers are available here at this platform. So, no need to search for different sources.

This is almost always the first SEO interview question you will face.

According to Moz, SEO is:

”the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.”
SEO helps to increase the visibility of the business. 93% of online experiences begin with search engines. People trust organic results more than paid results. Having your website listed for right keywords brings potential traffic to your website.

SEO methods help businesses to get their website rank for potential keywords without spending a dime on search engines advertisements and bringing the most valuable traffic. It’s called ‘organic’, ‘free’, ‘natural’ results. There are so many optimization methods, activities should be done to make sure your website is search engine friendly and ranking for targeted keywords.

What does SEO stand for?

SEO Stands for Search Engine Optimization.

Why SEO is so important to businesses?

There is a popular joke in the online industry is that, if you want to hide a dead body, you should hide it in the second page of Google. Because, a fraction of people actually go to the second page of SERP and if your industry is not on the first page of Google, your competitors will take all your customers.

SEO for business

CTR decreases gradually with each position. If you want your business to be successful in the online world, it is very important to have a well-optimized website. One big advantage of SEO against PPC is, even if you stop your SEO activities today, your results won’t stop tomorrow, unlike PPC.

SEO is very important for businesses if they want to make more sales without high marketing costs.

What is a Search Engine?
According to Google, a Search engine is “ a program that searches for and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user, used especially for finding particular sites on the World Wide Web”.
Search engines answer the queries entered by users and give them the list of relevant results based on various factors.

Name a few search engines other than Google.

One of the most common SEO interview question. Popular search engines other than Google are Bing, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo & Yandex. There are actually so many types of Search engines. For example, YouTube is a search engine which only results in video results. If you consider based on traffic, YouTube is the second popular search engine in the world.

Who are the founders of Google?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the founders of Google while they were pursuing PhD at Stanford University, California.

In which year Google was founded?
Google was founded in 1998.

What does Google stand for?

The letters GOOGLE doesn’t stand for anything. It’s not an abbreviation. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin started the company they named it Backrub.
After they realised they need a new name, they wanted to name as Googol. When they wanted to register they misspelt it Google and rest is history.

What are the most important Google Ranking Factors?

There is no definite, concrete answer for this. Everything we know is based on our experiments and industry best practices.

Most important Google ranking factors are:

Quality Content
Quality & Relevant Backlinks
Mobile First
Page Speed
Brand Strength
Domain Strength
User experience
Technical SEO
Social Signals
Content Freshness
Schema Code
HTTPS
Domain Authority
Content Type
Content Depth

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.

What is White Hat SEO?

One of the most common question in any SEO interview question and answers guide. White Hat SEO is a process of improving your search engine rank following the guidelines of search engines without compromising on your methods. White Hat SEO doesn’t involve in manipulating search engines with shady methods but instead involves in building search engine friendly website and user experience. White hat involves in creating quality content which provides value to the visitors and helps them to earn links instead of building backlinks.

What is Black Hat SEO?

Black Hat SEO is a process of trying to manipulate search engine algorithms to improve the search engine ranking. It violates search engines’ guidelines. Black Hate SEOs practice the methods to get immediate results instead of building a website with users in mind. There are so many Black Hat methods they utilize and search engines identify and offer penalty if get caught. Black Hat methods might be helpful in short term but if you are planning for long term, black hat definitely is not the solution. If your site gets penalized, it takes so much time and effort to remove it.

Difference between White Hat and Black Hat SEO?

The difference between White Hat and Black Hat SEO is:
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.

What are the black hat SEO practices to avoid?

The following are the list of black hat SEO practices to avoid:
Cloaking, keyword stuffing, link exchange, buying links, PNB, link hiding, link farming, gateway or doorway pages.

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.

2. What are the important types of SEO?

Based on the working activities, there are 2 types of SEO, i.e. On-Page and Off-Page SEO.

While On-Page refers to modifications and enhancements made on the landing page, Off-page consists of link building activities in accordance with relevant content on various platforms.

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

Cross-linking is a white-hat SEO strategy to improve rankings by passing link juice between 2 websites through reciprocal links and inbound links.

Cross-linking is used mainly to increase Domain Authority by maintaining high-quality links on 2 websites on a given topic.

4. What are Rich Snippets and how can they affect SEO Rankings?

Rich snippets are a special form of results found in Google’s Search Engine which is basically a form of Structured Data. Rich snippets do not affect the website’s ranking directly. However, presenting the data in an organized tabular form, which is easy for the bot to understand quickly is the main factor that results in better rankings in the long run while also improving your Page Rank.

5. What is the Broad Core Algorithm Update?

In October 2019, Google announced that Broad Core Update shall become more frequent since 2020. It is basically an important update which can directly impact search visibility and rankings to a number of websites. Each time such an update is rolled out, (one in Nov 2019 and one in Jan 2020) Google updates rankings on websites based on its fundamental rule, i.e. E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).

6. What is a Google Penalty and how to avoid them?

A Google penalty is a negative impact on your website’s search result ranking based on updates made to search algorithms or even a manual review. The penalty can be due to the various reasons with the main being usage of Black-Hat SEO techniques.

You can avoid a Google Penalty by avoiding these Black-Hat SEO Techniques:

Cloaking and/or Sneaky Redirects
Hidden Text
Keyword Stuffing
Pure Spam
Spammy Structured Markup
Thin Content With Little or No Actual Value
Unnatural Inbound and/or External Links

7. What do you mean by Cloaking?

Cloaking is a Black Hat SEO method in which content presented to the user’s web browser and search engine bot are different. The content meant for the search engine bots is filled with keywords and the user content is normal, in accordance to best SEO practices. This is done by delivering content based on IP addresses or User-Agent HTTP header of user request page.

8. What is Google Search Console or Webmasters Tools?

It is the Google tool which is used to control your website errors, measure performance even also controls your website presence in search result.

9. What is more important, having quality content or a high amount of backlinks?

Having quality content is the most important aspect of SEO along with creating high-quality backlinks that pass on good link juice. In terms of SEO, quality is always given more authority than quantity.

10. What is the BERT Algorithm?

BERT(Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is a vital algorithm update rolled out by Google on 25th October 2019. This update equips the Search Engine Spider with a Deep Learning Algorithm related to natural language processing. It helps a machine to understand a sentence as a human would, including the nuances in the context.

11. What is Google Sandbox?

Google Sandbox is basically a probation period for new domains and websites when they have pushed to the production/live stage. The bot analyses the Domain on various parameters and SEO executives should start link building only after completion of this time period, i.e 45-90 days.

12. What are the main things to consider in an SEO Audit?

Based on the webmaster’s requirements, each website could have different SEO tactics that would cover multiple aspects. As a thumb rule, SEO Experts should cover all these things in a basic SEO Audit to cover a wide range of webmasters such as:

Tech Stack Analysis with Compatibility
Accessibility and Indexability to Search Engines
On-Page SEO analysis
Content structure and analysis
Metadata inspection
Page / site structuring keeping UI/UX in mind
Off-Page analysis including link building techniques
Anchor text diversity in different Silo structures
Referring domains
Competitive analysis and keyword research
SERP Rankings

13. What is a 301 redirect?

A 301 Redirect is a type of permanent change that passes 90-99% of link juice to the final destination URL. It is one of the most effective ways to successfully implement redirects on broken links, bad links, etc.

14. What is difference between DA and PA?

DA is termed as Domain Authority, which is a search engine ranking score. In practice, it predicts the working performance of your website in investigating how well a website will rank on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

While PA is Page authority which is used to predict how a webpage will rank of SERP.

One of the most common question in any SEO interview. DA which stands for Domain Authority is a metric developed by MOZ. It ranges from 0 to 100. The higher the better. The more DA you have the better the possibility of ranking.

How important is DA?

DA is still an important metric for SEOs. They use it to quickly understand the quality of websites. It helps them to compare multiple sites and understand their authority.

Difference between DA and PA.

DA is Domain Authority. It explains the authority of your entire website. The higher the DA, the higher the possibility of ranking. But, DA is one of the hundreds of ranking factor.

PA is Page Authority. It explains the authority of a specific page, based on the backlink, social sharing, etc.

15. What should be the Meta tags length in SEO?

The title tag should be 60 to 70 characters including space and for Meta description it should be 200 to 250 characters including space.

16. What is a Disavow Link? How to Disavow a link from your website?

In this globalized and intricate generation of internet, there are many harmful or irrelevant sites that could have a negative impact on your site’s SEO if it had a backlink from them. To restrict this, these links are Disavowed, i.e. remove as your site backlink.

To Disavow a link from your website:

Go to Google Search Console and log in
Under the dropdown menu, select the Domain for which you have to disavow links
Click on “Disavow Links”
Click “Choose File”
Upload the list of URLs or domains you need to disavow in a .txt format

17. What are the most important factors for improving Google search rank?

There are a number of factors which improve google search rank-
The quality of content on your website
The length of content that you are using for SEO
The freshness, unique and interactive of your content
By using backlinks
By improving the computation speed for the web page

 18. What is Hummingbird update in SEO?

The updates are changes and improvements that Google is doing overtime, to improve the criteria that determine the relevance of a site and also avoid the so-called Black Hat SEO (SEO techniques that violate the policies and conditions of use of the search engine).

The Hummingbird update allowed Google to make more natural and efficient interpretations of the intention behind each search, forcing website owners to create better quality content

19. What is Pigeon algorithm?

The ultimate job of the algorithm is to facilitate access to quality information, that is, to help people find what they are looking for in the simplest way possible.

Pigeon is an update in the algorithm. It is aimed at increases the quality and security of local searches.

20. What is an AMP page in SEO?

The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is the project implemented by Google that aims to improve the loading speed of web pages on mobile phones. Although users use smartphones to surf the internet, there are still pages that are not adapted to these types of devices.

If the pages are not adapted to mobile phones, the user’s browsing experience decreases, especially when referring to the loading speed. For this reason, Google intends to make various solutions available to users to end this problem.

21. How to optimize for Rank Brain?

In October 2015, Google unveiled its new algorithm called Rank Brain, which uses artificial intelligence to filter the most relevant results and thus have a more exceptional ability to answer user questions.

Users no longer have to think with what words to perform the search. Actually, just talk directly with the machine. Therefore, in order for our content to position them better, they have to be answers to the problems of people written naturally.

The key is to write as if you were talking to someone in front of you, in a colloquial and clear way. RankBrain likes this content because it knows it is easier for most audiences to understand.

22. How Often Do You Research Keywords? What Tools Do You Use?

Research is a vital aspect that makes an SEO expert successful. Candidates should be researching for keywords at least once every three months for a particular domain. The keyword tool could be SEMRUsh or Google Keyword Planner or any of the most popular keyword tools, but it is important that you do this research because search volume results are updated in Google periodically.

23. Explain the term LSI?

LSI stands for Latent semantic indexing. It is basically a system through which search engines analyze the other words/ search queries people use surrounding a given topic. LSI keywords are words and phrases having a high degree of relevance to the original search term. Google’s ever-changing dynamic algorithm analyses LSI Rankings on a website to help determine the content quality and relevance to a particular search term.

24. What is Search Engines?

Search engines are websites or portal which give result for the user search terms or keywords. Top most search engines are Google, Yahoo, Bing, AltaVista and Ask.

25. What is Keywords and also explain its types in SEO?

The search terms or words which are searched by the users in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are called keywords in SEO. There are two types of keywords, Primary keywords and Secondary keywords.

Primary Keywords

Single and double word keywords are known as primary keywords. For Example SEO, Online Shopping, Mobile Prices, etc.

Secondary Keywords

More than Single and double words keywords are known as Secondary Keywords. Sometimes they also are known as long-tail keywords. For Example Best Interview Questions, Best Interview Questions, Html Interview Questions, Php Interview Questions, etc.

26. What is On-page in SEO?

The seo activities which are performed within the website is known as SEO op-page activities. Like Meta tags insertion, image insert, alt tags, content editing etc.

27. What is a SEO Off-page activity?

The activities which are performed on website urls without editing website is called SEO off-page activities. Like directory submissions, link building, social bookmarking submission, article submission etc.

28. What is a keyword?

Keywords are words or phrases search engine users use to find relevant content. They are also known as queries. When we figure out the list of keywords your potential users use, after the complete analyzation, we have to implement those keywords on relevant webpages and optimize it to rank higher on search engines.

What is keyword frequency?

Keyword frequency is the number of times a specific keyword phrase appears on a web page. While optimizing a web page, we have to make sure we don’t use the keyword so much that becomes keyword stuffing.

What is Keyword Difficulty?

Keyword difficulty is a metric to define how difficult it is to rank for a specific keyword-based on its popularity and competition. Higher the keyword difficulty, more time or number of backlinks might be needed.

What is Keyword Proximity?

Keyword Proximity tells the distance between to keywords on a web page.

The distance between a specific keyword within the set of content for a web page or you can say that after how many words the same keyword present again. The distance between the two same keywords should be 8 to 10 words.

For Example, Your keyword SEO occurs again after six words. (SEO is the way through which you promote your website. SEO makes your online presence.)

What is Keyword Density?

Keyword Density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a specific web page. When the keyword density is far higher than the recommended level, it might trigger search engines to think it’s keyword stuffing. So, we need to make sure the keyword density is not too high for any primary or secondary search phrases.

For example, if a keyword appears 5 times in an article of 200 words, the density would be 2.5%. There is no ideal keyword density but 3-4% is considered as best practice for SEO.

What is Keyword Stuffing?

Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO method which increases the number of keyword density to a far higher range in order to rank for potential keywords. After the panda update, it’s not recommended to keyword stuff to manipulate search engines and should be avoided at all costs.

29. What is Keyword Stemming?

Keyword Stemming is a process of identifying the root word of a keyword and creating new keywords by adding suffixes, prefixes and pluralization.

30. What is Keyword Prominence?

In which page section of the website a word or keyword presence is called keyword prominence. Like header section, body section, footer section etc. Best section is header and body section. Keyword Prominence tells where your keyword is located in a web page. For example, in a blog section, it is better to have your keyword in the article, especially first and last paragraph.

31. What is Alt Tag?

Alt tags provide text information of an image for search engines. It is also known as alt attribute in HTML image tag.

32. What are robots.txt file?

The robots.txt file is the text file which tells the search engines which page on your website to crawl.

This is most popular SEO interview questions

33. What is heading tag?

Heading tags are elements in the HTML code of your site that represent the headers on your page. Header tags have a descending hierarchy from <H1> (Header 1) to <H6> (Header 6) and can be used to indicate sections and subsections of a page. For example, you can use H2 tags for section titles and H3 for subsection titles.

34. What is Google Analytics?

Google analytics is the Google tool which is used to track the website statistic or traffic through SEO.

Related Article Google Analytics Interview Questions

35. What is Content Marketing/Promotion?

Promoting your website content according to SEO on the internet is known as content marketing. Content marketing includes no grammar mistakes, using your keywords and its synonyms and in simple words user friendly.

36. What is Inter linking in SEO?

Linking your all website pages with each other pages is known as interlinking. It is a good practice for search engine optimizations as well as user-friendly.

They are hyperlinks between different pages within the same website. They have several functions such as helping to define a navigation architecture within a web, helping internet robots to discover and index the contents of the site and above all distribute the authority or link juice of each of the pages of the website. It becomes one of the best SEO interview questions for fresher asked.

37. What do you understand by a Top-Level Domain?

Top-level domain (TLD) is the last phrase of the domain name after the dot(.). TLD are .com, .net, co.uk and other similar extensions.

38. What is crawling and indexing?

Crawling is a process of accessing and fetching all the webpages of the website that are interconnected. This is basically a task that is performed by the software named as a crawler. This software is also termed as spiders or bots; they visit a website and send information to their respective parent website.

Indexing is also a process of creating indexing for all the accessed and fetched website pages and keeping them into the huge centralized or distributed database from where it can later be retrieved. In addition, Index is another name for the database which is used by a search engine.

39. How can I get Google to crawl my site?

To get Google quickly index a new website, we can use a Google tool:

Fill out the form to send the web to Google within the Google Search Console tool. It is an old Google form that we can fill out and tell you what our new website is:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?hl=en

In order to have access to this valuable form, we must create a Google Search Console account (formerly called Google Webmaster Tools). This tool is essential to have your page indexed since it allows us to be in contact with Google and improve our natural positioning in said search engine.

40. What is organic result and paid result?

Organic and paid are the two type of results that search engines paid-

Organic results
Organic results are a type of result that web page lists, which are highly relevant to the user’s search query. Organic search results are also termed as natural search results. It improves the ranking of the websites.

Paid results
Paid results are advertisements in which website owners pay for the purpose of improving the ranking power of the website on search engines by advertisements. The website owners pay for the web pages for certain keywords so that the website of the owner will acquire top-ranking positions on the search engine.

41. What is long tail keyword?

Long-tail keywords are the keywords that target a more specific audience. The main purpose of the long trail keyword is to increase the rank of a website in search engines. By using long trail keywords website owners can generate as much traffic as it is possible by ensuring that owners are giving a great chance to their blogs for reaching the target audience. Overall, long trail keywords are intended to be used for the purpose of increasing website ranking on search engines.

42. What is Canonical URL?

Canonical URLs are search engine friendly URLs that are used for duplicate content. For example, there is a number of websites which offer filter options like prices, colors, sizes, such type of websites used duplicate Canonical URL with duplicate content. In fact, Canonical URLs are also termed as preferred versions of a webpage.

When there are multiple variations of a page, canonical URL is a way of telling search engines which specific URL is the original and which one you want to be listed in search engines. Canonical URL helps websites to avoid duplicate issues. There can be multiple cases you can have canonical issues such as different dynamic parameters of same page, print version, and more.

Cross-domain canonical URL makes content syndication possible. In this process, you select the original version and use the canonical attribute so the other versions are considered as the variations and not duplicate pages. Share the various methods to fix the canonical issues in this SEO interview question.

43. What is guest posting in SEO?

Guest post is simply posting or publishing an article or blog as a guest on a third party website. The author can place links/keywords in the text and bio, pointing to a target website.

44. How do you do keyword research 2020?

To check the keywords that you already have positioned on the search engine, you can use Google Analytics.

It is also likely that your competitors have already done all the keyword research work for you. So, you can research the keywords that rank and select the best ones.

45. What is difference between white hat and black hat SEO?

If the different techniques used by the webmaster to achieve the objective conform to ethical and normative parameters of search engines it is called White Hat, and if not, it is defined as Black Hat

White Hat SEO: When we talk about White Hat SEO, they are strategies that use ethical methods with ‘quality content’ created, which provides added value to the user and, contains relevant keywords in addition to collaborations with opinion experts or influencers. Ads are also included to help promote a website.

The most used technique for White Hat SEO is On-Page SEO which means the compliance of the website with a set of standards that make it easier for the search engine algorithm to track, index and classify semantically.

Black Hat SEO: Black Hat is a strategy that seeks immediacy in results and uses techniques that challenge the rules and guidelines of search engines. SPAM in forums or blogs, hidden texts, paid links, disorder and nonsense keywords but that quickly monetize and break navigation of the user with constant links that are not related to the content are some examples. Although these techniques can be effective in the short term, they can be penalized in the long run and be banned from the search engine, which would have a negative effect on sales and brand recognition.

46. How to increase my Page Rank?

There is a number of ways which are used to improve the ranking of the website’s pages such as –

By pushing relevant and quality empowered content (promotional and informative)
By using target and commonly used keyword phrases
By placing and embedding keyword in the website content
By regularly updating the content
By linking the website with the platform which possesses high traffic
By using alt (alternative) tags or text descriptions

47. How is bounce rate calculated?

Any SEO Interview Question and Answers guide won’t complete without this question. One of the most common question in any Google Analytics interview question. Bounce rate is the percentage of website users who leaves the website from the landing page without visiting any other page or without taking any specific action.

According to Google, Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.

To lower the bounce rate, increase the engagement on your page (with the help of internal links, CTA, etc), increase page speed, matching user experience and more.

Bounce rate benchmarks change from genre to genre. Blogs tend to have high bounce rates and B2B sites should have lesser. Benchmarks also change based on the industry.

48. What are Internal Links?

Internal links are hyperlinks that connect one webpage to another webpage of your domain. Internal links structure is very important for both user experience and search engines.

Internal links structure should be well planned keeping users in mind so they can navigate the website without any confusion. Keep every important page within 2,3 clicks from the home page. Link Depth is the number of clicks required to reach a page from home page. Keep all your important key pages links in the home page.

Internal links help search engines to crawl and index the web pages of the website and helps link juice pass from one page to another. If properly optimized, right placements of internal links reduce the bounce rate of the web page.

What are outbound links?
Outbound links are links that links your website to another website.

Having too many outbound links might hurt your SEO as they pass link juice from your domain to another domain. It is recommended to have no-follow links to outbound links to avoid passing on authority.

Keeping few outbound links to high authority sites might be helpful as you tell search engines more about the content you have and it creates a connection from your website to other relevant websites.

What are inbound links?
Inbound links are links coming from another domain to your own domain.

Difference between an inbound link and an outbound link?
Inbound links are incoming links from other domains to your domain. Outbound links are links that links your website to another website.