SEO Interview Questions

What is a Search Engine?

Ans. A search engine is a web-based software system which is developed to search and locate relevant information on the World Wide Web. Search engines generally answer the queries entered by the users and give them a list of search results.

Name of a few search engines.

Ans. The names of some search engines are- Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, DuckDuckGo and Yandex.

What are steps involved in implementing SEO?

SEO involves the following steps to follow as per guidelines.

• Keyword Research
• Competition Analysis
• Unique content creation
• Implementing on page changes in website
• Improving the social sharing on major networks
• Acquiring links in natural form to the page
• Analyzing the reports

In which year was Google founded?

Ans. Google was founded on 4th September, 1998.

What is World Wide Web?

Ans. The World Wide Web (WWW) or the Web, which was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in the year 1989, is an information system of internet servers containing webpages where specially formatted documents and resources, supported by Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP, can be located by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) with other hypertext links.

What is a Domain?

Ans. On the internet, the domain is simply a part of the network address and acts as a descriptor for websites. It includes email addresses, website addresses and addresses of Internet Protocols such as SSH, IRC and FTP.

For example, in www.mytasker.com, mytasker is the domain.

What is domain extension?

Ans. Domain extension refers to the notation found at the end of web addresses. The extension is used to specify a country code or any web category. For example, .edu is a domain extension to specify educational institution as the web category.

What is a Web server?

Ans. A web server is a computer program with an IP address and domain names that display web pages to users when requested. Web server accepts and processes requests sent via HTTP.

For example, when you enter the URL ‘mytasker.com/blog’ over the web browser, request is sent to the web servers which bear ‘mytasker.com’ as the domain name.

What is Web Hosting?

Ans. Web hosting refers to any service providing space for websites over the Internet. Web host enables your website to be viewed by others via modem or network by making space over its server.

There are different kinds of web hosting services available today which are used as per the needs and requirements of the web developers.

What is Crawling?

Ans. Crawling or web crawling refers to an automated process through which search engines filtrate web pages for proper indexing.

Web crawlers go through web pages, look for relevant keywords, hyperlinks and content, and bring information back to the web servers for indexing.

As crawlers like Google Bots also go through other linked pages on websites, companies build sitemaps for better accessibility and navigation.

What is Indexing?

Ans. Indexing starts when the crawling process gets over during a search. Google uses crawling to collect pages relevant to the search queries, and creates index that includes specific words, or search terms and their locations.

Search engines answer queries of the users by looking up to the index and showing the most appropriate pages.

 Which websites do you follow for latest updates in SEO?

• searchenginewatch.com
• searchengineland.com
• moz.com/google-algorithm-change/
• searchenginejournal.com
• seroundtable.com
• googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

What is SERP?

Ans. Search Engine Result Page or SERP refers to the page that is displayed when a specific search query is entered over the search engine. Apart from showing a list of results, SERP might also include advertisements.

What is organic result?

Ans. Organic result in SEO denotes to the listing of the web pages that are most relevant to the search query entered by the user. It is also referred to as “free” or “natural” result. Getting a higher ranking in the organic result over the search engines is the very purpose of SEO.

What are paid results?

Ans. Paid results in SEO mean the exact opposite of organic results. It generally denotes to advertisements that are displayed above the organic results.

Several website owners make payments to Google to display their websites for certain search terms or keywords. Paid results show up when some user enters a search query with those keywords.

What is “Google Suggest” or “Autocomplete”?

Ans. Google Suggest is a part of the auto-complete function of Google search engine. When any user enters a word or some letters over the search field, Google shows many associated terms to him/her in a drop down menu. Such suggestions are a collection of the most frequently searches terms over the Google search engine.

What is On Page SEO?

Ans. On page SEO refers to all the activities performed within the websites to get higher ranking and more relevant traffic from the search engines.

On page SEO is related to the optimization of the content as well as the HTML source code of any web page. Some of its aspects include meta tags, title tags, meta description and heading tags.

What is important on page techniques? 

• Unique title with relevant keyword
• Search engine friendly URLs
• Proper meta description tag
• Using heading in proper order
• High-quality content with keyword density
• Structured data in page
• Social Sharing
• Internal linking
• Latent semantic keywords
• Schema integration

What is Off Page SEO?

Ans. Off page SEO relates to the other aspects that influence the search ranking of websites on the Search Engine Result Page.

It refers to the promotional activities, such as content marketing, social media and link building performed outside the boundaries of any web page to improve its search ranking.

Can you explain certain rules which you follow in doing link building?

Yes, I use many specific rules to define the quality of links. I will look at following factors before submissions.

1. Quality of Backlink (PR, PA, DA must be good)
2. Relevancy of the content between 2 sites
3. Proper use of Anchor Text
4. Avoid site-wide links
5. Avoid links from low-quality sites

Is Meta keywords tag important for SEO?

No, this tag is not used by any search engines for ranking purpose. In 2008 Google announced this tag is used in their ranking factors. But as per analysis, we can see that most of the popular websites still use this tag. So it is better to use this tag with relevant keywords.

What are the keyword research tools available in the market?

We have many tools for keyword research, the most popular are Google Auto-suggestion, Google Keyword Planner, Uber Suggest, Bing Keyword Tool, Keyword.io and WordStream keyword tool.

What is the definition of keyword?

Ans. Keyword means any word serving as a key. Keyword in SEO refers to the key phrases and words included in the web content which helps the users to find the specific website by entering relevant search queries over the search engines.

What is long tail keyword?

Ans. Long tail keywords are phrases containing over 4+ words that make search results highly specific. These long phrases are used by smart SEO experts when they attempt to draw quality traffic to their websites rather than having random traffic, and increase their lead conversion rates.

What are LSI keywords?

Ans. LSI keywords or Latent Semantic Indexing are semantically associated with the main keyword that users enter over the search engines.

How to find LSI keywords?

Lets say, you are writing about On Page SEO. Now, search for your keyword (On page SEO) in Google and scroll down to the “Searches Related to…” area at the bottom of the page:

With the use of LSI keywords, that are linked with the main keywords in terms of relevancy, search engines can identify the semantic structure of the keywords and extract the hidden meaning of the text to bring the most appropriate results on SERPs.

What are Heading tags?

Ans. In SEO, heading or header tags are used to separate the heading and sub-heading of any content from the rest of the web page. There are 6 heading tags used in SEO in a top down hierarchy.

Ranging from h1 to h6, header tags bring coherence in content along with relevancy and keyword consistency in the search results displayed on SERPs.

What is Canonical URL?

Ans. Canonical URLs relate to the concept of selecting the best URL for the web pages that the visitors want to see. Also, known as canonical tags, these URLs help in content syndication when multiple versions of a same page become available over the Internet. Thus, it is used to resolve issues related to content duplication.

For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different.

What is Page Title?

Ans. Page title, also known as title tag, is a phrase used for describing a web page content. The title tag appears on the search result pages just above the URL (see below) and also appears at the top of a browser.

It is one of the main components of SEO as it sums up the content of any page accurately, and is generally optimized with keywords and other relevant information for drawing higher traffic.

What is the definition of URL?

Ans. Uniform Resource Locator or URL acts as a generic term used to specify all kinds of web addresses found on the web.

URLs provide users with ways to identify and locate resources and documents on the web. URLs contain internet protocols, IP address of the host and the domain name along with other information.

What is SEO friendly URL?

Ans. SEO friendly URLs are used to optimize the structure and word usage in URLs so that the process of indexing a website by search engines become improved.

SEO techniques, such as putting keywords and having proper length and file structure in the URLs, help in improving website ranking and enhancing website navigation.

Search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.) and users may have problems with complicated URLs. Clean and simple URL helps users and search engines to understand a page topic easily.

Google’s Matt Cutts has stated that the first 3-5 words in a URL are given more weight.

So try to make your URLs short and simple. And always include your target keyword in your URL.

For example, if your article is about Google Ranking Factors, your URL should be like this:

What are meta descriptions?

Ans. Meta descriptions are also called HTML attributes which should provide an accurate description of any web page content. These descriptions act as preview snippets of the web pages over the SERP page.

Meta descriptions, which should ideally be within 150 characters, enhance the promotional value of the web pages, and can gain greater user click-throughs, if performed correctly.

 

What are backlinks?

Ans. Backlinks are also called incoming links that help users to shift from one web page to the other web pages. These links play an important part in SEO.

When Google search engine views multiple quality backlinks to a page, it considers the page to be more relevant to the search query, which helps in its indexing process and improves its organic ranking on SERPs.

 

What is a Do-Follow link?

Ans. A Do-Follow Link, as the name suggests, allows Google link calculator called PageRank to count all the inbound links from other web pages and websites as link points.

The higher the link juice or link points are, the greater would be the search ranking of that web page, as these links make the web page appear very relevant and popular to the Google search engines.

 

What is a No-Follow link?

Ans. A No-Follow link is exactly the opposite of a Do-Follow link as such the link attributes do not allow the Google bots to follow them. These links cannot be followed by robots; only humans can do it.

No-follow link attributes are structured in the following manner:

Link text

 

What is internal linking?

Ans. Internal linking is a process of providing hyperlinks on the web pages that connect to the same domain. It is another way of directing the visitors from one web page to another of the same website.

Source:Web Training & My Tasker