SEO Interview Questions and Answers

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.

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.

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.

1. Primary Keywords

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

2. 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.

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.

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.

The no. of times a specific word present within the webpage total content in known as keyword density.

For Example:

If a web page have 100 words content and your keyword present 4 times then the density is 4%.

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.

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.)

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chronical 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 chronical URL with duplicate content. In fact, chronical URLs are also termed as preferred versions of a webpage.

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 webpage

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.

Note: Reach of SEO Executive Interview Questions seems coverable when you have excellent sources to read.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Note: These SEO interview questions and answers are a guide to a basic understanding. These are questions you must know the answer to before going on an interview.

In October 2015, Google unveiled its new algorithm called RankBrain, 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 themselves 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.

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

The definition of bounce rate is relatively simple to understand compared to other web analytics metrics. This does not mean that it is a superficial or unimportant fact since its analysis can reveal valuable insights.

The bounce rate offers information about the behavior of users of a website and shows their interaction on the page. Bouncing a web page consists of leaving it without interacting with the page in any way, such as writing a comment or clicking on a link. In other words, bouncing is about leaving the page before doing anything on it. The bounce rate is a parameter of Google Analytics to measure the interest of a website based on the visitor's circulation through it, at a higher bounce rate, less content visited, which means that another page similar to yours with less rate Bounce will be classified as better quality.

Rb = Tv/Te

Where Rb is bounce rate
Tv is a total one-page visit
Te is total entrance visits

The formula for calculating the bounce rate is quite clear and can be summed up in a simple equation: the number of users who leave the page after just seeing the landing page (the first page they see on the website) and who do not interact on it divided by the total users of the site. Therefore, if 40 users leave without taking any action on a page and we have 100 users in total, the bounce rate is 40%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Note: The following SEO interview questions are a guide to a basic understanding of the subject. Must read for Engineers switching to SEO.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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