SEO Interview Questions and Answers

SEO Stands for Search Engine Optimization. It 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. It shows unpaid results which is 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, the users tend to trust Google’s refined search results because they consider these searches to be more authentic and specific

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

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.

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.interviewgig.com, interviewgig is the domain.

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 and .in is a domain extension to specify India specified.

A website contains a collection of web pages or formatted documents that can be accessed over the Internet. Websites are generally identified with domain names or web addresses.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 dropdown menu. Such suggestions are a collection of the most frequently search terms over the Google search engine.

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.

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.

On-page SEO includes the factors you can control, such as keywords, content, page structure, internal linking, load time, etc. Off-page SEO includes those factors you can’t control, such as backlinks.

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

Long tail keywords are phrases containing over 4+ words that make search results highly specific.

LSI keywords are semantically associated with the main keyword that users enter over the search engines

search for your keyword on Google and scroll down to the “Searches Related to…” area at the bottom of the page then you can find LSI keywords.

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.

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.interviewgig.com

interviewgig.com

www.interviewgig.com/index.html

But technically all these urls are different.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

An external link is a hyperlink that points at a targeted or external domain and is different from the links present on the Source domain. For example, if you provide links of other third-party web pages on your website, those would be external links to your site.

External Link = links that point to a separate domain

Internal Link = links that point to content within the same domain

Content

Backlinks

Mobile-first User Experience

HTTPS Certificate

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

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

IF you want to block Google from crawling your website

User-agent: *

allow: /

IF you want to allow Google to crawl your website

Googlebot reads only the first 500kb present in the robots.txt file.

An HTML sitemap comprises of one single HTML page that bears the links of all the web pages of any specific website. This sitemap holds the foundation of all web pages of any website.

HTML sitemap contains all formatted text files and linking tags of any website. It is particularly useful when you have a large website with multiple web pages, because it helps you to improve the navigation of your website by listing all the web pages in one place in a user-friendly manner.

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.

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.

.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.

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 phrases with the purpose of sending visitors to a different page.

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.

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.

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 cannot 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.

Google Search Console helps the business owners, SEO experts, site administrators and web developers to see the crawl errors, crawl stats, backlinks and malware with a click of a button.

The schema is a markup code which provides more useful information to users on SERP’s. This project is supported by Google, Yahoo, Bing and Yandex. This is also called as Structured Data or Rich Snippets.

It is a freemium web service, which means that it provides certain basic services free of charge while the premium services demand investment.

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

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.

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 scores range from one to 100, it is calculated by evaluating linking root domains, number of total links, MozRank, MozTrust, etc…

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.

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.

Social bookmarking is a way for people to store, organize, search, and manage “bookmarks” of the web pages. Users can save these links to the web pages that they like or want to share, using a social bookmarking site to store these links.

Directory submission in SEO relates to the listing of any web address or site with the relevant details over various web directories under a specific category.

Press release submission involves writing press releases and submitting them to effective and popular PR sites for building incoming links to any specific website.

A classified ad is a form of advertising which is particularly common in newspapers, online and other periodicals which may be sold or distributed free of charge.

Forum posting is the act of engaging, interacting, and writing on a forum thread by leaving a simple response to the thread or to a particular post by a user on the same thread. Posting on popular forums is a powerful method of engaging and interacting with new users, while driving prospective clients to your website or business.

Guest posting is the process of creating content and publishing it on another person’s website. Guest posting blogs allow to show author bio (writer) at the top or bottom of an guest post.

Google algorithm is a set of commands written for the purpose of feeding back with search results relevant to the queries made.

Google’s algorithm does the work for you by searching out Web pages that contain the keywords you used to search, then assigning a rank to each page based on several factors, including how many times the keywords appear on the page, quality of the page etc.

Google uses numerous other criteria that change periodically to deliver more relevant results.

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.

Google launched the Penguin Update in April 2012. 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.

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What is EMD update?

This update was released by Google in Sep 2012 to target low-quality websites which used exact match domain name sites. The major sites which hit with the update the long tail domains with keywords.

Google Hummingbird is a search algorithm used by Google from August 30, 2013. 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

Google’s Mobile Responsive algorithm update on April 2015. 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

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is the protocol for secure communication on the World Wide Web. It prevents eavesdroppers from seeing information that visitors send or receive over the Internet. Google is giving secure sites a ranking boost (slight).

The Google Pigeon is the code name given to one of Google‘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.

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.

The Rich Answer Box is Google’s attempt to answer the searcher’s query directly without having to click on the link.

Google launched possum update in September 1, 2016. This SEO update is dedicated to ensure that local results depend more on the searcher’s location that means the closer searchers are to a business’s address, the more likely they would be to see it among local results. For using this update to optimize SEO ranking, SEOers need to expand their keyword list and do location-specific rank tracking.

This update occurred in March 2017. This update targets black-hat tactics tied to aggressive monetization. This includes an overload on ads, low-value content, and little added user benefits.

This update occurred in June 2017. Google officially launched their jobs portal, including a stand-alone 3-pack of job listings in search results. These results drew data from almost all of the major providers, including LinkedIn, Monster, Glassdoor, and CareerBuilder.

Google Sitelinks are the sub-listings that will sometimes show under the first listing on the first page of Google search results.

These are hyperlinks to website sub-pages that appear under specific Google listings to help users navigate the site.

There are two ways to see if the webpages of any specific website are indexed by Google.

Through Google Webmaster Tools After adding the website on the dashboard and verifying the ownership, clicking on the tab “Index status” would show the numbers of pages indexed by Google.

You can also perform a manual search on Google by typing on Google search bar site:domainname.com, and the number of pages indexed would reflect on the SERP.

The term AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages which is an open-source coding standard for publishers and with the help of this are able to load their sites quickly on mobile.

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.

Google Sandbox is a filter placed on new websites as a result of which, a site does not receive good rankings for its most important keywords or phrases. Even with good content, a site is may still significantly affected by the Sandbox effect.

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Crawl Stats report provides information on Googlebot’s activity on your site for the last 90 days. These stats take into account all the content types that are downloaded by Google such as CSS, JavaScript, Flash.

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

The total number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a single Web page is known as Keyword frequency

The distance between two keywords in a web page is known as keyword proximity.