SEO Interview Questions & Answers

1. What is SEO and introduce its types?





Ans. Search engine optimization or SEO is a process of keep changing the position of a web page or website in a search engine results by using keywords or phrases. it helps in enhance their visibility or ranking on top in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).





There are majorly two types of SEO that are being practiced namely On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.

a. On Page SEO (On-page Optimisation for Google's Panda Update)







b. Off Page SEO (Off-Page Optimization In The Penguin Update)





2. 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). In general, 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). In general, off Page SEO has to do with promotion methods – beyond website design –for the purpose of ranking a website higher in the search results or more traffic.

Off-page SEO will help make your website popular on the internet, so you can get more visibility. With the on-page techniques we can get visibility in search engines. But only off-page SEO techniques will help improve your website position in SERP.





The most popular ways are:











Article Submission , Blog Submission, Classified Submission, Product Submission, Social bookmarking, Business Listing, Google Local Listing, Podcast Submission,Video Promotions, PPT/PDFSubmission , Press Release Promotion, Infographics Submission, Image Sharing, Profile Link Creation, RSS Feed Submission, Forum Postings, Comment Posting, Community Creation in Social Networking Sites and Social Media Engagement, Answer Questions, Guest posting





3. What is Differences Between a Press Release, Article and a Blog?





Ans. Article Submission: Article offers more information than blog posts. They provide thoroughly researched and detailed information, more accurate and informative. They can be in more formal or professional tone.





Blog Submission : A blog is a frequently updated online personal journal or diary. It is a place to express yourself to the world. A place to share your thoughts and your passions. Really, it’s anything you want it to be.Blogs are more casual and provide a great way to personally connect with website readers. A blog is a frequently updated online personal journal or diary. It is a place to express yourself to the world. A place to share your thoughts and your passions. Really, it’s anything you want it to be.Blogs are more casual and provide a great way to personally connect with website readers.





Press Release Promotion: A press release is a written announcement to the media. It announces scheduled events, promotions, awards, new products and services, sales accomplishments, etc.They are written in a standard format containing a title, a sub head, a quote, the body and the boilerplate (a summary of an organization) and are formal. It is mostly written to journalists giving some information such as business announcements, giving information about its new products or about an upcoming event.

4. What is Differences Between a Social bookmarking and profile creation, Social Networking?

Ans. Social bookmarking: Social bookmarking is a web technology that is used to store, organize and share the bookmarks of the websites. social bookmarks allows you to save the address of a website that you are interested in visiting in the future, action that is performed in the online environment, thus you can access your bookmark from anywhere, as long as you have Internet. When creating social bookmarks, you can usually tag a page with keywords, for easy classification, choose who to share a bookmark with, discuss with other users about it, rate it, or highlight aspects of particular importance.





Profile Creation: profile creation is a best way for business promotion on the web. In profile creation website you put your business details or services.





Social Networking: Social networking has grown to become one of the largest and most influential components of the web, the use of dedicated websites and applications to interact with other users, or to find people with similar interests to one's own.





5. What is RSS Feed Submission?





Ans. Rich Site Summary often called Really Simple Syndication is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. RSS feeds enable publishers to syndicate data automatically. A standard XML file format ensures compatibility with many different machines/programs. RSS feeds also benefit users who want to receive timely updates from their favourite websites.



An RSS feed is a resource that shows the latest content from a source and the main thing about RSS is that it automatically updated. By submitting an RSS feed to different directories, you provide another way for your blog content to get syndicated and to distribute your backlinks.



5. How To Get Your Guest Posts Published?



Ans. Guest posting helps in increase backlinks, raise brand awareness, and increase traffic to websites:





Backlinks: If want your website to rank , need some quality backlinks from authority sites.





Authority: It acts as a form of social proof, which is a key indicator of authority. It’s also super helpful for promoting your “brand”: the more exposure the better.





Traffic: When write a guest post, very often the blog host will let you put a link to your own website. That means referral traffic for you! Sometimes they’ll let you put links to your social media, too.





6. 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 page that can be optimized, On-page SEO is the process of optimizing each and every web page of your site in order to rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).





On-Page Search Engine Optimization includes:





SEO-Friendly URLs, URL Structure, Meta Tags{title, description, keyword), Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6.), Keyword Density ,Image SEO (image title & Alt tag, Internal Linking, Page title, Page Quality Content and Increase Content Length, Site Speed, sitemap(xml, html), robot.txt & robot tag, Social Meta Tags,server optimization., Structured Data and Schema Markup, Mobile Friendliness,, canonical tag, 301 redirection, silo, breadcrumb, NOODP, Sprinkle LSI Keywords, HTTPS / SSL, Internal site search optimization, Social media tag, Add Social Sharing Buttons, Responsive Design





7. What are SEO Techniques available?





Ans. There are three SEO techniques:

a. White Hat SEO

b .Black Hat SEO or Negative SEO

c. Grey Hat





8. What is White Hat SEO?





Ans. White Hat SEO refers to any practice that improves your search performance on a search engine results page (SERP) while maintaining the integrity of your website and staying within the search engines' terms of service.





Common White Hat SEO Techniques:





Quality Content, Keyword Research and Effective Keyword Use, Quality Inbound Links, Use Descriptive, Keyword-Rich Meta Tags, Site performance, Mobile First, Use Schema for a Competitive Edge(Schema is commonly used to create Rich Snippets for Organizations, Events, Music, People, Products, Recipes, Review Ratings, and Videos), Mobile first, Optimum use of keyword density.





9. What is Black Hat SEO or Negative SEO?





Ans. Black hat SEO refers to using certain practices to increase a website’s or web pages rank in search results through means that violate the search engine’s terms of service.





Common Black Hat SEO Techniques:





Coaking, Keyword Stuffing, Doorway Pages, Tiny Text, Hidden Text, and Hidden Links, Over-optimization, Duplicate Content , Link Farms





a. Cloaking:



Cloaking is a technique used to deliver the content on a Web page to a search engine in a way that is different to what the user was looking for. The purpose of cloaking is to boost a website’s search engine rank on certain keywords. Cloaking takes a user to the other sites than what he or she expects by disguising those sites’ true content.







b.Keyword Stuffing:



"Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results. Often these keywords appear in a list or group, or out of context (not as natural prose). Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.





c. Doorway Pages:



Doorway Pages, also known as gateway pages, portal pages or entry pages, refer to web pages or websites that are developed for higher ranking when specific search queries are entered. Such pages give way to multiple web pages on the SERP which lead users to the same web destination. These can also funnel the users to intermediate pages that does not hold as much importance as the final webpage. Two common forms of doorway pages are cloaking and redirecting pages. Also called as Bridge Pages, portal pages, jump pages, entry pages, gateway pages. There are created to redirect visitors to another page by adding redirect code on landing page.





For Example – I google for ” Birthday cakes”, I click on link which opens a page but instantly redirects me to a Casino Page. Google Penalizes website for Spamming Search Engines with irrelevant results.





d. Link Farm





A link farm is a website (or a group of websites) created only for the purpose of increasing the link popularity of another site by increasing the number of incoming links.





10. What is an organic or natural search, organic traffic and Organic search results?





Ans.

a .organic search: Organic SEO (search engine optimization) is the phrase used to describe processes to obtain a natural placement on organic search engine results pages (SERPs).





b. organic traffic: "Organic traffic" is traffic that comes to your website as a result of unpaid search results.





c. Organic search results: Organic search results are the Web page listings that most closely match the user's search query based on relevance.





11. Before performing SEO activity what you do?





12. What all activities should be performed while performing SEO?





Ans. On-page SEO, Off Page SEO , On-page SEO, Off Page SEO , CompetitorAnalysis , Keyword Analysis, Website Analysis





13. How To Optimize The Website Which Has Pages In Millions?





Ans. From SEO point of view, for dynamic website, special additional SEO stuffs have to be implemented.

1 . Good Internal link structure

2 . Generation of dynamic title and description

3. Dynamic XML sitemap generation

4. Optimize Internal site search





14. What is an SEO audit?





Ans. An SEO audit is a process for evaluating the search engine friendliness of a website in a number of areas. The SEO auditor will check the website against a checklist and come up with recommendations of what needs to be fixed (because it is wrong) and what needs to change so that the performance of the website in search engines is improved.





An SEO Audit is a health check for your website which involves looking at the technical infrastructure of your website to optimize Search Engine visibility, usability and conversion.

• Traffic Overview

• SERPs Appearance

• Technical Factors

• General Appearance

• Content



SEO Audit Tools: Seoptimer : Seoptimer : http://www.seoptimer.com/

Lighthouse Chrome extension









15. What is SEO health check up?





Ans. SEO health check tool: How your website is performing.









15 .What is keyword or keyword phrase and how it is important in seo?





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.





Keyword is a single word, and while a combination of those keywords makes phrases. These keywords or phrases are used by the search engines to populate the subjects over the internet. Search engine stores keywords in the database, and when search is done, it will come up with the best possible match.





16.What is long tail keywords?





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. Also, long tail keywords are easy to rank compare to single word keyword.





17. What is keyword density,keyword proximity,keyword prominence,keyword frequency?





Ans. keyword density: 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. So if in an article of 100 words you are using your keyword 10 times, your density will be 10%. You must make your own decisions about what is right for you but it seems like a keyword density of around 2%-3% is just right.





Many SEO experts consider the optimum keyword density to be 1% to 3% percent and Google documentation states that your keyword density for any keyword or phrase should be less than 5%. You must make your own decisions about what is right for you but it seems like a keyword density of around 2%-3% is just right.





So, if your article or piece of content (the text you are analyzing) is 500 words in length and you have used your keyword 15 times, the keyword density for that keyword is…





Keyword density = (15 / 500) x 100

= 0.03 x 100

=3





Keyword density = 3%





keyword density analysis Tool: http://www.live-keyword-analysis.com/





keyword proximity: Keyword proximity refers to the closeness between two or more 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”.





keyword prominence: Keywords prominence is one of the various important factors for search engine optimization. It means, your keywords should be at prominent area in content of your web pages. To make higher prominence, you need to keep your keywords close to html tags such as <b> or <strong,>, <body>, <meta tag>, <Title>, <p>, <br>, <i> or <em>.





keyword frequency: Keyword frequency refers to the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears within a web page.





18. What are LSI keywords?





Ans. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. This technique is established to obtain the data by relating the word to its closest counterparts or to its similar context. For example, if you are searching something with a keyword “CAR” it will show all the related things like classic cars, car auctions, Bentley car, car race etc.

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.









19. How to do keyword research?





Ans. Keywords to boost your SEO strategy:





• Market-defining keywords

• Customer-defining keywords

• Product keywords

• Industry thought leaders

• Competing company names

• Related vertical keywords: These are the keywords that are related to your company and niche.

• Geotargeted keywords





Keyword Planner Tool: https://adwords.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/





20. What is search engine results page (SERP)?





Ans. A search engine results page (SERP) is the page displayed by a 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.





21. What is Page authority and domain authority?





Ans. Page Authority measures the predictive ranking strength of a single page, Domain Authority measures the strength of entire domains or subdomains.





Page Authority: Page authority is a metric, developed by SEOMoz, to predict the ability for a specific page to rank in search engines. Page authority uses a 0 to 100 logarithmic scale. A high Page authority score means your page has the potential to rank well in search engine results.





Domain Authority : Considered to be one of the most influential SEO factors, domain authority is a key performance metric developed by Moz, which rates any website on a 1-100 scale.



Considered to be one of the most influential SEO factors, domain authority is a key performance metric developed by Moz, which rates any website on a 1-100 scale.

The greater your DA, the more likely your website to have strong traffic and high ranking in Google. Domain authority is evaluated to check the credibility of any website. Lots of high quality and relevant backlinks help to increase Domain Authority. You can check domain authority of any website in Open Site Explorer





22. How to start SEO of fresh site?





Ans. SEO Steps to Take After You Launch a New Website:





Structure your website for your target keywords

Make sure each page has great, Google-friendly content

Optimize your title tags for each primary keyword

Add engaging, action-focused meta descriptions

Set up Google Analytics and add your website to Google’s Search Console

and add your website to Google’s Search Console Influence to build links

Build a long term strategy to produce ongoing SEO results





23. How to Do SEO for Flash Websites? Can search engine index the Flash Websites?





Ans. Many websites use Flash to show animation on their webpages. Flash is most commonly used to display photos in a slideshow.

















25. What is a Splash Page?





Ans. The page of a Web site that the user sees first before being given the option to continue to the main content of the site. Splash pages are used to promote a company, service or product or are used to inform the user of what kind of software or browser is necessary in order to view the rest of the site's pages.

A splash screen is a graphical control element consisting of window containing an image, a logo and the current version of the software. A splash screen usually appears while a game or program is launching.









26. What is a Backlink to a website?





Ans. Backlinks are incoming links to a webpage. Backlink is a link one website gets from another website. Backlinks make a huge impact on a website’s prominence in search engine results. If any of your content is getting organic links from other sites, that content will naturally rank higher with search engines.





Backlinks Checker Tool : http://www.backlinkwatch.com/





27. What are inbound links and what are outbound links?





Ans. Inbound Links, also known as incoming links or backlinks, refer to the hyperlinks present on a third-party web page that directs users to your web page only. Inbound links can be based on both text and graphics. Textual inbound links are more useful in drawing greater traffic and improving the Rank level of any webpage.





Outbound link(outgoing link): An outbound 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.

Outbound links bear great importance in SEO as they provide your web pages with more quality and value for the search engine ranking. Google search engine counts outbound links as third-party votes which improve the ranking of your web page.





28. What is google sand box?





Ans. 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.

A site is sandboxed when it is new and does not rank for the keyword phrases that are not incredibly competitive in Google.





Google sand box Tool: http://reconsideration.org/google-sandbox-tool/





29.What is cross linking?





Ans. Cross linking refers to the process of linking between two sites. Whether or not they are owned by the same person, It allows users to reference sites with content similar to that which they are already viewing, and may be of further interest to them.





Cross linking also serves an interesting purpose in terms of search engine optimization. Link popularity is one of the main factors involved in how search engines determine the value, importance and relevance of sites on a given topic. This calculation is then reflected in the site's search ranking..





30.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.

They help search engine spiders to crawl and index all the inner pages of a website/blog easily and such links help in building information hierarchy while pushing up the link juice level in any given website and allowing the visitors to navigate the website pages properly.





31. What is Quality links?





Ans. In search engine optimization (SEO) terminology, a quality backlink is a backlink that links to your Web site using your keywords or keyword phrase, and also appears on a Web site that has the same theme or similar content topic as your own Web site.



32.What is link exchange?





Ans. Link Exchanging is the process of exchanging text links between websites.













33. What is Link Baiting?





Ans. The art/craft of creating and targeting content specifically designed to provoke a reaction (attention) from a target audience, which in turn results in high quality incoming links.





The most important element of link baiting is creating compelling content, something that the reader finds value in. Examples of link bait, in this context, include breaking news, striking images, infographics, controversy, humor, educational material and applications.





33.What is One way, Two way and Three way Link Building?





Ans. One way link: - A link from one website to another website without any reciprocal link is known as one way link.





Two way link: - A link from one website to another website and that another website links back to it. It is also known as reciprocal link.





Three way links: - when a website links to another website and that another website links to third website but that third website links back to first website.





34. What is Deep linking?





Ans. Deep linking refers to the inclusion of hyperlinks within content directing traffic beyond a business’ home page and other entry pages. The practice is used in web marketing to guide visitors to pages that contain more informative content, including calls to action, which can help businesses improve web conversions.





35 .What is difference between crawling, indexing and caching?





Ans. Crawling: 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.





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.





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





Caching: Cache is a snapshot of a web page that Google creates and stores after they have indexed a page. When pages are indexed, they are categorized and filed within Google’s indexers, but they do not actively search through millions of web pages every time that page is called up. Instead, the snapshot of that page is searched, since it is easier to access. When indexers determine the page being requested, it then shows the actual page the cache was taken from.





36. What is a Spider, Bot, Crawler - Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp, and MSNbot?





Ans. Spiders, robot, and crawler, they are all same and referred by different names. It is a software program that follows, or “Crawls” different links throughout the internet, and then grabs the content from the sites and adds to the search engine indexes.





Googlebot is Google's web crawling bot (sometimes also called a "spider"). Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or "crawl") billions of pages on the web.





Google bot first crawl- Googlebot first accesses a site’s robots.txt to find out the rules for crawling the site. Any pages that are disallowed will not be crawled or indexed.

Slurp the web crawler for Yahoo!





msnbot a web-crawling robot (type of internet bot), deployed by Microsoft to collect documents from the web to build a searchable index for the MSN Search engine.





Bingbot the web crawler for Bing









37.What metrics do you use to measure SEO success?





Ans. There are three key performance indicators (KPIs) that should always be considered when measuring an SEO campaign’s effectiveness:

Rankings

Traffic

Traffic Volume

Traffic Quality

Pages Per Visit

Average Visit Duration

Bounce Rate

Conversions





38. What is KPI (Key Performance Indicator)?



Ans. A Key Performance Indicator is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives.





3 9. What is affiliate marketing and how does it work?





Ans. Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest forms of marketing wherein you refer someone to any online product and when that person buys the product based on your recommendation, you receive a commission.





40. What is Referral Link?





Ans. A referral link is a link that is given out to each customer who is invited to participate your referral program. This link is unique to each advocate and appears in each advocate's Sharing Page.





41. What is referral traffic?





Ans. Referral traffic is Google’s way of reporting visits that came to your site from sources outside of its search engine.

For example, when someone clicks on a hyperlink to go to a new page on a different website, Google Analytics tracks the click as a referral visit to the second site.





42. What's monthly search volume of a keyword and how it's calculated?





Ans. Keyword search volume refers to the volume (or number) of searches for a particular keyword in a given timeframe.





Keyword search volume Tool : https://adwords.google.com/intl/en_in/home/tools/keyword-planner/









44.What is Anchor text?





Ans. Anchor text denotes to a visible hyperlinked text that can be clicked through. Such hyperlinked texts link to different documents or locations available on the web.

Anchor text helps users to connect to diverse data that are relevant to the source page or content. Anchor texts can be of different types such as keyword rich anchor, generic anchors, branded anchors, image anchors etc.

SEO best practices dictate that anchor text should be relevant to the page you’re linking to, rather than generic text.





45. What is Browser Compatibility?





Ans. Browser compatibility is the capability or flexibility of a website, web application, script or HTML design to function on different web browsers available in the market. The benefit of creating a website with browser compatibility is that it improves a website's reach and cuts down on loss in performance.





46.What is AMP(Accelerated Mobile Pages)?





Ans. The



The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimized content once and make mobile pages load as fast as possible.

Google has built a new framework called AMP HTML. It allows mobile websites to load almost instantaneously. The AMP Project was formally announced on Oct. 7, 2015, with support from Google, Twitter, WordPress and several publishers and other companies.









SEO benefits of AMP





Reduced load time

Low Bounce rate

Enhanced SEO

Mobile Friendly

AMP Visitor Analytics









47.What is App store optimization (ASO) ?





Ans. App store optimization (ASO) is the process of improving the visibility of a mobile app (such as an iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry or Windows Phone app) in an app store (such as iTunes for iOS, Google Play for Android, Windows Store for Windows Phone or BlackBerry World for BlackBerry).

ASO is the process of optimizing mobile apps to rank higher in an app store’s search results. The higher your app ranks in an app store’s search results, the more visible it is to potential customers. That increased visibility tends to translate into more traffic to your app’s page in the app store.









49. How can I see what pages are indexed?





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





1) One can check the Google Index Status of any specific website through GoogleWebmaster 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.









2) One 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.









50. What are Google Sitelinks?





Ans. 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.





These are automatically added by Google using its algorithms. Page content, Site structure, Internal links and user behavior may be responsible for these.





51.What is Google Knowledge Graph?





Ans. The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base utilized by Google to improve its search engine’s results with semantic-search information gathered from a wide variety of sources.





Google Knowledge Graph ensures a visually appealing and intuitive graphical presentation of information related to queries.

It organizes data for presentation around what it calls entities, which include individuals, places, organizations, sports teams, works of art, movies, etc.





52. How to improve link popularity ?





Ans. Link Popularity refers to the number of links pointing to your site from other sites on the Web.If your site has a lot of high quality sites linking to it, the search engines can assume it is a popular site and therefore should rank higher.





Effective ways to improve your link popularity is Building links, one of the most important factors and in getting top placements on the major search engines. Link building refers to the number and quality of the incoming links that are pointing to your site from other people's websites.





53. How to increase website traffic?





Ans. Ways to increase traffic to your website:

Perform On-Page SEO

Get Listed

Advertise Online

Post to Social Media with Hashtags #

Target Long-Tail Keywords

Write Better Content

Use Eye-Catching Photos

Start Guest Blogging

Internal Linking

Check Google Analytics





No traffic, no leads.

No leads, no sales.

No sales, no business.









54. What are the Traffic Sources for your Website?





Ans. If you’re tracking website with Google Analytics, you will see traffic sources distribution between these categories:

Direct Traffic

Referral Traffic

Organic Traffic

Paid Traffic

Social Traffic

Other





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