SEO INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Q. What is SEO?

A. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of changing the position of a website or a web page in a search engine’s search results (Organic or Natural results).

(or)

SEO stands for search engine optimization and is a part of internet marketing. SEO is a method by which the visibility of a website or a web page is increased on search engine.
Google, yahoo, bing

Q. Types of SEO

A. Two Types of SEO are

On Page Optimization

Off Page Optimization

Q. SEO Techniques

A. Two SEO Techniques are

White Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO ( Negative SEO )

Q. What is On Page Optimization?

On-page optimization is one of the types of SEO that refers to factor that gives outcome to website or web page ranking on SERP ( Search Engine Results Page ). On-Page Optimization means controlling webpage by you or by your page coding.

Some of the examples are HTML Code, Meta Tags like Meta Title, Description, Content Quality, Keyword Density, Outbound Links, Image Alt tag etc.

Q. What is Off Page Optimization?

Off Page Optimization is also one of the types of SEO that are not controlled by the page coding.

Examples of Off-page optimization Link building, Blog posting, Image Sharing, Document Sharing, Video Sharing, Info graphics submission, Increasing Page Rank and Page Authority, Article submission, Getting high quality links from relevant sites etc.

Q. What is RSS?

Ans: RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication is useful to frequently publish all updated works including news headlines, blog entries etc. This RSS document also known as web feed, feed or channel that incorporate summarized text including metadata i.e. authorship and publishing dates etc.

However, RSS feeds make the publishers flexible by syndicating the content automatically. There is a standardized file format XML that lets the information to be published once which can be visible to several distinct programs. Also, this makes readers more ease to get updates timely by allowing them to subscribe from their favorite sites.

Q. What is Page Rank or PR?

Page Rank is a rank that has been provided by Google for each and every Webpage. This Rank ranges from 0 to 10. This Page Rank is calculated by an Algorithm used by Google Web Search Engine. PR of a web page is based on the number of backlinks that received from other high PR webpage.

Q. What is a Backlink?

Backlink means incoming links to a website or webpage. Inbound links are always better than outbound links. Those links are also known as incoming links, inlinks, inward links etc. Getting backlinks from high PR and relevant site is always good. Inlinks from .org, .edu sites would increase your website or webpage ranking on SERP. Do-follow links are better than No-follow links.

Q. What are out bound Links?

An outbound-link (OBL) or outgoing link is a link from your website or webpage to another website or webpage.

Q. What is a keyword?

Keyword is a word that is used for searching through Search Engines in order to get results related to your searched query.

Q. What is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is the percentage density of a keyword or phrase available on a webpage compared to the total number of words on the page. It is one of the important ranking factors for search engines to display a webpage on the SERP. Providing junk keywords on a page would decrease the ranking of a webpage.

Q. What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is a clickable hyperlink that is also known as link text, link label and link title. The keyword contained in the anchor text would increase the ranking of a webpage that receives the incoming link.

Q. What are organic results?

The page views come directly through SERP and not through any Off Page Optimization is known as organic results.

Q. What is Googlebot?

Googlebot is the search bot software used by Google to index a webpage. Crawling, Caching and indexing of a webpage happen through this Googlebot by collecting details from that webpage.

Q. What are Meta Tags?

There are several Meta tags used in HTML but the top four tags that are used for SEO are Meta Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords and Robot tags.

Q. What is Meta Title?

Title is the most important factors for a good SEO of a webpage. These tags should be located within head section. These tags should tell some useful information about that page. A good title tag should contain 60 characters. These titles would appear on the SERP for your website along with the Meta description of that page. Google won’t penalize your page if it contains title with more than 60 characters and it skips the remaining characters. If a web page doesn’t contain title tag means Google would select the H1 tag as title or it will provide the title by its own.
Always write title tag for the page and not for SEO, if you stuff keywords in you title then Google won’t rank your webpage.

Q. What is Meta Description?

A description tag should describe a webpage and it should contain keywords but don’t stuff all the keywords. Meaningless description would affect your webpage. A description tag should contain 150 – 160 characters. If you provide meaningless or empty description, Google would take the description from the content available in that page.

Q. What are Meta Keywords?

In early days Meta keywords are the least important tag for Search engine like Google. But it is an easy way to tell our important keywords to search engine. Meta keywords should contain less than 250 characters.
Now Google won’t consider Meta keywords as one of the ranking factor.

Q. What is White Hat Seo?

White Hat SEO is one of the SEO techniques that a Search engine always likes. Usage of SEO techniques, tricks and tactics by following search engine rules and regulations, algorithm and policies are known as White Hat SEO.

Q. What is Black Hat Seo?

Black Hat SEO or Negative SEO is a common term for doing SEO Spamming Techniques. Usage of SEO by not following policies and regulations of search engine is called as black hat seo. Some of the black hat seo techniques are

Providing Low Quality content or duplicate content on the page
Getting backlinks from spammed or adult sites.
Giving keyword stuffed content on the page with background color
Getting too much backlinks from a single page with different anchor text that targets a   single page of     your website.
Cloaking
Google Bowling etc

Q. Difference between keyword & keyword phrase?

The keyword term is basically concerned with a one-word term, on the other hand a keyword phrase considered as employment of two or more word-combinations. Therefore, it is very confounded to get high ranking in account of one-word keyword term until the one-word keyword has little online competition. Therefore, this practice is not encouraged to employ. In order to drive more traffic and top ranking in SERP it is recommended to employ keyword phrase.

Q. What is the difference between search engine marketing and Internet marketing?

Search Engine Marketing is specific to marketing your brand/service/products through search engines. It can be in the form of organic search results where landing pages are aimed for higher ranking, or in paid search results, where ads are aimed to display at maximum exposure for targeted keywords at minimal cost possible.

Internet marketing covers a broader range of channels. It includes search engine marketing, email marketing / EDM, social media, and so on.

Q. How will you solve canonicalization issue or what is .htacess file?

.htacess file is used to solve the canonicalization issue of a website. It may happen that the home page of the site may take several urls like

http://www.seocutts.com/orhttp://www.seocutts.com/index.html or http://seocutts.com/ .

The search engines might treat these url as different and may divide the link juice gained by having various backlinks made with any of these 3 urls. The link juice gets divided between these three urls equally. .htacess file is created to have a single url of the home page so that the link juice is passed onto single url.

Q. What is the difference between white hat and black hat?

White hat is what the search engines have stated as being within their guidelines for search engine optimization. Black hat is generally unethical tactics to have a page rank. It usually doesn’t work for long and can get you penalized.

Q. What is your favorite SEO website/blog,

SeoMoz,
Analytics.Blogspot.com,
GoogleWebMasterCentral.Blogspot.com,
InsideSearch.Blogspot.com and
Search Engine Roundtable are a few good ones. There are actually a lot more.

Q. What is on page and off page seo?

On page SEO are the things you can do within the website you own in order to help it rank for the keywords and phrases that you would like it to. Off page SEO are the things that you can do on other web sites towards those same goals.

Q. What is the best way to maximize the frequency of crawling of your website by search engines?

Frequently adding new, original and quality content on the website.

Q. What is the difference between Indexing and Crawling?

1) When the Search Engines come to your website and read the data or find the data, this process is called crawling.

2) Whenever Search Engines come to your website, whichever page they crawl, they take a copy of that page with them and save it on their server. This process is done by the search engine is called Indexing

Q. What is Pagination in SEO?

Pagination is the practice of dividing a piece of content into different pages while at the same time allowing Google to better understand the important pages to be indexed. Read the Google’s advice on using the pagination.

Q. What are top SEO ranking factors?

Quality of content on the webpage, quality and quantity of backlinks to the webpage, anchor text used in the backlinks, domain authority, social sharing metrics and some other traffic metrics like page CTR, bounce rate and average time on the webpage.

Q. Google’s Quality Score and what role does it play in ranking?

Ad Rank = CPC bid X Quality Score.

Quality Score for Google and the search network is a dynamic metric assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user’s search query. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower its cost-per-clicks (CPCs) and the better its ad position.

Q. How to achieve good CTR in PPC?

Here are few things that need to be kept in mind for CTR
■Target your ads to right audience
■Select correct keyword matching
■See that you target your ads by location and language
■Create different Ad Groups for different search phrases/keywords
■Calculate how much you can afford for the day
■test your ads on daily basis, change if you don`t get any response from users
■Give google users a good reason to click your ad

Q. What is pay per click? Which internet marketing model does it follow?

‘Pay per click’ , also known as ‘cost per click’ is a form of internet advertising which is used for directing traffic to websites. In this advertisers pay the site owners or publishers for the ads being viewed or click. Pay per click introduces a simple strategy of marketing in which an advertiser pays the website for publishing his advertisement and getting people to view it by clicking it, the more the views are for the advertisement, better is the revenue generated by the website from advertisement. Generally ‘pay per click’ is used by advertisers on keyword phrases relevant to their target markets. Content sites generally charge a fixed amount per click rather than using a bidding system. ‘Pay per click’ advertisements are commonly displayed on websites and search engine results.‘Pay per click’ is an approach that differs from the ‘pay per impression’ methods used in television and newspaper advertising.

Q. Where do you put your robots.txt?

a) Search for it in Google
b) In Webmaster Tools
c) The root directory of your domain or subdomain(s)
d) In the folder you want to disallow

Q. Your site is flagged as having malware, but you can’t find the malware. What do you do?

a) Submit a reconsideration request
b) Post in the Google Webmaster Help Forum to ask for help
c) Tweet a complaint to @google
d) Abandon your domain name and start over again

Q. “Unreachable robots.txt” in Webmaster Tools crawl errors means

a) You don’t have a robots.txt file
b) We couldn’t reach the robots.txt file on your server
c) Your robots.txt file disallows access to your robots.txt file
d) Your robots.txt file requires a password

Q. You would like your site to be found for some keywords related to your content which are only found in images on the page. How do you do this?

a) Place the keywords in an image on the website
b) Use the “keywords” meta tag
c) Use the “description” meta tag
d) Use the “alt” attribute or include the keywords in your text
e) Place them in tiny text in the footer

Q. What is the difference between 301 redirect & 302 redirect ?

The difference between a 301 and a 302 is that a 301 status code means that a page has permanently moved to a new location, while a 302 status code means that a page has temporarily moved to a new location.

Q.    Which SEO techniques are popular?
Ans:-There are mainly two type of popular SEO Techniques
A-White Hat SEO
B-Black Hat SEO
One more technique also used known as Grey Hat SEO.

Q.    What do you mean by organic results?
Ans:- Particular web page which comes in search engine result page in the part where free listing shown known as the organic results.

Q.    What are the limitations of title and description tags in Google, Yahoo, Bing & Ask.com?
Ans:- All search engine has their own algorithm for all the factors which is necessary to show your result in SERP. Same manner all has the different limitations for meta title tag as follow:

Google.com: Title length should be 50- 60 character & description length 150-160 characters.
Yahoo.com: Title length should be 60-72 character & description length 155-165 characters.
Bing.com: Title length should be 65 character & description length 155 characters.
Ask.com: Title length should be 70 character & description length 312 characters.

Q.    Did you know what is the difference between targeted page & landing page?
Ans. Page which we have targeted to rank that page known as targeted page and the page which has ranked in search engine called landing page.

Q.    What are the different method to control the robot?
Ans. We can control the robots via 3 methods which are:
1. Robots.txt
2. Robots Meta Tag
3. Rel= nofollow

Q.    What is Keyword Difficulty?
Ans. Keyword difficulty let us know who difficult to rank a particular keyword.

Q.    You have just launched a new web site. Unfortunately, nobody visits it, even search engines’ spiders don’t notice it. What can you do for its SEO success?
Ans. It happens with new sites some time if I am in such situation I will fetch the url with the help of webmaster tool or will submit in search engine.

Q. How will you increase the Pagerank of a page?
By building more backlinks from authority sites and high page rank webpages.

Q. How will you check the number of backlinks of your competitors site?
With the help of the link operator on Google and by using various external tools like Alexa, Backlink Watch , Open Site Explorer,Backlink finder etc.

Q. What is the difference between Spiders, Robots and Crawlers?
A spider, also known as a robot or a crawler, is a program that follows, or “crawls”, links throughout the Internet, grabbing content from sites and adding it to search engine indexes.

Q. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization while SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. SEO provides organic traffic to a website with the help of search engines while SEM involves the use of Google adwords and other paid channels of advertising.

Q. Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?
Wikipedia is an established authority! As such, it is referenced by huge numbers of other documents with relevant text associated with links back to Wikipedia.

Q. What is difference between crawling and caching?

Ans:- Crawling is the one time activity while caching is the repetitive activity.

Q. What is Indexing?
Ans:- Indexing is the process by which Google or other search engine store our website info in their database.

Q.What is robots.txt?
Ans:- If we want to block some data from search engine then we used this file. This file must be uploaded on root server. This is the first file which is crawled by search engine first.

Q. What is the different method to control the robot?
Ans:- There are main three different method which we have uses to control the robot for our website
1. Robots.txt
2. Robots Meta Tag
3. Rel= nofollow

Q: What’s the significance of Robots.txt file in a website?

Ans: Robots. text file is considered as a useful convention to prevent cooperating web robots and web crawlers from accessing all or part of a website or its content for which we don’t want to be crawled and indexed but publicly viewable. It is also employed by search engines to archive and categorize website and to generate a rule of no follow regarding some particular areas of our websites

Q: What is cloaking?

Ans: Cloaking is a technique which is used in Black Hat SEOthat enables to create two distinct pages where the page content being presented to search engine spider is different from that which is being presented to the user’s browser. These techniques do not come under the guidelines of search engines.

Q: In order to prevent penalty, what things you shouldn’t perform to increase ranking?

Ans: I would discard links from those websites which is supposed to act as link farm as well as poor quality sites which have low page rank. Ensure that our site must contain unique and quality content without keyword stuffing. Also, I used to avoid any practices of ‘spam’ which include certain affiliate advertising websites, unsolicited e-mail campaigns etc.

Q: What mistakes you should avoid while optimizing the website?

Ans: The main mistakes that should be avoided are filling keywords in webpage, employing identical anchor text for link building, keyword stuffing, getting low quality backlinks etc.

Q: Define and Differentiate Webmaster Tool & Analytics Tool?

Ans: Webmaster Tool is a free service catered by Google which provide us a complete report for indexing data, crawling errors, backlink information, search queries, website malware errors, CTR and submitting an XML sitemap. Basically, it acts as a mediator between website and server provide a complete overview of data, issues and other queries.

Q: How can you enhance the crawling frequency by search engines for your website?

Ans: Including new, original, unique and quality content on our website more frequently enables search engines to crawl more frequently.

Q. What is Panda Update ? 

Panda update was first released in Feb 2011 and major purpose of this update is to penalized the website with low quality content or duplicate or thin content which was created only for SEO purpose. In May 2014 Panda 4 was release which has hit many major brand sites like ebay, ask.com, biography.com and many other sites.

Q. What is Penguin Update ? 

Penguin update was first released in April 2012. This update targeted the websites using black hat seo techniques and using over optimization by violating the search guidelines. Later releases of Penguin update has targeted the websites generating links from low quality sources with keyword reach anchor text.

Q. What is Humming bird update ? 

This update was released in August 2013. The purpose of this update was to understand the intent of the user in the query and provide the results best suitable for user. Instead of ranking a page because of keyword density, this update understand the semantics of query, relevancy of content and provide the suitable results.

For example if you search for keyword : “which is best business hotel in hyderabad ?” then humming bird will understand the intent of user and provide the results for “best business hotel in hyderabad” by ignoring the words [which is] and [?] to provide relevant results.

Q. 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. Sites like www.buy-best-laptops-online.com were hit with the update. Even some good sites were hit with this update. Example www.pooltables.com has lost the 1st position after EMD Update.

Q. If we use a keyword in domain, Will it hit with EMD filter?

If we use a keyword in the domain along with other words or brand name, we must ensure that we are providing quality of content in the site which is protect from EMD filter.

Q. What is Meta Description, Is meta description used for Ranking the page ? 

Meta description is the two line summary displayed in SERP. Generally the description is 155 chars, but more characters the automatically truncated by Google.  The keywords in meta description is used in ranking purpose [Google updated this in Sep 2009 that it do not use meta description for ranking]  but proper meta description will improve the Click through rate (CTR) for the page.

Meta Description Code: 

<meta name=”description” content=”Write the brief summary of the page and explain precisely about the page”>

 Q.Is Meta keywords tag important for SEO ?

No, this tag is not used by any search engines for ranking purpose. We can avoid using this tag in page.

Q. Which is more likely to have a positive impact on a page’s search engine rankings and why – 10 links from 1 website or 1 link each from 10 different websites?
All other things being equal, there appears to be a very strong correlation between higher rankings and a diversity of linking domains. Hence, earning 10 links from 10 unique sites should provide greater benefit. My opinion is that Google rewards this type of linking because diversity indicates both broad popularity/importance and greater editorial citation vs. a single site (possibly one which has a relationship with the linked site). The larger quantity of linking domains is also a far greater barrier for marketers and businesses to earn vs. the single site’s links.

Q. Explain the difference between the following items and how the search engines treat them – 301 response code, 302 response code, canonical URL tag and meta refresh.
A 301 redirect tells browsers and search engines that a page has been permanently redirected to a new URL. A 302 redirect indicates a temporary redirection that will change again or revert back in the future. Search engines such as Google and Bing interpret a 301 redirect by passing the link equity and ranking metrics from the 301’d URL to the target page. 302 redirects do not always receive this treatment (though exceptions exist) and may show in the search results with the original URL/snippet even after the 302 redirect is in place.
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The Canonical URL tag is a < link rel> item in the header of a document that serves as a suggestion to search engines, indicating the “original” or “canonical” version of that page’s content. It is intended to tell engines which URL is suitable for indexing when multiple pages contain the same or very similar content.
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The meta refresh is a directive in the header of a document indicating that, after a certain quantity of time is passed, the browser should redirect to a new location (or reload the page). Search engines appear to treat most short meta refreshes (a few seconds in length) as permanent redirects, passing the link equity and ranking metrics to the target page (they also claim to do this 100% of the time for meta refreshes marked with “0” seconds of delay). Longer meta refreshes may be indexed as normal.

Q. Name at least 3 elements critical to ranking well in Google Local/Maps/Places search.
Any of the following would be reasonable answers – registration/verification with Google Local/Places; listing presence & consistency in Google Places sources; ratings and reviews from Google Places users; proximity  to centroid and match on local phone number/address; listing prominence in Google Places sources (e.g. Yelp, Citysearch, Urbanspoon, Dexknows, etc.), listings/references from sources that feature in “more about this place” (typically from local coverage websites); business listing title/name/domain name.

Q. What are some ways to positively influence the ratio of pages a search engine will crawl and index on a website?
There are a large number of potential ways to answer this question, so experienced SEOs will have to use their judgement about the answers given by others, but here are a few of the most obvious/sensible ones:
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A) Reduce the quantity of low quality, low value and/or low unique-content pages.
B) Add and verify an XML Sitemap to send URL information to the engines.
C) Produce RSS feeds of pages/sections that frequently update with new content and use ping services to alert engines of changes/additions. D) Reduce the click-depth required to reach pages on the site.
E) Eliminate confusing navigation and architecture such as high quantities of pagination, large numbers of faceted navigation or multiple versions of categorization/organization hierarchies.
F) Reduce or eliminate duplicate content (or leverage solutions such as rel=canonical tags).
G) Earn more links (or tweets possibly) to pages that are being passed over for crawling/indexing.

Q. Describe the concept of topic modeling and how modern search engines might use it to improve the quality of their results.
Topic modeling is a way for search engines to mathematically resolve the relationships between words and phrases and help determine if a set of content is relevant to a query. These systems typically leverage a vector space model in which the degree of “related-ness” is represented with an angle or “cosine similarity” – smaller angles are more similar while larger ones are further away. Many tens or hundreds of thousands of dimensions may be necessary to accurately represent a corpus’ collection of “topics” and the words/phrases that are related. Specific algorithms like LDA, LSI, LSA, pLSI, etc. are all forms of implementation of topic modeling.