A list of frequently asked SEO interview questions and answers are given below.
1) How can you define SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a set of process to increase the amount of visitors to a websites. It enhances the visibility of web page at the top of search engines.
2) Who do SEO?
They are called SEO executives, Webmasters, Websites optimizers, Digital marketing experts etc.
3) What are the basic required tools for doing SEO?
Google webmaster tools, Google Analytics, Open site explorer, Alexa, Website grader etc. are the basic tools which are used to do SEO. But now a day, there are many paid tools like Seo Moz, spydermate, bulkdachecker etc. available in the market.
4) Define ON page and Off page SEO?
On page SEO means to optimize your website and make some changes on the title, meta tags, structure, robots.txt etc.
Off page SEO means optimizing your websites which involves backlink, social media promotion etc.
5) What is the difference between On Page SEO and Off Page SEO?
In On Page SEO, optimization is done on website and making changes on title, meta tags, site structure, site content, solving canonicalization problem, managingrobots.txt etc. while in off page SEO, the main focus is on backlinks building and social media promotion.
6) Define some Off page SEO techniques?
There are several techniques used in Off page SEO that are given below:
- Directory Submission
- Social Bookmarking
- RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Submission
- Classified Submission
- Article Posting
- Blog Posting
- Press Release Submission
- Blog Commenting
- Yahoo Answer etc.
7) Which are the social media channels generally used for marketing?
Mostly used social media channels are:
Blogs: like blogger, wordpress, tumblr etc.
Social bookmarking sites: ike Digg, Jumptags, Delicious etc.,
Social networking sites: like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc.,
Video Sharing sites: like YouTube, Vimeo etc.
8) What is Google Sandbox?
Google Sandbox is an imaginary area which contains new and less authoritative sites for a specified time period until they cannot be displayed on the search results. It happens by building too many links within a short period of time.
9) What is the usage of anchor tag in SEO?
Anchor tag is used to make click-able text written on a hyperlink.
10) Define BLOG?
A blog is an information on the website. Blogs are usually the work of a single individual or of a small group on a particular subject.
11) What are some techniques of Black Hat SEO?
- Keyword Stuffing
- Cloaking
- Doorway page
- Link Farming
- Hidden Text etc.
12) Which type of website is good for SEO purpose?
- A website made on flash.
- A website made on HTML 5.
The content presented in flash website is hard to parse by search engines so, it is always preferred to build a website in HTML for better SEO prospective.
13) Which are the most important areas to include your keyword for the SEO purpose?
Page title and Body text are the most important areas where you can include keywords for the SEO purpose.
14) What is webmaster tool in SEO?
Webmaster is a free service by Google which provides free Indexing data, backlinks information, crawl errors, search queries, CTR, website malware errors and submit the XML sitemap.
15) What do you mean by Spider?
Many search engines use programs called spiders to index web sites. Spiders follow hyperlinks and gather textual and meta information for the search engine databases. Spiders may also rate the content being indexed to help the search engine determine relevancy levels to a search.
16) Why the title tag is valuable?
In SEO the title tag is very important it is highly recommended to include a unique title that exactly tells about the contents site in a page.
17) What is cloaking?
Clocking is a technique which is used in Black Hat SEO that enables to create 2 different page where the page content is presented to search engine spider.
18) Is HTML case-sensitive or case-insensitive?
HTML is a case-insensitive language because it doesn't matter for uppercase or lowercase.
19) What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
SEO is a process to get our website appear in the search engine result page.
SEM is a search engine marketing to purchase space in search engine result page.
20) Does google use the keyword meta tags?
No, Google does not use the keyword meta tags.
21) What are the tools used in SEO?
- Google webmaster tools
- Google Analytics
- Open site explorer
- Alexa
- Website grader
- Keyword Planner
- Plagiarism Checker etc.
22) What are the limitations of title and description tags?
The title tag should be between 66-70 characters and Meta description tag should be between 160-170 characters.
23) How would you increase the Pagerank of a page?
Pagerank of a page can be increased by building more backlinks from authority sites and high page rank webpages.
24) What do you mean by 301redirect?
301 redirecting is a method of redirecting users from the old page url to a new page url. 301 redirect is used to pass the link traffic from the old url to the new url.
25) What method should you use to decrease the loading time of a website?
We should follow the following instruction to decrease the loading time of a website:
- Use external stylesheets.
- Use less images (avoid them unless necessary).
- Optimize images and decrease the file size without affecting the quality of that image.
- Use CSS sprites to reduce HTTP request etc.
26) Which tool should be preferred between Webmaster and Analytics?
Webmaster tool should be preferred over Analytics tool because it includes almost all essential tools as well as some analytics data for the search engine optimization. But now due to the inclusion of webmaster data in Analytics, we would like to have access to Analytics.
27) What is the main usage of search engine spiders?
The main usage of search engine spiders is to index sites. It doesn't only visit them but index their content also. Spiders do not monitor sites for unethical activities.
28) How would you maximize the frequency of crawling of your website by search engines?
You must have to frequently add new original and quality content on the website for this.
29) When is reinclusion applied in a search engine's index?
If your website is banned by the search engines for black hat practices and if you have corrected our wrong doings, you apply for reinclusion.
30) What is robot.txt?
Robots.txt is a text file used to give instructions to the search engine crawlers about the caching and indexing of a webpage, domain, directory or a file of a website.
31) What is keyword proximity?
Keyword proximity is used to measure the distance between two keywords in the text. It is used by some search engines to measure relevancy of a given page to the search request. It specifies that the closer two keywords to each other, the more relevant the page.
32) What are the advantages of submitting sites to search directories?
Submitting sites to search directory are useful to get back links to your website. The more number of back links you get, the more probability to increase the chances that search engine will index it sooner, compared to when it is not listed.
