Top 38 SEO Interview Questions with Answer

SEO also known as search engine optimization is among one of the most popular method used for online digital marketing. SEO is widely adopted across several industries and is international. SEO is a digital marketing technique by which we get traffic on your website or web page. This is done by affecting the visibility and raking of our website or web pages on reach engine results. Web Bull India is the best digital marketing agency with years of experience and a team of expert professionals who know exactly how to implement the right digital marketing strategy for SEo to get your website on the top results of all the leading search engine results.

The Internet and search engines such as Google play a huge role in this age of technology. Which is why SEO has been adapted to be an integral part of digital marketing. SEO helps your organisation to build a strong online presence. Search engine optimization is one of the most reliable, cost effective and affordable ways to gain traffic as well as achieve a higher ranking on the search engine results. Our SEO experts have the required skills and experience which we contribute towards the improvement of your website ranking, improving the visibility of your website, better branding of your website and the web traffic. Having a high ROI, credibility as well as detailed insight into your organisation’s business website.

What are the top SEO interview questions?

If you want to get that job for the position of a SEO executive here is a list of some of the SEO interview questions that will help you crack your SEO interview:

Question 1: what are the different types of SEO?

Answer 1:

SEO are of 3 types, that are namely:

• On-page SEO: on-page SEO refers to the practice of using strategies to optimize all the pages on the organisations website as well as improve their rankings on search engine results for the top results. On-page SEO also assists in attracting and earning organic traffic to the business website.
• Off-page SEO: the process of off-page SEO refers to using techniques to improve the organisation’s website’s position and ranking on the search engine results page(SERPS).
• Technical SEO: technical SEO refers to a method in which the organisation’s website is optimised for crawling, indexing as well as assisting with the search engine access, all of which is done in a systematic ad hassle free manner.

Question 2: what are backlinks and what is its purpose?

Answer 2:

Backlinks can be defined as any incoming links to a web pag or website. Having a high-quality backlink helps the organisations website to rank high and have better visibility on all search engine results.

Question 3: what is off-page optimization?

Answer 3: off-page optimization is a process which is not regulated by page coding.

Question 4: what is on-page optimization?

Answer 4: on-page optimization is a process that is used to regulate the organization’s website to be optimized using page coding.

Question 5: what is page ranking?

Answer 5: page rankings is an algorithm that is used by google. In this algorithm the search engine gives an organization’s web page a ranking to determine the relevance or importance of the web page.

Question 6: what are keywords?

Answer 6: keywords is an SEO can be words and phrases that are used in the content written on the website. These words or phrases make it possible for people to find your site on any search engine.

Question 7: name some of the tools that are used in SEO?

Answer 7: some of the most common tools that are used for the purpose of SEO are namely, google search console, Neil Patel SEO Analyzer, Google keyword planner, Longtail PRO, Screaming Frog and many more. Using these tools can benefit your SEO and help in achieving better rankings on the search engine results.

Question 8: what is 301 redirect?

Answer 8: 301 redirect is a method by which you can redirect a viewe or user onto a new URL from a different URL.

Question 9: what common mistakes are made in SEO?

Answer 9: there are a few mistakes that are common in SEO and one should always keep in mind while doing search engine optimization for a website or web page. Here are some of the examples of the common SEO mistakes:

• One should not use the same anchor text for every link.
• One should focus on link quality and not link quantity.
• Using content that is poorly written for your website.
• Optimize using the right keywords.

Question 10: describe what is a landing page?

Answer 10: landing page refers to the web page that serves as an entry point to a website or even a particular section of the website.

Question 11: what is an outbound link?

Answer: An outbound link is a link on the website that links to an another web page or website. The purpose of using outbound links is to help in extending the relevancy signal of the web page as well as boost the SEO rankings if they come from authority sites.

Question 12: define the term keyword density?

Answer 12: keyword density can be described as the percentage density of a particular phrase or a particular keyword available on the website or web page to the total number of words on that web page.

Question 13: what are HTML Meta tags?

Answer 13: HTML Meta tags are page Datta tags that lie between the opening and choosing of the head tags in the HTML code of the particular document.

Question 14: mention the character limits and name the 4 important Meta tags used in SEO?

Answer 14: Here are the 4 important Meta tags that are used in SEO along with their character limits:

1. Description Meta tags- description Meta tags have a limit of 150 characters.
2. Title Meta tag-  title Meta tags have a limit of 60 characters.
3. Keyword Meta tag- keyword Meta tags have a limit of 200 characters.
4. Meta robot tag-  N/A

Question 15: what is the difference between a no-follow and a do-follow link?

Answer 15: The difference between a no-follow and I do-follow link is that no-following usually does not influence the ranking of your website on the search engine index whereas do-follow link acts as a banklink that is counted by all the top search engines which helps in a enhancing the ranking of your website.

Question 16: define an anchor text?

Answer 16: an anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. The anchor text used should be relevant to the page it is linked to, rather than just generic text.

Question 17: what is the purpose of a Googlebot?

Answer 17: a Googlebot is the name of the web crawler software that is used by Google as a search bot to index web pages.

Question 18: how can you decrease the loading time of a website?

Answer 18:  here is are a few methods that can be applied in to inorder to decrease the loading time of a website:

• You can enable the browser caching for your website.
• By optimising an image without losing its quality.
• Reduce HTTP request by optimising CSS delivery.
• Avoiding self-hosted videos on your website.

Question 19: what is the purpose of robots.txt?

Answer 19: a robots.txt is a standard that is used by website to communicate with other web crawlers as well as other web robots.

Question 20: is it better to use a Meta tag or a robots.txt?

Answer 20: It is much more beneficial to use Meta Robot tags as they help in focusing the search engine crawlers not only to the index but also display hidden messages. By using this we can also ensure that the link equity is not lost, by using the ‘follow’ command.

Question 21: what does keyword difficulty mean?

Answer 21: keyword difficulty can be defined as to how difficult a keyword is to rank on the search engines because of its popularity.

Question 22: define long-tail keyword?

Answer 22: long-tail keywords can be defined as the phrases that contain more than 4 words. These long-tail keywords are used inorder to make the search results highly specific.

Question 23: what can be described as a SEO friendly URL?

Answer 23: a URL that contains proper file structure and maintains a proper length can be defined as SEO friendly URLs.

Question 24: what tools can be used to check backlinks of websites?

Answer 24: here are a few tools that can be used to check the number of backlinks of a website. By using these you can look at the baclinks of other sites as well:

• Backlink finder
• Backlink watch
• Alexa
• Open site explorer

Question 25: What is the purpose of the Panda update?

Answer 25: The Panda update was reused in the year 2011. The update aimed to lower the rank of low quality sites, thin sites as well as content farms and return higher quality websites on the top rankings of the search engine results.

Question 26: what is the purpose of the Penguin update?

Answer 26: Penguin update was released in the year 2012. The purpose of the Penguin update was to catch websites that deemed to be spamming its search results. Especially those website that are doing so by buying links and obtaining them through link networks that are designed to boost the Google rankings of the website in its search engine results.

Question 27: define sandbox effect?

Answer 27: sandbox effect is the theory that states that the website with newly-registered domains or even the domains with frequent ownership or name server changes are placed in a sandbox, which a holding area in the indexes if Google until such time  is deemed appropriate before rankings and be commenced.

Question 28: define doorway pages?

Answer 28: doorway pages can be defined as web pages that are created for spamdexing. This is done for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for certain phrases to send visitors to a different web page.

Question 29: what is the fixed limit for a robot.txt file?

Answer 29: The limit set for a robot.txt file is 500 KV as Googlebot can only read the first 500kb present in the robot.txt file.

Question 30: define keyboard proximity?

Answer 30: keyword proximity can be defined as the distance between the two keywords available on the web page.

Question 31: State the criteria for uniqueness of a page?

Answer 31: here are some of the criteria for the uniqueness of a bitch:

• Take similarity
• Code similarity
• Page names
• Titles
• Headings
• Meta tags
• Page titles

Question 32: What are the few black heart techniques that should be avoided?

Answer 32: here are few of the black hat techniques that one should always avoid:

• Cloaking
• Link farming
• Doorway pages
• Keyboard stuffing
• Hidden text

Question 33:  how to remove a toxic link from your website?

Answer 33: Remove a toxic link from your website first use link checker tool to find out the toxic link to the website then use the Google Disavow tool to remove the toxic link from your website.

Question 34: What can you do if your website is banned for black hat practices?

Answer 34: if your website is backed by the search engine for black hat practices you can apply for the re-inclusion after rectifying the wrong doings.

Question 35: how is XML Sitemap important?

Answer 35: XML or Extensible Markup Language is created to facilitate the functionality of search engines. A good XML helps in informing the search engine about the number of pages present on a specific website, the frequency of their updates as well as the time of the last modification performed on the webpage. This helps in the proper indexing of the website by the search engine.

Question 36:Define DA?

Answer 36: DA also known as domain authority can be defined as a score 12 by Moz. This helps in accurately predicting how well a website will rank on search engine results pages.

Question 37: What is Google Pigeon update?

Answer 37: Google Pigeon update was released in 2014. The update aims to increase the ranking of local listings on the search engine results.

Question 38: what is the purpose of Google ‘s rich answer box?

Answer 38: The purpose of Rich Answer Box  is Google‘s attempt to answer the queries of the searches directly without having a need to click on the link.