Mastering SEO Interviews: 121 Essential Questions and Expert Answers

Are you looking for SEO and Digital Marketing interview questions and answers in preparation for your interview? Then you are reading the right kind of article. Keep reading till the end as you will be exploring the best Digital Marketing interview questions for freshers and experienced. Digital Marketing is always a trend for digital promotions since businesses are expanding their customer/audience reach through online marketing. Hence, hiring SEO professionals becomes more important.

1. What is SEO & why is it so important?

Ans. In simple words, SEO or Search Engine Optimization denotes any activity performed for the improvement of Search Engine rankings of websites, products, services, or other content. It shows unpaid results which are 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 matters because users pay more heed to the first 5 searches on Google. Moreover, users tend to trust Google’s refined search results because they consider these searches to be more authentic and specific.

2. What is a Search Engine?

Ans. A search engine is a web-based software system that is developed to search and locate relevant information on the World Wide Web. Search engines generally answer the queries entered by the users and give them a list of search results.

3. Name a few search engines.

Ans. The names of some search engines are- Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex.

4. Who are the Founders of Google?

Ans. The founders of Google are Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

5. In which year was Google founded?

Ans. Google was founded on 4th September 1998.

6. What is World Wide Web?

Ans. 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.

7. What is a Domain?

Ans. 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.mytasker.com, my tasker is the domain.

8. What is domain extension?

Ans. 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 institutions as the web category.

9. What is a website?

Ans. 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.

For example, if you type the web address www.mytasker.com over the internet, it will take you to the home page of the actual website.

10. What is a Web server?

Ans. A web server is a computer program with an IP address and domain names that display web pages to users when requested. The web server accepts and processes requests sent via HTTP.

For example, when you enter the URL ‘mytasker.com/blog’ over the web browser, the request is sent to the web servers which bear ‘mytasker.com’ as the domain name.

11. What is Web Hosting?

Ans. 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.

There are different kinds of web hosting services available today that are used as per the needs and requirements of web developers.

12. What is Crawling?

Ans. 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.

13. What is Indexing?

Ans. Indexing starts when the crawling process gets over during a search. Google uses crawling to collect pages relevant to the search queries and creates an 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.

14. What is SERP?

Ans. Search Engine Result Page or SERP refers to the page that is displayed when a specific search query is entered over the search engine. Apart from showing a list of results, SERP might also include advertisements.

15. What is the organic result?

Ans. Organic result in SEO denotes the listing of the web pages that are most relevant to the search query entered by the user. It is also referred to as a “free” or “natural” result. Getting a higher ranking in the organic result over the search engines is the very purpose of SEO.

16. What are paid results?

Ans. Paid results in SEO mean the exact opposite of organic results. It generally denotes advertisements that are displayed above the organic results.

Several website owners make payments to Google to display their websites for certain search terms or keywords. Paid results show up when some user enters a search query with those keywords.

17. What is “Google Suggest” or “Autocomplete”?

Ans. Google Suggest is a part of the auto-complete function of the 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 drop-down menu. Such suggestions are a collection of the most frequently search terms over the Google search engine.

For example, as you start to type Photoshop tutorial, you might see other popular Photoshop tutorial-related searches like “Photoshop tutorial for beginners” or “Photoshop tutorial for photographers.”

18. What is On-Page SEO?

Ans. On-page SEO refers to all the activities performed within the websites to get a 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 descriptions, and heading tags.

19. What is Off-Page SEO?

Ans. 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.

20. What is the definition of a keyword?

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.

21. What is a long tail keyword?

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 increasing their lead conversion rates.

Also, long-tail keywords are easy to rank compared to single-word keywords.

22. What are LSI keywords?

Ans. LSI keywords or Latent Semantic Indexing are semantically associated with the main keyword that users enter over the search engines.

How to find LSI keywords?

Let’s say, you are writing about On Page SEO. Now, search for your keyword (On-page SEO) in Google and scroll down to the “Searches Related to…” area at the bottom of the page:

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.

23. What are Heading tags?

Ans. In SEO, heading or 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.

Ranging from h1 to h6, header tags bring coherence in content along with relevancy and keyword consistency in the search results displayed on SERPs.

24. What is a Canonical URL?

Ans. 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 the 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.example.com
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these URLs are different.

25. What is Page Title?

Ans. Page title, also known as title tag, is a phrase used for describing web page content. The title tag appears on the search result pages just above the URL (see below) and also appears at the top of the browser.

It is one of the main components of SEO as it sums up the content of any page accurately, and is generally optimized with keywords and other relevant information for drawing higher traffic.

26. What is the definition of a URL?

Ans. 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, the IP address of the host, and the domain name along with other information.

27. What is SEO-friendly URL?

Ans. 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 becomes 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.

Search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) and users may have problems with complicated URLs. A clean and simple URL helps users and search engines to understand a page topic easily.

Google’s Matt Cutts has stated that the first 3-5 words in a URL are given more weight.

So try to make your URLs short and simple. And always include your target keyword in your URL.

For example, if your article is about Google Ranking Factors, your URL should be like this:

28. What are meta descriptions?

Ans. 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.

Meta descriptions, which should ideally be within 150 characters, enhance the promotional value of the web pages, and can gain greater user click-throughs, if performed correctly.

29. What are backlinks?

Ans. Backlinks are also called incoming links that help users to shift from one web page to the other web pages. These links play an important part in SEO.

When a Google search engine views multiple quality backlinks to a page, it considers the page to be more relevant to the search query, which helps in its indexing process and improves its organic ranking on SERPs.

30. What is a Do-Follow link?

Ans. A Do-Follow Link, as the name suggests, allows a Google link calculator called PageRank to count all the inbound links from other web pages and websites as link points.

The higher the link juice or link points are, the greater would be the search ranking of that web page, as these links make the web page appear very relevant and popular to the Google search engines.

31. What is a No-Follow link?

Ans. A No-Follow link is exactly the opposite of a Do-Follow link as such the link attributes do not allow the Google bots to follow them. These links cannot be followed by robots; only humans can do it.

No-follow link attributes are structured in the following manner:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Link text</a>

32. What is internal linking?

Ans. Internal Linking is a process of providing hyperlinks on web pages that connect to the same domain. It is another way of directing 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.

33. What are incoming 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. However, textual inbound links are more useful in drawing greater traffic and improving the PageRank level of any webpage.

34. What is an outgoing link?

Ans. An outbound link is a hyperlink that points to a targeted or external domain and is different from the links present in the Source domain. For example, if you provide links to 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 search engine ranking. Google search engine counts outbound links as third-party votes which improve the ranking of your web page.

35. Why are backlinks important in SEO?

Ans. From the perspective of SEO, there is a difference between backlinks and quality backlinks.

For Google search, random backlinks do not offer any help. Google assesses the quality of the backlinks present on a webpage with the relevancy found in the content of both web pages.

The higher the relevance between the original content and backlink content, the greater becomes the quality of the backlinks.

Quality backlinks bring more referral traffic to a website/blog, and most importantly will improve the ranking of a webpage.

36. What are the most important Google ranking factors?

Ans. According to Andrey Lipattsev, the Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, the top 3 ranking factors affecting the search engine algorithm of Google are:

#1 Content

#2 Backlinks

#3 RankBrain

37. What is robots.txt?

Ans. Robots.txt is one way of telling the Search Engine Bots about the web pages on your website that you do not want them to visit.

Robots.txt is useful for preventing the indexation of the parts of any online content that website owners do not want to display.

If you  want to block all search engine robots from crawling your website, just put in the following code:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

If you  want to block Google from crawling your website, just put the following code:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /

It is important to decide the location of Robots.txt very carefully, or else errors might occur while displaying the website.

38. What is HTML Sitemap?

Ans. An HTML sitemap comprises 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.

39. What is XML Sitemap

Ans. XML or Extensible Markup Language is primarily created to facilitate the functionality of search engines.

A good XML sitemap informs the search engines about the number of pages present on a specific website, the frequency of their updates, and the time of the last modifications performed on them, which helps in proper indexing of the website by the search engines.

40. How can I see what pages are indexed in Google?

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

1) One can check the Google Index Status of any specific website through Google Webmaster tools. After adding the website to the dashboard and verifying the ownership, clicking on the tab “Index status” would show the number 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.

41. What are doorway pages?

Ans. 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 do not hold as much importance as the final webpage. Two common forms of doorway pages are cloaking and redirecting pages.

42. What are 404 errors?

Ans. 404 errors are considered one of the most potential impediments in the way to successful SEO. When a specific URL is renamed or becomes non-existent, any links connecting to that URL would result in 404 errors.

The interesting thing is, Google does not penalize any website for 404 errors. However, if the search engines consistently fail to crawl the internal links of any website, the search ranking of that website is very likely to drop with low traffic.

43. What is anchor text?

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

These texts are often underlined and blue, but different colors might be given with the changes in the HTML code. 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 anchors, 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.

44. What is Image Alt Text?

Ans. Google Bots cannot process images on the web. Therefore, it makes use of the alt attributes to understand what an image is all about.

The Image Alt text is generally considered as an alternate text for an image, which provides a textual alternative to the web crawlers to index the web page bearing the image.

Properly phrased alt tags can increase the SEO ranking of your website’s images in Google image search results, as they tend to add more value to the user experience.

45. What is Google Webmaster Tools/Google Search Console?

Ans. It was on 20th May 2015 that Google changed the name of Google Webmaster tools to Google Search Console.

Google Search Console provides free web services to webmasters by enabling them to monitor and sustain the online presence of their specific websites.

Google Search Console helps 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.

46. What is 301 Redirect?

Ans. 301 redirects are considered one of the most effective ways of performing redirects on any website. When a web address has been changed permanently, it is best to use 301 redirects which will redirect all the users to the new web address.

With this redirect, the search engine passes all the values associated with the old website to the new website. Moreover, the 301 redirect also pushes all the link juice to the new web address which keeps the ranking of the website unaffected.

47. What is Google Analytics?

Ans. Launched in 2005 by Google, Google Analytics is one of the most empowering analytical tools in SEO, which helps webmasters to track and monitor the traffic on their websites.

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

One of the advantages of using Google Analytics is that it can be integrated with other Google products such as Public Data Explorer, Google AdWords, etc.

48. What is Google PageRank?

Ans. Google PageRank was a calculative software that determined the relevancy of one web page based on the number of quality backlinks it contains.

In other words, PageRank views backlinks as votes, which means if Page X links to Page Y, Page Y is voted by Page X. The job of PageRank is to interpret both the page content and find relevancy. The higher the relevancy level, the greater importance is ascribed to a certain page by Google which positively affects the organic result of that web page.

Note: Currently Google doesn’t use PageRank to rank a webpage. Google’s John Mueller said Google probably won’t update Toolbar PageRank in the future.

49. What is Domain Authority?

Ans. 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 a high ranking in Google.

You can check the domain authority of any website in Open Site Explorer.

This metric effectively predicts the search ranking of any website in the future, based on the strength of the domain authority.

Domain authority is evaluated to check the credibility of any website. Lots of high-quality and relevant backlinks help to increase Domain Authority.

50. What is Search Engine Submission?

Ans. Search engine submission refers to a specific activity of the web masters in which a website is directly submitted to the search engine so that its online recognition and visibility are increased.

In other words, it is one way of informing the search engines about the existence of any website, which is then indexed by the search engines and reflected on the SERP page.

This is also performed by the web developers and the SEO experts so that the search engines reflect the most recent content of the website.

Is search engine submission necessary?

The simple answer is: NO.

You don’t need to submit your website to search engines.

The majority of search engines nowadays (Google, Bing, and Yahoo) crawl and index pages by following links.

51. What is Directory Submission?

Ans. 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.

Directory submission performs the same function as a phone directory and increases the popularity of websites with greater online exposure. Directory submission can be both free of cost and paid.

Note: Over the last few years, directories have changed – they are no longer good for getting thousands of links to your site so you can game Google. Today, directories are valuable when used carefully.

52. What is Article Submission?

Ans. Article submission is considered a part of Off Page SEO optimization. Article submission, which involves the presentation of articles to online article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, ArticleTrader, etc. with proper anchor text for link building, is performed for the promotion of any website.

Even though it enjoyed wide popularity as one of the very effective SEO techniques, article directories lost their charm with Matt Cutts, Google’s webspam team head, issuing a warning against its usage in 2014.

53. What is a Press Release submission?

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

Online press releases remain in the database forever, which means that they could be used anytime by anyone in need. It also enhances the online visibility of websites in the future.

54. What are Classified ads?

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

Classified advertisements are much cheaper than larger display advertisements used by businesses, although display advertising is more widespread.

55. What is Forum Posting?

Ans. Forum posting is the act of engaging, interacting, and writing on a forum thread by leaving a simple response to the thread or 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.

Example: FileZilla Forums, WebmasterWorld…

56. What is a Business directory?

Ans. A business directory is a website or printed listing of information that lists all businesses within some category. Businesses can be categorized by business, location, activity, or size.

The business may be compiled either manually or through automated online search software.

57. What is Social Bookmarking?

Ans. Social bookmarking is a way for people to store, organize, search, and manage “bookmarks” of 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.

These bookmarks are usually public and can be viewed by other members of the site where they are stored.

58. What is Social Networking?

Ans. Social networking is the practice of expanding the number of one’s business and/or social contacts by making connections through individuals, often through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and Google+.

59. What is RSS Feed?

Ans. RSS (Rich Site Summary) 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 favorite websites or aggregate data from many sites.

60. What is Guest posting?

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

Blogs are the most popular platform for guest posting. This is a great way to build an online reputation, and backlinks and for a company to get much-needed recognition.

61. What is Blog commenting?

Ans. Blog commenting is a popular online marketing strategy of leaving thoughtful comments on a blog post, where an individual or a business should be able to gain an online presence.

Blog comments can establish an individual or a business as a thought leader in a particular industry, which may lead to new business opportunities and also a link-building tactic since the comment links back to the page that was submitted in the “Website” field.

62. What is Google’s Algorithm?

Ans. Google algorithm is a set of commands written to feedback 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.

63. What is Google Panda?

Ans. Google Panda was 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”, and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.

Google Panda was created to target sites that publish low-quality content and penalize them if possible.

64. What is Google Penguin?

Ans. Google launched the Penguin Update in April 2012 to better identify and regulate websites that were considered spammy or overly optimized.

The Penguin targeted sites that manifested keyword stuffing as well as those that practiced black-hat SEO. On the other hand, this algorithm rewarded the sites that used white-hat SEO and that were of high quality in a generic sense.

65 What is Google Hummingbird?

Ans. Google Hummingbird is a search algorithm used by Google since August 30, 2013. It was designed to embody the special characteristics of speed and precision.

One of the significant advantages of Hummingbird is that Google was able to refresh not just its index but its search engine as well. However, they also retained important elements such as the search algorithms they previously created.

66. What is Mobilegeddon?

Ans. Mobilegeddon is a name given by webmasters and web developers to Google’s algorithm update of April 21, 2015.

This update’s main effect is prioritizing the websites that display well on smartphones and other mobile devices.

Individual pages can be tested for “mobile-friendliness” using the Mobile-Friendly Test tool by Google.

67. What is HTTPS/SSL Update?

Ans. 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.

HTTPS/SSL is important for SEO.

Why?

Because Google is giving secure sites a ranking boost (slight).

68. What is Google Pigeon Update?

Ans. Google Pigeon is the code name given to one of Google’s local search algorithm updates released on July 24, 2014.

It aimed to increase the ranking of local listings in a search which also affects the search results shown in Google Maps along with the regular Google search results.

69. What is Google Penalty?

Ans. A Google Penalty is the negative effect on a website’s search rankings based on the updates to Google’s search algorithms and/or manual review.

It can be an unfortunate malfunction of an algorithm update or an intentional penalization for various black-hat SEO techniques.

70. 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.

71. 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.

72. What is Google My Business?

Ans. Google My Business is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses, brands, artists, and organizations to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps. By verifying and editing your business information, you can both help customers find you and tell them the story of your business.

In addition to providing the information for your Local Search listing, the Google My Business page connects you to your Google+ Page, Google Analytics, and Adwords Express.

Its uses include:

• Updating business information
• Adding photos of your business
• Connecting directly with customers
• Monitoring and responding to Google reviews
• Managing information

73. Definition of SEO Audit

Ans. 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.

You can identify problematic areas that need improvement to create an action plan while a good SEO audit keeps your website up-to-date with the latest developments in search marketing.

74. Popular SEO Blogs to follow

Ans. Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, Content Marketing Institute, Moz, KISSmetrics, HubSpot, etc.

75. What is AMP

Ans. AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source coding standard for publishers to be able to load their sites quickly on mobile since mobile responsiveness could be unimpressive and slow compared to desktop resources which are heavy and plenty.

76. Name of a few Popular SEO Tools

Ans. The names of a few SEO tools are Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Keyword Planner, Buzzsumo, Bing Webmaster Tools, Moz, SEMRush, Check My Links, etc.

77. What is cloaking?

Ans. Cloaking is a technique used to deliver the content on a Web page to a search engine in a way that is different from 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 other sites than what he or she expects by disguising those sites’ true content.

78. What is keyword density?

Ans. Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page. Keyword density can be used to determine whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. The percentage is always in comparison to the total number of words on the webpage.

79. What is keyword frequency?

Ans. Keyword frequency is the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a single Web page.

80. What is Google Sandbox?

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.

81. What is Disavow tool?

Ans. Google’s link disavowal tool allows publishers to inform Google that they don’t want certain links from external sites to be considered as part of Google’s system of counting links to rank websites.

So, you may ask Google to remove certain URLs or domains as a ranking factor in the indexing of your site by creating a .txt file with a list of these domains or URLs and sending it to Google.

82. What is Google Fetch?

Ans. Fetch is a Google tool that enables you to test how Google renders a URL on your site. You can use Google Fetch to see whether Googlebot can access a page on your site, how it renders the page, and whether any page resources are blocked by Googlebot.

This tool can be effectively used for the following purposes:

• Troubleshooting webpages to improve performance in SEO.
• Submitting pages for indexing whenever the content is changed significantly.
• Finding out the pages affected by any malware attack.

83. How do you separate words in the URL?

Ans. You should use hyphens to separate words in the URL.

84. What is Google Dance?

Ans. Google Dance is an outdated slang term used to describe the period when Google rebuilds its rankings, and as a result of this rebuilding, the rankings order of Websites on Google’s SERP may fluctuate repeatedly.

The results fluctuate widely within a 3 to 5 days period. Googlebot revisits every website, figures out how many sites link to it, and how many it links out to, and how valuable these links are.

85. What is Google’s Rich Answer Box?

Ans. A rich answer is any attempt by Google to answer the searcher’s query in search results in a way not requiring a click-through to a website.

Rich answers come in many forms which can be recipes, sports scores, stock graphs, calculators, sliders, text-based answers, numbered step-by-step directions, maps, and much more.

Answers provided by Google

• Basic Snippets
• Featured Snippets

86. What is ccTLD?

Ans. It’s country code top-level domains.

87. What is Black Hat SEO?

Ans. It is the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques, and tactics that focus only on the search engines and usually do not obey search engine guidelines.

88. Name a few Black Hat SEO techniques

Ans. A few black hat SEO techniques are:

• Link Farming
• Hidden text
• Gateway or Doorway pages
• Cloaking
• Keyword Stuffing

89. What is the meaning of competitive analysis?

Ans. A competitive analysis is a critical part of your company’s marketing plan. This analysis in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the current and potential competitors.

This analysis provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context to identify opportunities and threats.

90. What is a contextual backlink?

Ans. Contextual backlinks are links to external websites that are placed within the primary content of a web page.

Contextual backlinks are much more powerful than any other backlinks. Also, this type of backlink is very hard to get.

91. What does it mean by “repeat the search with the omitted results included”?

Ans. This means that Google considers the page to be of low-quality content/ duplicate content/with an algorithmic penalty.

Duplication of the same content/page is another reason behind this.

92. What is Duplicate content?

Ans. Duplicate content, as the name suggests, generally refers to the substantial parts of content within or across domains that are either identical or appreciably similar.

93. What is CTR and how to boost it?

Ans. The click-through rate is measured by dividing the number of times a link appears on a search engine results page by the number of times it is clicked on by a visitor.

A high organic CTR in Google or any search engine means you get more traffic.

The ways to boost CTR are:

• Write a Better Headline and make it interesting
• Write outstanding meta description
• Put Your Main Keyword in Your Display URL

94. What is the bounce rate?

Ans. Bounce rate is the number of visitors which a site receives only for them to leave the site after viewing only one page.

It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave or “bounce” rather than continuing to view the other pages within the same site.

95. What is Pogo-Sticking?

Ans. Pogo-sticking is defined as going back and forth from a search engine results page (SERP) to an individual search result destination site.

This means that when the searcher clicks on a link on a SERP, sees that it’s not what he/she is looking for, and immediately leaves by hitting the back button.

Google doesn’t like pogo-sticking at all. The reason why is very obvious: when users repeatedly visit your page but don’t stick around to read what you’ve written, it becomes apparent that the page doesn’t satisfy the users.

96. Differences between bounce rate and pogo sticking.

Ans. The difference between bounce rate and pogo sticking is:

Bounce rate: A high bounce rate isn’t always bad, as it can mean that while the visitor didn’t travel deeper into a site, he spent some time on the page and got an answer to his question. He may have saved the URL or may come back later, but since he didn’t spend more time reading the content the activity is considered a bounce.

Pogo sticking: 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. This type of behavior is a direct result of immediate dissatisfaction with the search result. This always has a negative aspect to it.

In simple words, pogo-sticking has to do with search engine traffic, while the bounce rate is tied to all traffic sources including search.

97. What is Alexa Rank in SEO?

Ans. Alexa.com is a website that ranks websites based on traffic, so in terms of SEO, moving up or down the ranks of Alexa is indicative of how effective your SEO campaign has been.

The rank is calculated using a combination of the estimated average daily unique visitors to the site and the estimated number of page views on the site over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews is ranked as #1.

98. What is the goal of Google Analytics?

Ans. Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. The goal is to make sure that users can review online campaigns by tracking page quality and conversions essentially to improve lead generation on their websites.

According to Google: Goals measure how well your site or app fulfills your target objectives. A goal represents a completed activity, called a conversion, that contributes to the success of your business.

99. What is a funnel in Google Analytics?

Ans. A funnel is useful when you are looking to track the pages your visitors land on as well as the path that visitors use to land on the page. These are defined as funnels, as you’re setting up a pathway to track if the visitors walked the same pathway.

Funnels will restrict the number of completed goals to only those who follow through the entire pathway.

100. 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.

101. What are Google trends?

Ans. Google Trends is a public web facility of Google Inc., that shows how often a particular search term is entered or used to search, relative to the total search volume across various regions and languages in the world.

The Google Trends tool uses real-time search data to help you gauge consumer search behaviors over time.

Most important of all, Google Trends shows you high-volume trending search terms in your niche.

102. What is content marketing?

Ans.  Content marketing is an approach focused on creating and distributing valuable and meaningful content to attract and retain a fixed audience and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer actions.

103. What are crawl stats?

Ans.  The 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, and Flash.

Google’s ability to fetch and crawl web pages is incredibly efficient and the crawl stats provides insights for the same with complete data on the statistics.

104. What is RankBrain in SEO?

Launched by Google on 26th October 2015, RankBrain accounts for an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system which provides aid to Google to process its search queries through an algorithm-learning program.

The uniqueness of this machine-learning technology lies in its effective management of search queries that are new to the Google search engine.

By converting the search language into vectors (mathematical codes), this AI system can conjecture what the users are trying to convey by exploring already recorded search phrases of similar meaning and filtering search results accordingly without any manual help.

105. What are Cross-linking and its functions?

Ans: Cross-linking is used to refer to the process of linking one site to another site and provide a way to allow the accessing of it.

Functions include

• It provides the users with reference sites that consist of content related to the search.
• It doesn’t need to be owned by the same person as it provides the methods that have been built on the Internet.
• It serves the purpose to display the page on the search engines using search engine optimization techniques and methods.

106. How can we set different targeted country locations for a country-specific domain webmaster? Ex: We have (www.example.co.in) which needs to get targeted for US or UK locations. How will you do that?

Ans:

Solution 1: We can simply add a subfolder for that particularly targeted region, which we can separately verify in the webmaster for that particularly targeted country. Ex: www.example.co.in/US or www.example.co.in/UK.

Solution 2: We can also add a sub-domain to the existing domain and can verify that separately in Webmasters. EX: us.example.co.in or UK.example.co.in

Solution 3: Else, you can use country language tags as sub-domains and then can verify in webmasters. EX: en-gb.example.co.in (UK) and en-us.example.co.in (US).

107. What is Keyword Stemming?

Ans: Keyword Stemming is the process of finding out the root word from the search query. The process of keyword stemming involves taking a basic but popular keyword about a particular website and adding a prefix, suffix, or pluralization to make the keyword into a new word.

108. How many types of goals are there in Google Analytics?

Ans: There are 4 types of goals: Destination, Event, Duration, and Page/Screen per Session Goal.

109. How will you relate Webpage Cache View and Web page Indexing with each other?

Ans: Web page cache view appears only when the page is indexed. You cannot see a cached version of a webpage until the page gets indexed in the search engines by crawlers. Which is the only main relation between Web page Cache and Indexing?

110. What is the benefit of Do-Follow backlinks?

Ans: Do-follow backlinks help to pass the page value of a website page towards a link to a web page, which is popularly known as Link Juice. Another advantage of do-follow backlinks is that they help a web page get good rankings in the SERPs on the text used as a hyperlink.

111. What are Keywords in SEO?

Ans: Keywords contained within a Web page are the most important element to achieving high search engine rankings. Keywords are by no means the only relevant factor in how search engines rank a Web page. Other factors also count. But the majority of SEO strategies involve a Webpage’s keywords in one form or another. Therefore, it’s fair to say that keywords are the most important element to achieving top search engine rankings. After all, if a page had no text at all, there is nothing for a search engine to index!

112. What are Perfect Keywords?

Ans: You should create each Web page by concentrating on the following (in order of importance):

• one keyword or keyword phrase matching the page content
• and most frequently used by the target audience
• and has the least number of competing pages in the search engines.

Admittedly this is not easy and is not always possible. And how do you go about finding the one perfect keyword phrase that matches the page content that is most frequently used by the target audience, and has the least number of competing pages in the search engines? OK, you may take a breath now.

113. What is Keyword Frequency?

Ans: Keyword frequency refers to the number of times a keyword phrase appears within a page. The theory is that the more times a keyword/s appears within a Webpage, the more relevant the page is likely to be for someone searching those keywords. But do not abuse the system by repeating the same keywords over and over again.

114. What is Keyword Density?

Ans: Keyword density is the ratio (percentage) of keywords contained within the total number of indexable words within a Web page. In general, I suggest using a keyword density ratio in the range of 2-8%. Personally worry about it too much.

115. What is Keyword Prominence?

Ans: Keyword prominence is about improving the prominence of keywords by placing important keywords at the top of a Web page. The closer your important keywords are to the start of a page, a sentence, title, or meta tag, the better.

116. What is Keyword Proximity?

Ans: Keyword proximity refers to the closeness between two or more keywords. In general, the closer the keywords are, the better.

For example:

• Internet keyword marketing and analysis tools
• Internet keyword analysis and marketing tools

If someone searched for ‘keyword marketing’ a Web page containing the first sentence is likely to rank higher than the second, because the two keywords are closer together.

117. What is digital marketing?

Ans: Digital marketing (also known as data-driven marketing) is an umbrella term for the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium. The key objective is to promote brands and increase sales through various digital marketing techniques.

118. What are the various digital marketing techniques?

Ans: Various digital marketing techniques are-

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Content marketing
• PPC (Pay per click marketing)
• Campaign marketing
• Display advertising
• e-books
• Influencer marketing

119. How can you categorize digital marketing?

Ans: Digital marketing/communication is categorized into two segments

Inbound Marketing: This technique takes the help of social media, digital content in e-books, webinars, or e-newsletters for attracting the attention of prospects via content creation to increase the number of clicks on links and learn more about a company and its services.

Outbound Marketing: This segment includes placing ads, cold calls, e-mails, or reaching out to potential customers through digital mediums.

120. Why is online marketing preferred over offline marketing?

Ans: Currently online marketing is preferred by many businesses mainly because we are living in the digital era.

• Online marketing allows you to reach a large number of people and create brand awareness
• Technically online marketing is less expensive in terms of applying aggressive promotional strategies.
• No need to bother about printing or painting. Fabrication, rents, offline execution, negotiation, etc.
• Ability to target specific audiences from specific locations with ease.
• ROI-based marketing is now available.
• One can reach many individuals online and you can set your target as worldwide.

Whereas the number of people who prefer reading newspapers, watching television, etc. Therefore, the target is within a specific area.

121. What is the most effective way to increase the traffic to your website?

Ans: Various ways to increase the traffic to your website –

• Advertise. This one is so obvious; we’re going to look at it first
• Get Social
• Mix It Up
• Write Irresistible Headlines
• Pay Attention to On-Page SEO
• Target Long-Tail Keywords
• The site should be responsive
• Invite Others to Guest Blog on Your Site
• Link internally
• Make yourself heard in the comment section
• Get active on social media

Conclusion

Elevate your SEO interview game with our in-depth resource featuring 121 essential questions and expert answers. Equip yourself with the knowledge and confidence to ace any SEO interview and embark on a path toward professional triumph. Please remember that there are other SEO questions as well. However, we have brought to you 121 most useful and common SEO questions and answers that would help you to face any interview with confidence!

Go on and start the SEO career of your dream.

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Top 100+ SEO Interview Questions and Answers for 2023