Latest Advanced Most Useful SEO Interview Questions Answers

This post is about SEO interview questions which have compiled SEO interview questions & answers. These are very helpful for SEO job interview that will definitely bring a successful and bright career. These SEO interview questions and answers 2016 are congregated by our SEO experts in order to save your precious time and efforts and deliver a collection of best and most frequently asked questions just for you.

In the field of internet marketing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been emerged as an excellent method to promote a website that’s means promoting a website in search engine with motive to enhance the ranking in the search engine page result. However, in order to get a top ranking position in search engines, a website must be appeared as search engine friendly. That’s why we’re sharing most frequently asked SEO interview questions and answers.

As people accessing the internet are proliferating
dynamically, the extent of online or internet marketing is also on the hike accordingly. From huge corporate companies to small business, establishment comprehending the importance of online marketing which tends to rise of demand for SEO and SEM expert. However, the interview held for SEO jobs is seems to be very confounded as most often it comprises various challenging questions that proves your capability of reasoning, logic, problem-solving skills and creative thinking. Therefore, either you are a fresher or experienced SEO professional, We here to help you by presenting most frequently asked SEO interview questions and answers that would not only show your skills and knowledge but also helps to achieve the SEO jobs and make you the winner.

Moreover, being an SEO professional you would have to prove your skills and knowledge of SEO as well as SEO services in order to show your expertise in Search Engine field. Hence, in the coming section of this post I am going to present almost everything which concerns with SEO job interview question & an answer which ensures your success in the SEO interview. So, just go ahead and go through these set of SEO interview question & answers 2016 .

Question: What is a Search Engine?

Answer: Search Engines are very critical key element useful to find out specific and relevant information through the huge extent of World Wide Web. Some major commonly used search engine:

Google
Yahoo
Bing

Question: Tell me something about Google.
Google Logo

Answer: Google is the world’s largest and renowned search engine incorporating about 67.6% of market share. It was introduced in 1998 by students of Stanford University students Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The unique algorithmic ranking system is considered as its key of success. Besides Google Mail services there are various worthy and useful tools are being offered absolutely free which include Blogger, Feedburner, YouTube, Google Plus, Adsense, Webmaster Tools, Adword, Analytics and many more.

Question: Define SEO?
SEO

Answer: SEO is the abbreviated form of “Search Engine Optimization”. It is the ;set of process on account of which a website or web page is being constructed or optimized that helps them to enhance their appearance or visibility on top in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Question: Explain distinct types of SEO practice?

Answer: Primarily two types of SEO are being sported in practice – Off-Page SEO and On-Page SEO.

Off-page SEO is the method of earning backlinks from other websites in order to enhance the ranking of the site. This method includes various method of SEO including Blog posting, forum, article submission, Press release submission, classified and miscellaneous.

On-Page SEO is the process of optimizing a website which includes on-site work such as writing content, title, description, ALT tag, Meta tags as well as ensuring web-page’s code and designwhich can be indexed and crawled by search engines properly.

Question: What are the different techniques used in Off Page SEO?

Answer: There are lots of techniques used in Off-page SEO work. Major Techniques are:

Directory Submission
Social Bookmarking
Blog Post
Article Post
Press Release Submission
Forum Posting
Yahoo Answer
Blog Comment
Deep link Directory Submission
Regional Directory Submission and all that.

Question: Define blog, article & press release?
Blog

Answer: A blog is referred as an information or discussion published on website or World Wide Web incorporating distinct entries called as posts. Basically, the blog is referred as everything thing where you can include others too. It is more individual in contrast to article and press release. It is also considered as very personal in subject to both style and comprised ideas and information and can be written in the way just like you may talk to your readers. It is also called Web diary or Online Diary.
article

The articles are concerned with a specific topic or event and are highly oriented towards an opinion instead of information. An article is supposed to be more oriented towards showing up opinions, views and idea. Generally, it is written by a third party or expert of any specific field.

Press Release is related to a specific action or event which can be republished by distinct medium of mass-media including other websites. It should be simple, short and professional. It conveys a clear message or information.

Question: What are Meta Tags?

Answer: HTML meta tags are usually referred as tags of page data which sits between opening and closing head tags of a document’s HTML code. Actually these are hidden keywords who sits in the code. These are invisible to visitors but are visible and readable by Search Engines.

Example:

<head>
<title>Not considered as Meta Tag, even required anyway</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Write your description here” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Write your keyword here” />
</head>

Question: Difference between keyword & keyword phrase?

Answer: 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 words combination. 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.

Question: What do you know about Black Hat SEO?

Answer: In order to attain High Ranking in search engine result page, websites go for various methods and techniques which are characterized by two categories.

The methods which are implemented and acceptable according to search engine guidelines are White Hat SEO, on the other hand, the method which are less acceptable or instructed to avoid in search engine guidelines are “Black Hat SEO”.

Question: Can you tell me some Black Hat SEO techniques?

Answer: Some Black Hat SEO techniques are:

Keyword Stuffing
Cloaking
Doorway Pages or Gateway Pages
Link Farming
Hidden Text, etc.

Question: What is spider?
Spider

Answer: Spider also called as bot, crawler or robot is a set of computer program that browses the World Wide Web in methodical and orderly fashion as well automatically scan the webpages and website for updated content and download a copy to its data center to index.

Question: Name the bots (spider) of major search engine?

Answer: The name of bots/spider of Google search engine is GoogleBot, Yahoo Slurp for Yahoo search and BingBot for Bing search engine.

Question: Can you differentiate ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’?

Answer: Nofollow link is exactly vice-versa of dofollow link. These are non-crawling link which is not passed by search engine bots and hence can’t be cached or indexed. It is obvious when we wish to prevent a link from crawling and indexing.

Dofollow link is a kind of hyperlink which says all search engine crawlers to pass through which also put an impact over page rank. When we opt to employ or attempt to achieve a dofollow link then it is counted by search engines and sits in the eye of Google, Bing, MSN, Yahoo etc. as a backlink for your website and enhances your site ranking.

Question: Define Page Rank.

Answer: PageRank is a set of algorithm for link analysis named after Larry Page and employed by Google search engine towards defining a numerical value from 1 to 10 to each component of hyperlinked documents like the world wide web. The value accepts only round figure that means decimal are not allowed. Page rank is calculated by their inbound links.

Question: Establish a difference between PR & SERP.

Answer: PR is Page Rank which is defined by quality inbound links from other website or webpages to a web page or website as well as say the importance of that site.

SERP stands for Search Engine Result Page is the placement of the website or webpage which is returned by a search engine after a search query or attribute.

Question: What is Cache?
Cache

Answer: Cache is the process performed by search engine crawler at a regular interval of time. It used to scan and take snapshot of each page over world wide web as well as store as a backup copy. Almost every search engine result page incorporates a cached link for every site. However, clicking over cached link show you the last Google cached version of that specific page rather than of current version. Also, you can directly prefix “cache:http://www.webgranth.com” with the desired URL to view its cached version.

Question: Define ALT tag?
HTML tag

Answer: The ALT attribute also called as ALT tag are employed in XHTML and HTML documents in context of defining alternative text that is supposed to be rendered when the element can’t be rendered to which it is applied. One great feature of ALT tag is that it is readable to ‘screen reader’ which is a software by means of which a blind person can hear this. In addition, it delivers alternative information for an image due to some specific reason a user can’t view it, such as in case of a slow connection and an error occurred in the source attribute.

For example, the HTML for this image will appear something like this:

<img alt=”you can define at tag just below the input box of image title while uploading or editing an image.” src=”http://www.webgranth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Alt tag.jpg”>

Question: What do you know about Adsense?

Answer: Adsense is a web program conducted by Google that enables publishers of content websites to cater text, rich media, image, video advertisements automatically which are relevant to content of the website and audience. These advertisements are included, maintained and sorted by Google itself and earn money either by per-click or per-impression basis.

Question: Can you define Adword?

Answer: Adword is referred as the main advertising product of Google which is useful to make appear your ads on Google and its partner websites including Google Search. This Google’s product offer PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising which is a primary module and incorporate a sub module CPC (Cost Per Click) where we bid that rate that will be charged only when the users click your advertisement. One another sub module is CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impression) advertising where advertiser pay for a thousand impressions on flat rate to the publisher. In addition it also includes website targeted advertising of banner, text and rich-media ads. Moreover, the ad will appear especially to those people who are already looking for such type of product you are offering as well as offer to choose particular sites with the geographical area to show your ads.

Question: What is PPC?

Answer: PPC is the abbreviated form of Pay Per Click and is an advertisement campaign conducted by Google. It is referred as a primary module with two sub module CPC (Cost-per-click) and CPM (Cost per thousand impressions) through a bidding and flat rate respectively. In CPC the advertiser would be only charged when the user click over to their advert.

Question: What are the aspects in SEO?

Answer: The main aspect of SEO is divided into two classes: SEO On-Page and SEO Off-Page.

SEO On-Page includes Meta tag, description, keywords optimization, site structure and analysis, etc.

SEO Off-Page aspect is Keyword Research, unique and quality content, link building through Blog Comments, Blog Posting, Article submission, Press Release, Classified posting, Forum posting.
Question: What do you know about RSS?

Answer: 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.

Question: How would you define Alexa?
Alexa

Answer: Alexa is a California based subsidiary company of Amazon.com which is widely known for its website and toolbar. This Alexa toolbar congregates browsing behavior data and send it to website, where the data is analyzed and stored and create reports for company’s web traffic. Also, Alexa provides data concerned with traffic, global ranking and other additional information for a website.

Question: How can you achieve Google Page Rank?

Answer: Generally, Google Page Rank is based on inbound links, therefore, the more backlinks you congregate higher your page rank will be. Also, it is influenced by rank of a page which is linked to you. One other thing to consider is that the older your website will be, it will be more favorable and trusted by Google. Google rewards those websites who incorporate lots of pages, tons of incoming link and also healthy quantity of internal links to other pages within the site. In respect of SEO projects, it is relatively not so significant but delivers a picture about work to perform towards earning inbound links.

Question: Why the Title Tag in Website is valuable?

Answer: In our SEO efforts Title Tags are very earnest. It is highly recommended to include a Unique Title that exactly says about the contents sits on that page. It is valuable because this is a thing which appears in the search engine result section and tells the user & search engine, what is on this page.

Question: What is Site Map and distinguish between HTML sitemap and XML sitemap?

Answer: A sitemap incorporates list of webpages which are accessible to users or crawlers. It might be a document in any form employed as a tool for planning either a web page or web design that enables them to appear on a website as well as typically placed in a hierarchical style. This helps search engine bots and users to find out the pages on a website. The site map renders our website more search engine friendly as well as enhances the probability for frequent indexing.

HTML sitemap can be incorporated directly in a web page for user’s flexibility and can be implemented through proper design. On the other hand, XML sitemap is useful only for search engine crawlers or spiders and doesn’t visible to users. It sits in the root of the website.

such as: http://www.webgranth.com/sitemap.xml

Which is better: an HTML site map or XML Sitemap? BY Matt Cutt

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

Answer: 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.

Question: How Keywords are implemented for optimization?

Answer: The best way to opt and implement keywords is to designate those keywords which are popular, relevant to our content, comprises high search volume and effective. Stuffing and other employment of keywords must be avoided. In order to get best result and effect, our pages shouldn’t contain a keyword density more than 3-4%. Including keywords in title and description is highly recommended.

Question: What is cloaking?

Answer: Cloaking is a technique which is used in Black Hat SEO that 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.

Question: Do you know about Blog Flipping?

Answer: Blog Flipping is the practice for sale a blog when it becomes famous and popular as well as driving healthy amount of traffic.

Question: What you opined about HTML either it is Case Sensitive or Case Insensitive?

Answer: HTML is case Insensitive. It doesn’t matter and deliver identical result either you write in Upper Case or Lower Case.

Question: Under what circumstances you would intend to eliminate pages from search engines through robots.txt vs. Meta robots tag?

Answer: Generally, I would continue to employ robots.txt in order to make search engine indexing a directory on a website. This might be often a directory that is concerned with admin function or incorporate contents only in the form of script or image gallery. Generally, robots.txt is employed to prevent a directory and its sub-folders and files to crawl by search engine bot as well as Meta robots tag for a specific web page.

Question: What things are significant in organically ranking a website?

Answer: Basically there are various things that are being employed for organically ranking a website which can be classified in 3 distinct categories:

Website content: It must be quality and unique content as well as most be well optimized and well structured.
Website structure: This includes TAGS, clear navigation, ensuring usability, validation of HTML errors and miscellaneous.
Backlinks: You can create a link to anywhere but prior to this it is obvious to ensure for relevant site and healthy link.

Question: What steps would you follow to optimize a website?
SEO Steps

Answer: These are following steps to be followed while optimizing a website:

First of all we will interview webmaster or website owner to congregate relevant information, goals and website’s purpose.
Performing keyword analysis and find out the best search volume keywords that should be incorporated into the website as well as individual pages of the website.
Analyzing the content of website in order to ensure usage of content relevant keywords and phrases. This comprises titles, “alt” attributes and META tags (Meta Title, Meta description & Meta Keyword).
Target & implementing keywords as H1, H2 & so on relevant to the site and its content.
Analyzing website navigation.
Ensuring the robots.txt file and sitemap existence as well as check their efficiency.
If required, making recommendations for modifications in website as well as its each and every page and so on…..

Question: SEO Checklist for New Websites

Question: What is considered as more significant – Creating great content or building backlinks?

Answer: Both are obvious. Creating quality content is considered as the first element responsible for ranking as well as building backlinks is useful to build authority to a site as well as coined as a metric for ranking well.

Question: What will be your step when the company website you are working with wish to migrate its all content to a new domain?

Answer: First of all I would update the previous website with a permanent redirect to new page for each and every page. Later eradicate previous content from search engines in the context of avoiding duplicate content issues.

Question: How can I merge two sites? By MAtt Cutt

Question: What’s your opinion about link buying?

Answer: Generally I avoid this practice. Though other means of paid marketing are also available. The process of link buying is not liked by search engines. It doesn’t come under the guidelines of search engine.

Question: Can you establish a difference between SEM and SEO?

Answer: SEO is a set of processes to get our website or pages appear in the search engine result page. On the other hand SEM is search engine marketing being used in practice to purchase advertising space in the search engine page result.

Question: What strategies would you implement for backlinks?

Answer: I would request for backlinks to a competitor’s relevant website as well as a provide reciprocal link if required. In addition, I would attempt to submit a press release, article submission, blog submission and other aspects of off-page SEO to most relevant and quality sites.

Question: What do you think about social media in SEO strategy?

Answer: Social networking websites are considered as social media which is very effective and robust for viral marketing. Viral marketing has proven as a very powerful resource, in the case if our content is unique, attractive and appealing. Some media Site:

Facebook
Twitter
Linkedin
Myspace
Digg
Youtube
Myspace, etc.

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

Answer: 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.

Question: What mistakes you should avoid while optimizing the website?
SEO Mistakes

Answer: 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.

Question: Define and Differentiate Webmaster Tool & Analytics Tool?
Google Webmaster Tool

Answer: 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.

Webmaster Tool Video By MATT CUTT

Google Analytics is a free web analysis tool first rolled out in late 2005 but generally it become available for users in August 2006. This tool acts between website & internet browser/users and offers a complete overview of visitor statistics which exactly says about general website activities like page views, site visits, bounce rates, average time spent on site or pages, sources of traffic, location etc. It is also obvious for tracking Adword queries.

Beginners Guide to Google Analytics

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

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

Question: What do you know about Keyword stemming?

Answer: It is the practice to find out root word from search query. For instance, a keyword like “playful” will be split to the word “play” by stemming algorithm that turns it possible. Thus, the search result appears on the screen will contain the word “play” in it.

Question: What do you know about LSI?

Answer: LSI is the abbreviated form of Latent Semantic Indexing. It has been emerged as a technique of fetching data via establishing a communication among words as well as employing synonyms in the midst of retrieving the data from the index.

Question: Can you tell me about Frames in HTML?

Answer: Frames in HTML are obvious as they used to discriminate the page content into distinct fragments. Search engines treat these frames as absolutely different pages as well as frames also put a negative impact over SEO. Therefore, we should avoid the practice of using Frames and implement a basic HTML instead.

Question: How can you know about your SEO campaign whether it is working or not?

Answer: First of all I would attempt to make a search on all search engines employing relevant keywords and keyphrases, I am optimizing for. The analysis of results will say whether the methods of optimization have gained results or lost. I would analyze the report regularly as search engine makes updating and index. I would attempt to another aspect of website statistics which says about origin of traffic.

Question: What is the meaning of competitive analysis?

Answer: Competitive analysis, as its name suggested it is the establishment of a comparison of data between the website I am optimizing and that website who rank highly in search results. It will be a great source of ideas.

Question: After implementing distinct SEO methods for a site, if you haven’t got any improvements. What would be your next step?

Answer: I would make troubleshooting for the issues. Firstly, I would designate whether it is a new project. Again I will analyze relevant keywords and phrase for the site I am optimizing for as well as took an insight study of competitive analysis. If the website and pages have been indexed and appears in the first 10 pages of search engine result pages but not in the top three, I would go for some transformation to on page text, page titles and page descriptions. But in the case if website has not been indexed still or dropped from the index, might be it comprises some big issues and total re-submission and re-work might be required.

Question: Why do we need to specify alt and title attribute in image tag?

Answer: Alt attribute should be specified in the image tag because of three primary reasons

Search engine bots do not read the image without text.
Alt attribute describes what the image signifies.
It adversely affects the user experience for those users who have disabled the image in their browsers.

Title attribute must be specified in the image tag because

This attribute is for the human readers and not for the search engine crawler.
As title text appears when the users hover over the images, it gives an idea about the image.
It can can also double up as a call to action label.

Question: How have the new web technologies like XHTML, CSS, Flash, and XML changed the way search engines function?

Answer: These web technologies, especially, CSS has transformed the layouts from table-based to CSS-based. As the ratio of content to markup improves considerably, the loading time of the webpage reduces by 10% to 20%.

Question: What do 301 and 302 mean in SEO?

Answer: A 301 is referred to as a permanent redirect and is used when the URL of the website changes. The entire link juice is passed onto the redirected page and so it is the most preferred redirection.

A 302 redirection is a temporary redirection and does not pass any link juice to the redirected page. This redirection is never recommended from the perspective of SEO.

Question: What is meant by Flux in SEO?

Answer: Flux is the shuffling of the position of the website in the search engine result when new search engine algorithm updates are rolled out.

Question: Highlight tools you mostly used for website audit?

Answer: For website audit most of thing like back-links, index pages, duplicate content etc we should check manually. Apart from this here is a blog that would be helpful for website audit: http://goo.gl/6fvAGp

Question: What is Disavow link?

Answer: Sometimes your website’s ranking is marred by the low-quality links that are not under your control. To prevent the damage caused by these links, you can ask Google to not consider these links while accessing your website for ranking. Apart from this, you should also put all-out efforts to remove these unnatural links that point to your website.

Question: What is the process to disavow bad links?

Answer: Disavowing a link is a 2-step process. In the first step, you need to download the list of links that point to your website and in the 2nd step, you have to upload a file that contains the links that you wish to disavow. All the old disavowed files will be lost as soon as you upload the new ones.

Question: How to neutralize the toxic links that point to your website?

Answer: It is easy to know about the links to your website using the Backlink Quality Checker. You need to access the ‘ Toxic link’ report, and here you will find all the links that are harmful to your website. All such links that match the links in the Toxic link report need to be removed immediately. Google disavow tools can help you with this, and all you have to do is to upload such links to the Google Disavow tool and have them removed.

Google Update: SEO interview Questions & Answers Question: What is Phantom Update?

Answer: Phantom Update by Google is the quality filter that has been integrated with the ranking algorithm of Google. It targets the webpages with low quality and low rankings and does not affect the entire domain. However, the pages that are impacted also indirectly create adverse effects on the domain as a whole.

Question: What is Panda Update?

Answer: Panda update was rolled out by Google in the year 2011 with an aim to prevent websites with poor quality of content from securing top ranks in the search engine result pages. This search filter is updated at a regular basis. After each update, the websites are spared if they have made the appropriate changes and fresh ones with poor content are caught.

What is meant by EMD (Exact Match Domain) update?

Answer: Exact match domain is an algorithm update that was launched by Google in the year 2012. The purpose of this update is to prevent some websites from getting good rank just because their domain names contain words that exactly match the searched term. Every EMD update aims at filtering such websites and give good ranking to the websites that have improved their content.

Question: What is Pigeon update?

Answer: Pigeon update is a search engine algorithm update by Google, rolled out on July 24, 2014 to improve the ranking of the local listings. It is aimed to give preference to the local searchesmaking it useful for the local businesses or businesses targeting customers based on locations. This update ensures that the search results are based on the location of the user and the listing in the local directory.

Question: What is Penguin update?

Answer: The Penguin update from Google was first announced in 2012 and is aimed towards reducing the ranks of those websites who use spam link building techniques and such practice is called Link spamming, and it comes under the violation of the guidelines of Google’s Webmaster.

Question: What is Hummingbird update?

Hummingbird update - Seo interview questions answers

Answer: This update is called Hummingbird update because it is meant to be fast and precise. It is a new search algorithm that Google is using since September 2013. The purpose of this update is to comprehend the meaning of the search query in entirety and push those web-pages ahead that cater to the full meaning and returns best result.

Question: Explain Mobilegeddon update

Seo interview question answers - Mobilegeddon update

Answer: Mobilegeddon is the latest search engine algorithm update that aims towards giving preference to mobile-friendly websites and discards those which are not compatible with the mobile phones and other devices like tablets and iPads. This update majorly impacts mobile search result.

Question: What does Microblogging refers to in SEO?

Answer: Microblogging is a broadcasting web service that allows easy sharing of data and other information through different social media channels like Twitter, Jaiku, Soup and Chryp. Businesses, marketers and subscribers make use of these micro blogging sites to share short and aggregated messages with their target audience in the form of news updates, notifications, etc.

Question: What does urllist.txt means in SEO?

Answer: Urllist.txt in Yahoo is same as sitemap.xml is in Google. It is a simple text file that contains URLs in a list placed line by line. Webmasters working on Yahoo can easily get their site crawled by search engines with the help of these sitemaps i.e urllist.txt.

Find Site on Google

Some SEO Myths By MAtt Cutt

How to structure a site?

However, I opined here that this post will be highly beneficial for who are stepping towards marshaling their career as an SEO professional especially for those who are still fresh. Moreover, in this post I have also listed some useful SEO interview question for experienced professionals that will definitely help them to grab their dream job and offer a great opportunity to add sparkles in their career.