TOP 50 SEO interview questions-and-answers

SEO 

What are the SEO Techniques available ?

Two SEO techniques are: white hat SEO and black hat SEO which is called has negative SEO.

What is On page optimization ? 

On page optimization gives outcome to a  web page or website ranking on search engine Results page. This  will regulate your web page by page coding or by you.

  

What is Off page optimization ?

Off page optimization is a type of SEO which is not regulated by your page coding.Image sharing, blog posting, Document sharing, Info graphics submission, increasing page authority or page rank, getting high quality links from relevant sites and article submission are the few example of off page  optimization.

What is a back link ?

back links are the incoming links to your web page or website and getting these back links from good PR and relevant site is always better for your site.

What you mean by page rank or PR ?

for every web page, Google will give a rank, which is called as page rank. Normally page rank ranges from 0-10,Google web Search Engine algorithm is responsible for calculating the page rank of every web page.

What is an out bound link ?

An outgoing link or outbound link is a link  from own webpage or website.

What is a keyword ?

Keyword is a particular term used for searching through search Engines like Google in order to get outcomes related to your searched question

What is Anchor Text ?

Anchor Text is also Known as link text or link tittle.Which is a clickable Hyperlink.   This is used to increase your webpage ranking by receiving the incoming links after clicking the contained keyword.

What are Organic results ?

Organic results are the page views which come directly via SERP and not from any off page optimization.

What is Googlebot  ?

Googlebot  is a kind of software used by the Google as a search bot to index a webpage. This software collects the information from every webpage by doing the crawling. caching and then indexing of a webpage.

What is a meta Tag ? 

You can observe many meta tags being used  in HTML coding, but the important ones are the four meta tags.they are: meta tittle, meta keywords, meta description and Robot tags.

What tools do you use for doing SEO ?

Most coomen tools used in SEO are : Google  Analytics, Google Webmaster tools, Alexa, Open site explorer and Website grader. nowadays you can also find some paid SEO tools like spydermate, seo Moz and bulkdechecker in market.

What is Google sandbox ? 

This is the place where the fresh and less authoritative sites were kept for a certain time period, till their establishment in the search results. this may happens due to the building of so many links with in a short time span.

What are the limitations of title and Description tags ?

Title tag can be normally  between 50-68 characters and meta description tag can be around 140-150 characters.

How will you increase the page rank of a page ?

To increase the page rank of your webpage, you must build more backlinks from high page rank websites and authority sites.

 How will you treat Web standards while optimizing a website ?

• I usually apply the web standards from the W3c while optimizing a webpage, which help that site to get more points from Google to improvise page rank.
• 19 what is 301 redirect ?

it is a kind of process to redirect the user from an old page url to a new page URL.

What is clocking ?

clocking is the procedure of using some deceptive techniques which allows the user with a different version of the website than that presented to the search engines.

What methods would you apply for decreasing the loading time of a website ?

We can use the external style sheets, minimum images, decrease the file size of the images that we use, without compromising on the Quality and use the CSS sprites to regulate the Http requests.

What are webmaster tools ?

It is a free service provided by the Google to get the information about the indexing data, backlinks, search queries,  crawl problems, malware complaints and XML site map.

What is robots.txt ?

It is a kind of text file utilized to provide the instructions to the crawlers about the caching and indexing of a website, directory, domain or a file of a webpage, file of a website or directory, domain.

What will you do, for the company website you are working for, decides to move all the contents to new domain ?

The First step would be to update the previous site with a permanent redirect to new page for all the pages, ofter that, I will remove the previous content from search engine in order to avoid duplicate content issues.

Can you optimize the website which has pages in millions ?

 From SEO point of view,for dynamic website,special additional SEO stuffs have to be implemented. 

1.Good internal link structure 

2.Generation of dynamic title and description 

3.Dynamic XML sitemap generation 

 What is the latest update in SEO ?

The latest updates in SEO are :

1.panda

2.penguin

What are the key aspects of panda update ?

Panda is to improve the search in Google. the latest version has focused on quality content,proper design, proper speed,proper use of images and many more.

 What are the key aspects of penguin update ?

penguin is the code name for google algorithm. Its main target is to decrease the ranking of that website that are violating the Google webmaster guidelines. these guidelines. these guidelines are violated by using black hat techniques like cloaking and stuffing.

How will you neutralize a toxic link to your site ?

Through backlink Quality checker you can know who links to your website. Now, you have to go to 'toxic link' report, where you will find all the links, that are harmful to your websites. If there is any link in 'toxic link ' report' that matches with the link on your website,then you can remove it by using Google disavow tool.

What are the SEO Tools do you use ?

The SEO tools  I use are Google analytic, Alexa, open site explorer, Google master tool.

What you mean by back link ?

The incoming links to your website or webpage is referred as backlink.

What are out bound links ?

The outbound links are our website links to other website.

Can you tell me something about Google bot ?

To index a web page Google uses the Google bot software. caching, crawling and indexing of web page are done through Googlebot by collecting details from that page.

What was the recent update which google had and what changes would you suggest for it ?

Google recently had the hummingbird update which was a change in the core search algorithm. Google moved from keyword based searching to concept based searching. It included semantic level analysis order to find out real answers and searchers intent behind the user query. I would add comprehensive and fresh content to my site after that the hummingbird update. prior to the hummingbird update, Google had the penguin update which was a measure to control web spam. penguin update which was a measure to control web spam. penguin had penalized websites which had a spammy back-linking  profile and returned more semantic results. semantic results were based on the relationship between words present on the search query. penguin trusted sites that had original and good content , fresh content , good social media presence and quality organic links.

What all verticals have you handled in your SEO career so far ? 

verticals means on what themes of websites have you worked so far. this may include education, real estate, IT, travel , shopping , job etc....

What you Know about Google Panda update ?

the panda update was done to improve the Quality of search results in Google. panda update also known as the farmer update was done to eliminate content farms which provided less user friendly experience. It used machine language scalability as one of the important metrics for judging relevancy of a web page. All the focus was transformed on the user and quality content, paper design, proper speed, proper use of images and videos, content to ad radio all mattered more after the panda update.You need to Optimize your site for better click through  rate and a less bounce rate.

What is Google Sandbox in SEO ?

Goolgle sandbox is an imaginary area where new and less authoritative sites are kept for a specified time period until they establish themselves of being displayed on the search results. It happens by building too many links with in short period of time.

What is introduce its types ?

Search engine optimization or SEO is a keep changing the position of a webpage or web site in a search engine results by using keywords or phrases.

Two types of SEO are are :

1. On page Optimization

2.Off page Optimization

What is the difference between on page SEO off page SEO ?
On page seo means Optimizing your website and making changes on little, meta tags, site structure, site content, solving canonicalization problem, managing robots.txt etc...

Off page optimization means optimizing your web presence which involves backlink building and social media optimization.

What is PPC ?
PPC stands for pay per click and is an advertisement campaign hosted by Google. It is segmented into two modules CPC (cost per click ) and CPM (cost per thousand impressions ) through flat rate and bidding respectively. In ppc, if the user clicks on the advert, only then the advertiser wiil be charged.

How will you solve canonicalization issue or what is .htacess file?
.htacess file is used to solve the canonicalization issue of a website. It way happen that the home page of the site may take several urls like http://mylearning-swamy.blogspot.in. the search engines might treat these url as different and may divide the link juice gained by having various back links made with any of these 3 urls. the link juice get divided between these three urls equally. its file is created to have a single url of the home page so that the link juice is passed onto single url.

What is keyword stemming in SEO?
Keyword stemming is process of finding out the root word from the search query. A query having the Word "playful" Would be broken down to the word "play" with the help of stemming algorithm.The search results would be having the word "play" in it.

What is LSI ?
LSI stands for latent semantic indexing. It is a data retrieval technique which finds connection between words and the use of synonyms while fetching data from in the index.

What do you know about the Florida update ?
Florida update happened on November 16th 2003. This is a data retrieval technique which finds connection between words and the Use of synonyms while fetching data from the index.

Do you separate SEO strategies for Google, Yahoo, Bing ?
Yes i use separate strategies for Google yahoo and Bing and other search engines. More backlinks are required for Google.It pays more attention to back links and site authority while Yahoo and Bing pays more attention to title and meta tags. hence, a site takes time to rank on Google as compared to yahoo and Bing.
How will you increase the pagerank of a page ?
By building more backlinks from authority sites and high page rank webpages.

How will You check the number of back links of your competitors site ?
With the help of the link operator on Google and by using various external tools like Alexa , backlink watch, open site Explorer, backlink finder etc...

What is the difference between PR and SERP ?

PR (Page Rank )	SERP (Search Engine Result Page )
Page rank is calculated on the basis of quality inbound links from other website or webpage or website.	SERP is the placement of the website or web pages which is returned by the search engine ofter a search query or attribute.