TOP 20 SEM INTERVIEW QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Adwords

1) Explain what is Adwords?

Adwords is the system that Google has designed to assist in marketing product or services in Google search engine and its affiliated sites.  It will place a text ad that appears when people search for phrases associated to your offering.

2) Explain how Adwords work?

Adwords work on bidding system if the bidding price is higher your ad will appear on top of the Google page.  Adwords works on “pay per click” that means you only pay the amount you have bid if someone taps on your ad as a result of a web search.

3) Explain why to use Google Adwords?

Google Adwords behave differently to traffic that comes from Google Adwords or “Pay Per Click”. The traffic that comes through surfing often visits the website for information, whereas the traffic via pay per click knows what they are clicking on and what they want to buy.  So few visitors through Adwords might be more valuable than million visitors.

4) Explain what is Ad rank?

Ad rank determines your ad position on Google page, and it is determined by your bid for that keyword and quality score.

5) Explain how does Ad rank impact Cost-Per-Click?

Ad rank plays a huge role in defining the actual cost-per-click that your opponents pay, when someone clicks on their ads.  Your CPC can be calculated by following way

Your Price = The ad rank of the person below you/ your quality score + $0.01

6) Explain how does a Google auction work?

Each month auction gets run billion of times, and the result are such that users find ads that are relevant to what they are looking for.  The search engine processes the request and runs the auction that determines the ad positions and each advertisers CPC.

7) Explain what gets entered into a Google Account?

Once the advertisers determine the keywords that they want to bid on, Google will enter a keyword from your account which is most related into the auction with the maximum bid specified as well as the associated ad.

8) Explain what is Google Quality Score?

Google’s quality score determines how beneficial and relevant your ad is to the user, based primarily on your ad’s CTR, quality of your landing page and keyword relevance.  Higher quality score keywords will save your money and earn better ad ranking.

9) Explain what is an ad group in Google Adwords?

Ad group is a container of your keywords, advertisements, and landing pages.  Google rewards advertisers who prepare Adword campaigns with tightly structured ad groups. Its not advisable to include all your keywords into the single ad group, but to organize keywords into themes.

10) Explain what is conversion optimizer in Adwords?

Conversion Optimizer is a tool used by Google Adwords for bid manipulation and decides which clicks on the ad will be valuable.  It can help you to return maximum on your investment.

11) Mention some of the Google Adword Ad Extensions?

Different ad extension can enhance the increase in traffic.  Some of the common Ad extensions used in adwords are

• Sitelinks
• Call Extensions
• Location Extensions
• Social Annotations
• Seller ratings
• Mobile app extensions
• Offer ads
• Communication Ad
• Review extension
• Image and drop down navigation Ad extension

12) Mention in google Adwords that options can’t be changed after creating an account?

After creating account Currency and Time Zone, cannot be changed.

13) Explain how you can improve conversion rates?

By creating ads that match properly with keywords and create tightly themed ad groups, you can target users to the campaign that helps in conversions.

14) Mention what is the limit set for the number or characters for Adwords ad?

Limit for Adword is

• Description line 1^st : 25 characters
• Description line 2^nd: 35 characters
• Destination URL: 1024 characters

No images are allowed in URL.

15) Explain what is the meaning of CTR and how you can calculate?

CTR stands for Click through rate that tells the number of visitors visited on your ad on the web page. The formula for calculating CTR is

Number of click / Number of impressions X 100

These will give you an answer in percentage like what percentage of customers have viewed your ad.

16) Mention what are the type of Keywords?

There are no specific types for Keywords however they are classified on the basis of how likely is going to be clicked by visitors

• Research Keywords: It tends to contain one or two words – Tea
• Consideration: It tends to contain two or three words – Green Tea
• Purchase: It must have more than three words – buy loose green tea
• Loyalty: This must be shorter- Starbucks

17) Explain what is Google Ad API?

Google Ad API is designed for representing large, tech savvy advertisers and third parties. It allows developers build an application that directly interacts with Google Adwords server 

18) Mention what all things can be done using Google Ad API?

With Google Ad API, you can build an application that can do following things

• You can automatically generate keywords, ad text, custom reports and landing pages
• Develop additional applications and tools to help you manage accounts
• Synchronize Adwords data with your inventory system to manage campaigns based on stock

19) Explain how you can track conversions in Google Adwords?

In Google Adwords, conversion tracking can be done in following ways

• Tracking purchases by involving basic tracking code provided by Adwords and modifying it with additional code unique to your particular e-commerce platform
• View-through conversion window options tracks when a person sees your ad but does not click it (impression)
• By enabling your ad rotation setting to optimize for clicks, meaning that Adwords will serve the ads it feels are likely to be clicked
• By accessing search funnels inside tools and analysis, you can also know when customers clicked on your ad for the first time and how frequently they saw your ad before converting.

20) Explain what are the other two options for bidding other than C-P-C?

Other than CPC the other two options are CPM (Cost per Thousand Impression) and CPA ( Cost Per Action ).

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.

Difference between MMC Adwords & Adwords?

• Compare our two advertising products, AdWords and AdWords Express, and find the best option for your business. We recommend using only one of these advertising tools at a time.
•  See the available advertising settings, features, as well as requirements for each advertising tool. 

Reach potential customers at the moment they’re looking for a business like yours. With AdWords Express or AdWords, you can show your ads on Google.com, Google Maps, and related websites within the Google Display Network.

There’s no advantage to using both advertising products at the same time. Using both AdWords and AdWords Express can complicate your ad management and cause your ads to compete against each other, so we recommend using only one of these advertising tools at a time.

Compare products at a glance

	AdWords Express	AdWords
Pay only for clicks	Yes	Yes
Automated management	Yes	No
Easy solution for businesses without a website	Yes	No
Ads on Google Search and Google Maps	Yes	Yes
Ads on other related websites	Limited	Yes
Mobile ads	Yes	Yes
Other advanced ad formats (e.g. video)	No	Yes
Ability to target ads geographically	Anywhere	Anywhere

Both AdWords and AdWords Express allow you to increase the number of times and the number of places where your business info appears. With either advertising product you can use targeted messaging in your ads to attract and engage potential customers.

MMC AdwordsBenefits: 

•  Pay only when someone clicks your ad 
• Minimal ongoing management necessary 
• Advertise with text ads on Google and Google Maps 
• Reach customers in any geographic location that you choose. 

AdwordsBenefits

• Pay only when someone clicks your ad 
• You choose your own keywords, set bid prices, and structure your account 
• Reach customers in any location that you choose 
• Advertise with special ad formats, detailed reporting, and ad scheduling

what is GOMC challenge ?

Digital marketing is a growth machine for many businesses, and the Google Online Marketing Challenge (GOMC) enables us to share knowledge through hands-on experience with the e-marketers of tomorrow. By participating in the GOMC, students and academics get to work with real businesses and real budgets, and provide them with an opportunity to deliver tangible results. 

Every year, as part of the annual Google Online Marketing Challenge, Google gives hundreds of student teams across the world an AdWords online advertising budget of US$250 and three weeks to help a local business improve their marketing campaigns. Over 18,000 students from more than 80 countries and territories participated in this year’s Challenge

Difference between Search Network & Display Network?

No.s	Search Network	Display Network
1	Only in search engine	Gmail, Youtube, Blogger, Adsense account holder.
2	Google search pertner ask, Amazon, Alexa, babylon. CPC, CPA (Supporters)	CPC, CPA, CPM, CPV, (Supporters)
3	Only Text ads	Text Ads, Images, Video Ads, Animation Ads, Link Ads
4	Quality scores 10/10 fectors I : CTR II : Ad relavancy III : Landing page optimazation	Only landing page optimization.
5	Targetting Keywords	Targetting Keywords, or traffic Age or gender Mannual placement remarketing

what is adwords API ?

The Google AdWords Application Programming Interface (API) is designed for developers representing large, tech-savvy advertisers and third parties. This includes agencies, search engine marketers (SEMs), and other online marketing professionals who manage multiple client accounts or large campaigns.

The Google AdWords API lets developers build applications that interact directly with the Google AdWords server. With these applications, advertisers and third parties can more efficiently and creatively manage their large or complex AdWords accounts and campaigns.

How you can use the API 

• Automatically generate keywords, ad text, landing pages, and custom reports.

•  Integrate AdWords data with your inventory system to manage campaigns based on stock. 

• Develop additional tools and applications to help you manage accounts.

Getting started with the API

Because implementing the AdWords API takes technical know-how and programming skills, best results can be achieved by advertisers who employ software developers. 

The API is flexible and functional -- you can use it to build an application that meets your needs. Using the API, you can: 

 And you can even develop in the language of your choice. The AdWords API SOAP interface is supported by all popular programming languages, including Java, PHP, Python, .NET, Perl, and Ruby.

Signing up is easy. All you need is an active AdWords account. Once you've registered as a developer, you can access the AdWords API Center to manage your token and budget settings. Your developer token is a unique combination of letters, numbers, and characters that identifies your AdWords API activity. It's your key to talking to the AdWords server and your clients' AdWords accounts

AdWords API 

An advanced feature that lets advertisers interact with and make changes to their AdWords account through applications they create. The AdWords API (application programming interface) allows developers to create and use applications that interact directly with their account details on the AdWords server. The API can help advertisers efficiently manage large AdWords accounts and campaigns. For example, you can compile your AdWords data to use with other systems like inventories, generate regular reports, and make campaign adjustments in bulk. To use the AdWords API, you'll need a My Client Center (MCC) account and a Developer Token. The AdWords API is a good option for advertisers who have a developer or programmer who has the technical skills. If you don't have these resources but still want an extra tool to help manage large changes to your account, try AdWords Editor instead.

AdWords Editor is a free, downloadable application for managing your AdWords advertising campaigns. The basic process is simple: download one or more accounts, make changes offline, then upload the changes to AdWords.

   Use bulk editing tools to quickly make multiple changes.

• Export and import files to share proposals or make changes to an account.

• View statistics for all campaigns or a subset of campaigns.

• Copy or move items between ad groups and campaigns.

• Keep working even when you're offline.

About AdWords Editor

• AdWords Editor is a free, downloadable application for managing your AdWords advertising campaigns.
• The basic process is simple: download one or more accounts, make changes offline, then upload the changes to AdWords.

• AdWords Editor can help you save time and make it easier to make changes in bulk.

What you can do with AdWords Editor

• Use bulk editing tools to make multiple changes quickly.
• Export and import files to share proposals or make changes to an account.
• View statistics for all campaigns or a subset of campaigns.
• Manage, edit, and view multiple accounts at the same time.
• Search and replace text across ad groups or campaigns.
• Copy or move items between ad groups and campaigns.
• Undo and redo multiple changes while editing your campaigns.
• Make changes in draft before uploading them to your account.
• Keep working even when you're offline.

Using AdWords Editor with AdWords

Once you start using AdWords Editor, you can still sign in and make changes to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com. Simply download your recent changes to make sure AdWords Editor has the most up-to-date version of the account.