300+ TOP SEO Interview Questions and Answers Google Seo

Seo Interview Questions for freshers and experienced :-

1. What is SEO?

SEO is the abbreviated form of “Search Engine Optimization”. SEO is the process of changing the position of a website or a web page in a search engine’s search results (Organic or Natural results).

2. Explain different Types of SEO?

Primarily two types of SEO are being sporting 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 include 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 design which can be indexed and crawled by search engines properly.

3. Explain SEO Techniques?

Two types of seo techniques are there:

1. White Hat SEO
2. Black Hat SEO (Negitive Seo)

4. What is On Page Optimization?

On-page optimization is one of the types of SEO that refers to factor that gives outcome to a website or web page ranking on SERP (Search Engine Results Page). On-Page Optimization means controlling a webpage by you or by your page coding.

Some of the examples are HTML Code, Meta Tags like Meta Title, Description, Content Quality, Keyword Density, Outbound Links, Image Alt tag etc.

5. What is Off Page Optimization?

Off Page Optimization is also one of the types of SEO that are not controlled by the page coding.

Examples of Off-page optimization Link building, Blog posting, Image Sharing, Document Sharing, Video Sharing, Info graphics submission, Increasing Page Rank and Page Authority, Article submission, Getting high quality links from relevant sites etc.

6. What is Page Rank or PR?

Page Rank is a rank that has been provided by Google for each and every Webpage. This Rank ranges from o to io. This Page Rank is calculated by an Algorithm used by Google Web Search Engine. PR of a web page is based on the number of backlinks that received from other high PR webpage.

7. What is a Back Link?

Back link means incoming links to a website or webpage. Inbound links are always better than outbound links. Those links are also known as incoming links, in links, inward links etc. Getting backlinks from high PR and relevant site is always good. In links from .org, .edu sites would increase your website or webpage ranking on SERP. Do-follow links are better than No-follow links.

8. What are Out Bound Links?

An outbound-link (OBL) or outgoing link is a link from your website or webpage to another website or webpage.

9. What is a Keyword?

Keyword is a word used or searching through Search Engines in order to get results related to your searched query.

10. What is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is the percentage density of a keyword or phrase available on a webpage compared to the total number of words on the page. It is one of the important ranking factors for search engines to display a webpage on the SERP. Providing junk keywords on a page would decrease the ranking of a webpage.

11. What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is a clickable hyperlink that is also known as link text, link label and link title. The keyword contained in the anchor text would increase the ranking of a webpage that receives the incoming link.

12. What are Organic Results?

The page views come directly through SERP and not through any Off Page Optimization is known as organic results.

13. What is Google bot?

Google bot is the search bot software used by Google to index a webpage. Crawling, Caching and indexing of a webpage happen through this Google bot by collecting details from that webpage.

14. What are meta tags?

There are several Meta tags used in HTML but the top four tags that are used for SEQ are Meta Title, Meta Description, Meta Keywords and Robot tags.

15. What is Meta Title?

Title is the most important factors for a good SEO of a webpage. These tags should be located within head section. These tags should tell some useful information about that page. A good title tag should contain 60 characters.

These titles would appear on the SERP for your website along with the Meta description of that page. Google won’t penalize your page if it contains title with more than 60 characters and it skips the remaining characters. If a web page doesn’t contain title tag means Google would select the Hi tag as title or it will provide the title by its own.

Always write title tag for the page and not for SEO, if you stuff keywords in you title then Google won’t rank your webpage.

16. What is Meta Description?

A description tag should describe a webpage and it should contain keywords but don’t stuff all the keywords. Meaningless description would affect your webpage. A description tag should contain 150 – 16o characters. If you provide meaningless or empty description, Google would take the description from the content available in that page.

17. What are Meta Keywords?

In early days Meta keywords are the least important tag for Search engine like Google. But it is an easy way to tell our important keywords to search engine. Meta keywords should contain less than 250 characters.

Now Google won’t consider Meta keywords as one of the ranking factor.

18. What is White Hat Seo?

White Hat Seo is one of the techniques that a Search engine always likes. Usage of SEO techniques, tricks and tactics by following search engine rules and regulations, algorithm and policies are known as White Hat SEO.

19. What is Black Hat Seo?

Black Hat SEO or Negative SEO is a common term for doing SEO Spamming Techniques. Usage of SEO by not following policies and regulations of search engine is called as black hat seo. Some of the black hat seo techniques are :

• Providing Low Quality content or duplicate content on the page Getting backlinks from spammed or adult sites.
• Giving keyword stuffed content on the page with background color
• Getting too much backlinks from a single page with different anchor text that targets a single page of your website.
• Cloaking
• Google Bowling etc

20. What is difference between crawling and caching?

Crawling is the one time activity while caching is the repetitive activity.

21. What is Indexing?

Indexing is the process by which Google or other search engine store our website info in their database.

22.What is robots.txt?

If we want to block some data from search engine then we used this file. This file must be uploaded on root server. This is the first file which is crawled by search engine first.

23. What is the different method to control the robot?

There are main three different method which we have uses to control the robot for our website

1. Robots.txt
2. Robots Meta Tag
3. Rel= nofollow

24. What is the method to content optimization?

There are so many way by which we can optimize our content. Here i will suggest some things which is necessary to know.

• Keyword density in content
• Keyword Proximity
• Keyword Prominence
• Keyword Proximity

25. Can you please suggest the type of keywords?

I will suggest you some most important type of keywords:-

• Primary Keywords
• Secondary Keywords
• Branded Keywords
• Non Branded Keywords
• Seasonal Keywords

26. What is the difference between targeted page and Landing Page?

Page which we have targeted to rank the page known a s targeted page and the page which has ranked called landing page.

27. Can you please suggest the meaning of Call to Action?

There are so many things which we have used to increase the CTR of our page known as Call to action for more info you can contact me at info@example.com

28. What is the difference between Spiders, Robots and Crawlers?

A spider, also known as a robot or a crawler, is a program that follows, or “crawls”, links throughout the Internet, grabbing content from sites and adding it to search engine indexes.

29. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization while SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. SEO provides organic traffic to a website with the help of search engines while SEM involves the use of Google adwords and other paid channels of advertising.

30. Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?

Wikipedia is an established authority! As such, it is referenced by huge numbers of other documents with relevant text associated with links back to Wikipedia.

31. What are out bound Links?

An outbound-link (OBL) or outgoing link is a link from your website or webpage to another website or webpage.

32. What is the difference between search engine marketing and Internet marketing?

Search Engine Marketing is specific to marketing your brand/service/products through search engines. It can be in the form of organic search results where landing pages are aimed for higher ranking, or in paid search results, where ads are aimed to display at maximum exposure for targeted keywords at minimal cost possible.

Internet marketing covers a broader range of channels. It includes search engine marketing, email marketing / EDM, social media, and so on.

33. What is your favorite SEO website/blog, and why?

This is an open ended question. There were some that I were looking for but I was also hoping someone would tell me a few that I didn’t know about.

• SeoMoz,
• Analytics.Blogspot.com,
• GoogleWebMasterCentral.Blogspot.com,
• InsideSearch.Blogspot.com and
• Search Engine Roundtable are a few good ones. There are actually a lot more.

34. What is Pagination in SEO?

Pagination is the practice of dividing a piece of content into different pages while at the same time allowing Google to better understand the important pages to be indexed. Read the Google’s advice on using the pagination.

35. What are top SEO ranking factors?

Quality of content on the webpage, quality and quantity of backlinks to the webpage, anchor text used in the backlinks, domain authority, social sharing metrics and some other traffic metrics like page CTR, bounce rate and average time on the webpage.

36. How to achieve good CTR in PPC?

Here are few things that need to be kept in mind for CTR

• Target your ads to right audience
• Select correct keyword matching
• See that you target your ads by location and language
• Create different Ad Groups for different search phrases/keywords
• Calculate how much you can afford for the day
• Test your ads on daily basis, change if you don`t get any response from users
• Give google users a good reason to click your ad

37. What is pay per click? Which internet marketing model does it follow?

‘Pay per click’ , also known as ‘cost per click’ is a form of internet advertising which is used for directing traffic to websites. In this advertisers pay the site owners or publishers for the ads being viewed or click. Pay per click introduces a simple strategy of marketing in which an advertiser pays the website for publishing his advertisement and getting people to view it by clicking it, the more the views are for the advertisement, better is the revenue generated by the website from advertisement. Generally ‘pay per click’ is used by advertisers on keyword phrases relevant to their target markets. Content sites generally charge a fixed amount per click rather than using a bidding system. ‘Pay per click’ advertisements are commonly displayed on websites and search engine results.‘Pay per click’ is an approach that differs from the ‘pay per impression’ methods used in television and newspaper advertising.

38. Where do you put your robots.txt?

• Search for it in Google
• In Webmaster Tools
• The root directory of your domain or subdomain(s)
• In the folder you want to disallow

39. Did you know what is the difference between targeted page & landing page?

Page which we have targeted to rank that page known as targeted page and the page which has ranked in search engine called landing page.

40. What is google Sandbox ?

Google 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 within a short period of time.

41. What is LSI ?

LSI stands for latent semantic indexing.It is data retrieval technique.

42. Which Important factors makes Off Page Optimization better ?

In Off Page Optimization there are some important factors like

• Article Submission
• Press Release
• Blog Writing/posting/creation
• Classified Submission
• Social Media

43. Which Important factors makes ON Page Optimization better ?

In On Page Optimization there are some important factors like:

1. Title Tag
2. Meta tag
3. Keyword
4. Sitemap
5. Images
6. Internal linking
7. Bread crimp.

44. What are webmaster tools?

Webmaster tools is free service by google where we can check all the details like indexing data,daily user, stats, search query,CTR and XML sitemap.

45. Who is Matt cutts ?

Matt cutts is the head of Google web spam team.

46. Do you know about latest update in SEO ?

Yes Sir i know about latest updates in SEO:

• Panda
• penguin

47. What’s special in XML Sitemap and where do you submit that?

That is a file which list all the pages of website in XML format designed for SE’s. Here we can give the crawlable frequency and also we can define the priority of all the web pages (1.0, 08. 065 etc). This can be submitted in Google Webmaster tools.

48. Can you name the SEO blogs that you regularly read?

1. Search Engine journal
2. Search Engine Land
3. MOZ
4. SEO Smarty
5. Jimboykins
6. SE Round Table

49. What is your idea about page rank and how it’s calculated?

Let me first tell about the calculation behind that. Google says that page rank calculation formula is having more than 2 lakh variables. I am sure that following things are the main factor,

1. Internal Back Links
2. External Back Links
3. Domain Age
4. Content

Apart from this, number of visits, bounce rate, CTR etc may be a factor in calculating the page rank. Page rank is just a metric from Google which defines the quality of the page. Moreover we do have many other targets like keyword position, quality traffic and conversions. In my vision, I am having very least importance to page rank. But I am crazy about getting full green PR tool bar for my blog.

50. What is Search Console? Why do you use Search Console .

Search Console web tool that is provided by Google for Analysis the website and provides all information about occur any types of event such as any robots regarding error, Sitemap regarding error, Indexing regarding information and many more. It tells about what’s going on the site this time, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month and 1 years structured data of all information of website. If any problems on site then Google send a message on the webmaster tool.we can know the problem on the site and remove the occur errors. so it plays a vital parts for all website. For more Information Visit the webmaster tool website here : https://search.google.com/search-console and log in your email id which you create for website.

51. What is cloaking in SEO?

Clocking is method that have two different content for a separate URL. is is done for instance ranking of the site. it means, we get different content on site but search robots get different content on site. For example. if any body want to tell about the adult information ,or any illegal information on website, the write content for visitor about Adult or Illegal but tell the robots through good Keyword phrase or good anchor tag title tag or meta tag. because robots search the content through these. but visitor got wrong information about wishing result.Now you understand well with this example.

52. What is Google Bombing?

Google bombing is practice of create a thousand of links for website that help to page ranking. it contain low quality link through Sub domain, low page rank link, and other adult links, it is done for comical and satirical purpose by some Special Group or organization. but is not good for website. After sometime Google banned like these link. it is also a black hat seo, because the links comes from unrelated keyword phrase or different theme website.

53. What is link farming in SEO?

Link farming is a technique that is done by A special group of websites that is developed for give link purpose to other website. it means it is a collection of links only, not Any detailed content on the website.it is done by some Automatically generated link (java script) that occur automatic if any visitor visit the site. it is done by hand to by a group. it is done for instance ranking of the site, but is not good for Organic search. Search engine penalize like these link. so avoid this type technique.

54. What is keyword Stuffing in SEO.

Keyword stuffing means there are many keywords are used on website content for the ranking purpose. it is not good for Seo organic search result. After some time we penalized by Search engine. So we should use less keywords phrases compare to Content. it is also a example of Black hat seo.

55. What Is Link Building? Explain Its Types And Which One Is Good?

The process of getting links from other relevant sites that points your website called link building. Link building in seo improves website ranking on search engine result pages (serps). The main purpose behind to do link building is to get top ranking on top search engines that can deliver huge traffics and crowd for a target website or web-pages .

In the early days when seo was just started initially, there were basically three types of link building:

One Ways Link Building Or Artificial Link Building
Two Ways Link Building Or Reciprocal Link Building
Three Way Link Building Or Link Exchange
But nowadays in this emerging digital marketing world it has changed almost a lot and today’s latest link building strategy does matter for getting high quality and most trusted backlinks to get top ranking on search engine result pages. e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.
Link Creation
Link Request
Link Attraction
For more detailed info about latest link building in seo, just click on it.

56. What Is Google Panda, Penguin, EMD, Hummingbird & Payday Loan (Spam) Algorithms?

Google Panda, Penguin, EMD, Page Layout, Hummingbird & Payday Loan are Google’s pagerank algorithms that vary often by Google itself to deliver expected search queries on its searches.

Explain it separately with their purposes and effects on search results on Google steps:

1. Google Panda: Rolled out in Feb 2011 and went global in April 2011 with purpose of lower the websites ranking of low quality & thin websites to return high quality websites rank on its search engine result pages (serps). Websites with high ad-to-content ratios and copied contents are considered as low quality sites. It affects 12 percent of search results.
2. Google Penguin: A webspam update in April 24, 2012 by Google and given the code name Penguin update that includes spamming factors such as keyword stuffing, un-relevant contents or links, number of artificial links etc. It affects 3.1 percent of English search queries.
3. EMD: Exact Match Domain updates introduce by Google in Sept. 27, 2012. It was basically for anchor text optimization. According to EMD, low quality exact match domains are not going to rank on Google search engine result page. It affected only 0.6 percent of English search queries on Google’s search results
4. Payday Loan: Google Payday Loan also known as Spam algorithm is for spammy query results at its searches. It is specifically for spam tactics or factors such as link building and spammy queries e.g. – Viagra, porn etc. Payday loan updates were took place by Google on June 11, 2013 with impacts of 0.3 percent of US queries.
5. Page Layout: On Jan 19, 2012 Google has launched page layout algorithm for too much ad-space above the fold of websites. With too much of heavy ads above the fold can be penalized or their ranking may goes own. The total impact was less than 1 percent on Google searches.
6. Hummingbird: Google unleashed this hummingbird algorithm on Sept. 26, 2013 on its 15th birth anniversary by claiming that Google search results can be more natural and in direct way in terms of understanding user intent at searches. Hummingbird update is the first major update since 2001, said by Amit Singhal, Google’s Search Chief. It affects 90 percent of websites ranking on searches globally.

57. Differentiate Organic, Natural & Ethical SEO.

There is no difference between organic and natural seo except ethical. Organic or natural seo is to get quality traffic via ranking and its natural approach on serps.

Ethical seo is the process or techniques for search engine optimization and marketing using strategy, steps, technique or process defined by search engines like Google. It is also known as white hat seo.

58. 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 within a short time span.

59. 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.

60. How will you increase the Pagerank of a page?

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

61. How will you treat Web standards while optimizing a website?

I usually apply the web standards from the W3C while optimizing the webpage, which help that site to get more points from Google to improvise page rank.

62. What is 301 redirect?

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

63. What is Cross Linking?

It is considered as one of the best strategy that can come in handy to yield high search engine rankings, by leveraging several domains owned by you.

64. What is Blog? why it is Important for Website?

Blog is Very Important for Website, It is also like as website, We can say that blog is Sub site . We can share about our site and our view with user, It is just like electronic Diary where we save on line line data. We can share our knowledge and though before friends and all people of the world. Search Engine Also give performance of our blog if it is useful for other . Content should note be copy from other site.

Two famous website for blogging

• Blogger
• Word Press.

Other many site provide to create blog free. you can visit here The Top list of blogging Websites here. and create you own blog .

65. What is Classified Site? Why it is Important?

Classified sites are just like platform or place for advertisement ,when we want to Advertise our site our business site on net then it is very useful. User visit on site directly or indirectly from it. it is instant useful for site, we can see link or tittle of our site in Google search easily by it. but is is not durable, after some days or some month it is automatically deleted. but mention not it is very very useful for website or business. Some Classified website are following—- Olx.com, Quickr.com, Indiabackpage.com, classified.com, craigslist.com, etc.

66. What is Article ? Why it is Necessary for SEO?

Article is such a topics that Explain in depth of any Special Subjects. It describes in fresh and unique information. it explain about 400 to 600 words. it is very important for SEO point of view. It is always useful for Website page rank. it helps because Google gives credit to new and fresh content . Article is such a thing that fill this problem. We should write article in 4 -5 paragraph. The word which is used should be grammatically correct. The meaning of article should be clear view of specific topics. We should submit Article in high pr site because it shows instance improvement

67. What is Press Release? Why it is Important for SEO or website?

Press Release is just instance New about your website. Anything you update on your website, you can tell your visitors about your updated product or content through press release. So we can say that press release such a content that describe the latest new about specific product or event or news. It is very useful for SEO point of view. because you introduce the visitors of your newly lunched product or other things. It helps to rank of site because it is new content for Google and unique for Search Engine. we should always write press Release New Message about our products or website, content should be 400- 600 words. it should be grammatically correct and use Simple language because all visitor can reads well and understand well what to say.

68. Tell me One URL short links site name ?

http://www.bitly.com

69. What do you know about Adsense?

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 website and audience. These advertisement are included, maintained and sorted by Google itself and earn money either by per-click or per-impression basis.

70. Can you define Adwords?

Adwords 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 impression on flat rate to 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 geographical area to show your ads.

71. If the meta robots tag has a value of “no index, no follow” what does it mean?

It means the search engine crawlers would not index the contents and would not follow the links present on the page.

72. Who is Rand Fishkin?

Rand Fishkin is the CEO and Co founder of MOZ, the most popular seo software in the world. He started the informative “White Board Friday” series for explaining the concepts related to Seo and search engines.

73. How does Google Plus helps in Seo?

Google Plus helps the promoted web pages to get plus ones which are considered as genuine votes by Google. More plus ones helps to enhance our search engine rankings. Moreover,it helps to get high rankings in personalized search results where our friends can see the web pages shared and promoted by us.

74. What is the difference between clicks and visits in Google Analytics?

Clicks indicates the number of times any user clicks on an ad while visits indicates the number of unique sessions each visits create.

75. How will you plan an Seo strategy for a website already affected by Penguin update?

Penguin update deals with scanning through the link profile of a website. I will scan the links pointing to the site using tools like ahrefs and prepare a list of low quality links. I will make every effort to get those links removed like emailing the webmaster. If somehow, I am unable to remove some links then I will use the disavow links tool to devalue the remaining links from harming the site. Apart from this, I will plan a link bait strategy to get some high authority links in order to increase the reputation of the site. This will surely help a site to recover from the effects of the Penguin update.

76. What do you think about the latest algorithm update from Google?

You must follow industry blogs and be updated about the SEO trends. So when you are asked about the latest algorithm update, you should talk about your views on what kind of sites/ search queries got affected, how it compares to the previous update which was rolled out and so on.

Here is a scenario. Assume the latest update rolled out was the Penguin update and the one before that was panda. You could say that Penguin update was mostly targeted at low quality content and not about links as the Panda update was. It hit heavily on content farms and thin content pages.

77. How will you check the number of backlinks 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.

78. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization while SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. SEO provides organic traffic to a website with the help of search engines while SEM involves the use of Google adwords and other paid channels of advertising.

79. What is a Pizza Box in terms of Google?

Google server comes in a standard case which is commonly known as “Pizza Box”.

80. When you see a site for the first time to SEO, what are your first steps?

With this question, the interviewer is interested in how you approach tasks – and in what order. When it comes to a task like this, everyone is going to have their own opinions and preferences on what should be done in what order – so there aren’t really any right or wrong answers. Think about what order you’ve completed this task in before – and try to think of reasons that would justify this order. This answer should tell the interviewer a lot about how you approach tasks and how you work – which should help them to work out if you’d be a good fit for their company.

81. What’s the keyword density and how that is calculated?

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. It is calculated in the following way.
(Targeted keyword/Total no. of words)*100. Also we must consider that the keyword density includes the page content as well as the page code while doing the percentage calculation.

82. Should the keyword density calculated in parts of words or in total?

There can’t be a direct answer to this question. The SEO professional must be extremely instrumental while calculating the keyword density. Though it’s suggested to have the keyword in full, we must not ignore the part keywords and other semantic keywords while this calculation is on.

83.Can I jumble the positions of words in side the keyword phrases? Does it make the word a new keyword?

No you should not jumble the keyword. This makes a new keyword, which can’t have the searches we are expecting. So this practice should be avoided at any cost.

84. Should the keyword density check cover the code area?

While you are calculating the number of times repeation the code area should be taken into consideration.

85. What is LSI? How does that work and what’s the relevancy of LSI in SEO?

LSI means Latent Semantic Indexing. This is owned and used by Google. The search engine tries to associate certain terms with concepts while indexing web pages. For example, Paris and Hilton are associated with a woman instead of a city and a hotel, Tiger and Woods are associated with golf.

Google has been using this concept to determine suitable ads for its AdSense service for some time now. It seems that Google is now also using this concept to improve the quality of its search results. If Google uses this concept in its ranking algorithm (which is very likely though the complete traces have not yet found out) then its advisable that you don’t focus on a single keyword, but on a set of related keywords with your search engine optimization activities.

86. What’s keyword stemming?

Keyword Stemming is a useful tool for web pages and search engines. The process of keyword stemming involves taking a basic but popular keyword pertaining to a particular website and adding a prefix, suffix, or pluralization to make the keyword into a new word. This particular process allows a website to expand upon the number of variable options, which can help a website get more traffic. Words that are a product of keyword stemming can expand in either direction, or even add words to the phrase, making the possibilities limitless.

87. Keyword relevancy, keyword proximity, keyword density etc. What do you mean by them?

Keyword Density: It is combination of the number of times a keyword or keyword phrases,in proportion with other words, appears on a web page.

Keyword Proximity:It refers to the distance in space as measured in within the keywords as well as the phrases including the keywords without repetition and with contextual relevance.
It measures the closeness between two keywords.

Keyword Relevancy: Keyword Relevancy encompasses a large area of potential confusion. Simply put, your “keywords” must be relevant to the contents, or “theme” of your web page. Keyword relevancy and analysis in choosing keywords that is matching the content of the web page is important to your success with the search engine. When selecting the keywords you have to be more specific as there is better chance of getting targeted traffic.

88. Tell me something about yourself?

You should brief your interviewer about your family, your educational background and your work experience.

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

Google recently had the Penguin update which was a measure to control web spam. Penguin update had penalized websites which had a spammy backlinking 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.

90. 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, jobs etc.

91. What do you understand by the 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 now quality content , proper design, proper speed, proper use of images and videos, content to ad ratio all mattered more after the Panda update. You need to optimize your site for better clickthrough rate and a less bounce rate.

92. What is Google Sandbox in SEO?

Google 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 within a short period of time.

93. What is the difference between on page seo and off page seo?

On page seo means optimizing your website and making changes on title, 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 promotion.

94. How will you solve canonicalization issue or what is .htacess file?

.htacess file is used to solve the canonicalization issue of a website. It may happen that the home page of the site may take several urls like http://www.example.com or http://www.example.com/index.html or http://example.com . The search engines might treat these url as different and may divide the link juice gained by having various backlinks made with any of these 3 urls. The link juice gets divided between these three urls equally. .htacess file is created to have a single url of the home page so that the link juice is passed onto single url.

95. What is keyword stemming in SEO?

Keyword stemming is the 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 returned would be having the word ” play” in it.

96. What is PPC?

PPC stands for Pay Per Click. It is a form of advertising methodology in which the advertiser pays for every click on their ads. Google uses this form of advertising in its channel of advertising called Adwords.

97. What do you know about the Florida update?

Florida update happened on November 16th 2003. This update applied stemming, maintained local rank, penalized over optimized sites by applying filter etc. In short, it modified the search results before presenting it to the user by applying filters.

98. What are the limitations of title and description tags?

Title tag can be between 50-68 characters and meta description tag can be between 140-160 characters.

99. Does Google uses keyword tags?

No, Google does not make use of keyword tags.

100. What do you understand by Cloaking?

Cloaking involves using deceptive techniques which presents the user with a different version of the webpage than that presented to the search engines.

101. Explain meta tags?
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.

102. What is press release for SEO Expert?
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.

103. What are articles for SEO Expert?
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.

104. What is Off-page SEO?
Off-page SEO is the method of earning back-links 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.

105. What is On-Page SEO?
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 design which can be indexed and crawled by search engines properly.

106. Explain different techniques used in Off Page SEO?
There are lots of techniques used in Off-page SEO work. Major Techniques are:

1. Social Bookmarking
2. Blog Post
3. Article Post
4. Press Release Submission
5. Forum Posting
6. Yahoo Answer
7. Blog Comment
8. Deep link Directory Submission
9. Regional Directory Submission and all that.

107. What are the distinct types of SEO practice?
Primarily two types of SEO are being sported in practice:

• Off-Page SEO
• On-Page SEO.

108. What is Google?
Google is the world’s largest and renowned search engine incorporating about 66.8%(approximately) 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.

109. Explain some major commonly used search engines?

• Google
• Yahoo
• Bing
• Ask
• Aol Search
• Wow
• WebCrawler
• MyWebSearch
• Infospace
• Info

110. What is Search Engine?
Search Engines are very critical key element useful to find out specific and relevant information through the huge extent of World Wide Web.

111. What are contextual backlinks?

Contextual backlinks are the links surrounded by text in the body of the content. Contextual links possess high value than the links from header, footer or sidebar.

Contextual links are the most valuable backlinks but are difficult to attain.

112. What are the social media platform used for SEO?

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn are some crucial platforms that are used for online promotion.

113. What are social signals?

Social signals are engaging activities people have with your accounts on social media platforms as in likes, dislikes, comments, shares, views, etc.

114. What is cross linking?

Cross linking is the activity of linking one site to another. It provides users with reference sites that contain the content related to the search. If owned by same person, Google recommends it to be no-follow.

115. How to say a specific link is a bad one?

Links from irrelevant and low authorised websites, links from link exchanges, too many anchor-optimized links from single page, and links from penalized websites.

116. High quality content or high amount of backlinks?

If we have high quality content, we can earn high quality backlinks. Quality is always better than Quantity (even in SEO). So, high quality content is always better.

Expert Level SEO Interview Questions & Answers

117. What is AMP?

Source

AMP stands for Accelerate Mobile Pages is an open source project which helps publishers to increase the speed and improve readability of their web pages on mobile devices. Google, WordPress, Adobe has joined hands with few other companies to made this possible.

118. What is Rankbrain?

Rankbrain is a part of Google’s Hummingbird search algorithm. Google utilizes Rankbrain to understand the intend of search queries. Its an AI system to process pages to understand and decide the relevant results for specific new queries. RankBrain can learn and understand new patterns which helps to find quality results. There is no way to optimize a website for RankBrain but just to concentrate on quality content as RankBrain is hardly about keywords.

119. What is BERT algorithm?

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers is an algorithm updated which helps Google with a deep learning algorithm for NLP. Natural language processing can help Google to understand the context of the sentence as like a human.

120. What is SEO Audit?

SEO Audit is an activity of evaluating the health of the website. There are multiple sections involved in SEO audit like On-Page, Off-Page and Technical SEO.

SEO Audit helps to find the issues in the website which should be fixed to improve the website ranking, user experience and conversions.

Some of the primary aspects are: Indexability, on-page, content quality, technical SEO, navigation, speed of the website, structuring of the website, anchor texts, off-page, referring domain – backlink ratio, meta data, quality of the referring domains, competitive analysis, etc.

121. What is a link audit?

Link audit is an activity to audit the backlinks of your domain. Link audit helps you to understand the type of backlinks you receive, also to lists to backlinks you want to add to your disavow list.

122. What is Google’s Rich Answer Box?

This is one of the advanced SEO interview question. Google’s method of helping the users to find the answer to their queries without clicking any website is Google’s rich answer box. You can find these when search for weather reports, distance, cricket score, unit conversions, calculators, text based answers and more.

123. What is Disavow Tool?

Disavow Tool is a Google Search Console Tool to allow publishers to convey Google that certain links from other domains should not be considered and should be avoided. It helps the websites to avoid any actions based on bad links. But, the tool should be handled very carefully and if not used with cautious, it can harm the website performance in search engines.

124. What is Guest Posting?

Guest posting is one of the best link building activity where you contact a relevant and quality website and offer to write for them and getting a contextual link back to your page. Some websites let you have link only on the author bio and some websites let you have link in-body for a small fee.

Guest posting increases the visibility of your website among your targeted customers and potential traffic to your website and improves the authority of your website.

125. What is Schema Markup?

Very regular SEO Interview Question. Schema Markup is a structured data you implement in the website for search engines to understand your website better and provide additional information to users on SERP. It doesn’t improve the search ranking of the website but the rich snippet improves the CTR of the listing thus improves the ranking in long run.

126. How can we increase the frequency of crawling by search engines?

We can increase the frequency by updating the page regularly, adding new content. Ensuring the server has no downtime and always works and running, updating your sitemaps, removing unnecessary pages, improving quality backlinks, decreasing the loading time of your website, etc.

127. What is “(Not Provided)” data in Keyword Reports?

Honestly, this is one of the regular questions in the google analytics interview question. To answer this you have to understand why google does this.

In October 2011, Google changed the way it harvests data from search to protect users’ privacy.

128. How to optimize a website with millions of pages?

Special attention need to be given to following section for those kind of websites:

Creating dynamic meta tags

Dynamic XML sitemap

Strong internal structure for navigation

129. What to do if your website got penalized ?

First, to understand why it happened and fix the issues completely. Then apply for re-inclusion.

130. How can we improve the landing page quality?

Landing page quality can be improved by following ways:

A strong headline and supportive tagline
Original and quality content
Page load time
User-friendliness and user experience
Following Google guidelines
Easy to navigate and understand
Clear call of action message
Visual imagery
Not having too many links
Should connect with Brand and proposition
Simplified lead capture form
Trust symbols.

131. What is Event Tracking?

It is one of the common Google analytics interview questions. Events are user interactions with content that can be tracked independently from a web page or a screen load.

Downloads, mobile ad clicks, gadgets, Flash elements, AJAX embedded elements, and video plays are all examples of actions you might want to track as Events.

For example, if you like to see how many visitors download an ebook, watched a video, you can set up event tracking.

132. What does SEO Manager do?

SEO Manager

An important SEO Interview Question if you are attending an interview for the position of SEO Manager. An SEO Manager is responsible for coordinating and implementing SEO and SEM (search engine marketing) campaigns/programs for clients. They oversee and coordinate with the content, design, social media, and marketing teams and also manage offsite and onsite optimization projects. SEO Managers get the higher range of SEO salary in India. SEO manager is responsible to coordinate SEO efforts, both onpage and offsite optimization. SEO manager develops and executive SEO strategies with the help of his team of SEO specialists. He/she also needs to have basic knowledge of web design and development.

Primary tasks of an SEO Manager:

Execute SEO projects and campaigns to improve website leads/purchase.
Analyze, report the performance of the projects and campaigns.
Overlook the performance of other team members, and guide them to work efficiently.
Optimize the website landing page, fill the content gap and track KPIs.
He should have excellent communication skills to help him collaborate with other team heads.
Guiding the team for the challenges they face and recommend suggestions to fix problems.

133. What is model comparison tool?

Model comparison tool helps to compare conversion metric by using different attribution modeling like first interaction, last interaction, time decay and more. Model comparison tools helps you to compare three attribution models with one another.

134. What does EAT mean?

Expertise, Authority & Trustworthiness.

135. What stand for YMYL ?

YMYL Stands for Your Money, Your Life.

136. How to decrease the loading time of the website?

We can decrease loading time by

Optimize CSS delivery to reduce HTTP request

Using external style sheets

Compressed images (without compromising the quality)

Minifying code

Enable browser caching

Use CSS sprites to reduce HTTP request

Less self- hosted videos

137. Explain LSI

LSI Stands for Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords are semantically associated with primary keyword that visitors used in the search engines.

LSI keywords will increase the keyword relevancy when we optimize the page with these keywords. LSI make it possible to optimize keywords in the web page without creating keyword stuffing issues. Google’s algorithm utilizes LSI keywords to help identify the relevancy of a particular search term. It helps search engines to understand the semantic structure of the keywords and squeeze out the meaning of the text to bring the best results on SERP.

138. What is Google Analytics?

This is almost always the first Google Analytics interview question you will face. Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offered by Google to help you track and analyze the performance of your website.

Google Analytics records various activities of users when they visit your site like user engagement, visitor flow, number of conversions, along with attributes such as age, gender, interests with the help of tracking code.

Google Analytics aggregates the data in multiple ways like User level, Session level, Pageview level, Event level.

The main purpose of the tool is to help you make decisions to improve the site performance and revenue.

139. Tell me some of the reports in Google Analytics

Mobile performance report
Traffic acquisition report
Content efficiency report
Keyword analysis report
New vs Returning visitors
Landing pages report
Bounce rate vs Exit rate report

140. What you can get from Google Analytics?

This SEO Interview question is to check your GA knowledge.The primary things we can get from Google analytics are:

Real time users report

Location of your users

Best and worst performing channels

List of popular pages

Speed of your webpages

Goals and conversion

Funnel Flow

Visitor Behavior and internal search

Audience Devices

SEO Questions and Answers pdf Download