Basic SEO Interview Questions and Answers 2016
Here I am trying to help you by some basic SEO
related questions and their answers which will help you in search engine optimization
technology.
What
is SEO?
SEO is search engine optimization or optimizer is
a collection of techniques applied to optimize our site so that it ranks well
in SERPs (Search engine result pages) like Google, Yahoo, Bing and another
major search engines.
Who
Do SEO?
They are the Webmaster, SEO Engineer and Website
optimizer etc.
What
tools do you use for doing SEO?
I use Google webmaster tools, Google Analytics,
Open site explorer, Alexa, Website grader etc. But now a days there are so many
paid tools are available in market like Seo Moz, spydermate, bulkdachecker etc.
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.
What
is the difference between On Page SEO and Off Page SEO?
On Page Optimization means optimizing your website
and making changes on title, meta tags, site structure, site content, solving
canonicalization problem, managingrobots.txt etc.
Off Page Optimization means optimizing your web
presence which involves backlink building and social media promotion.
What
are the limitations of title and description tags?
Title tag can be between 66-70 characters and Meta
description tag can be between 160-170 characters.
How
will you increase the Pagerank of a page?
By building more backlinks from authority sites
and high page rank webpages.
What
do you mean by anchor text?
Click-able text written on an hyperlink is known
as Anchor Text.
How
will you treat Web standards while optimizing a website?
Google loves web standards hence I will apply the
web standards provided by W3C while optimizing a web site.
If
the meta robots tag has a value of “no index, no follow” what does it mean?
Does Google uses keyword tags?
It means the search engine crawlers would not
index the contents and would not follow the links present on the page.
No, Google does not make use of keyword tags.
What
is 301 redirect?
It is a method of redirecting user from the old
page url to the new page url. 301 redirect is a permanent redirect and is
helpful in passing the link juice from the old url to the new url.
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.
What
methods would you apply for decreasing the loading time of a website?
I would use external style sheets, less images
(unless necessary), optimize the images and decrease the file sizes of the
image without reducing the quality of the image, use CSS sprites to reduce HTTP
requests etc.
What
are the Social Media channels you have used for marketing?
I have used blogs like blogger, word press, tumblr
etc, social bookmarking sites like Digg, Jumptags, Delicious etc., social
networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn etc., Video Sharing sites like
YouTube, Vimeo etc.
What
would you suggest to the client who has a website made on Flash? How would you do Seo for that site?
Search engines find it harder to parse the
contents presented using Flash. I would suggest the client to use an
alternative to flash like HTML 5.
What
do you understand by Frames in HTML?
A frame is a HTML technique which divides the
content of a page onto several parts. Search engines see Frames as completely
different pages and as such Frames have a negative impact on Seo. We should
avoid the usage of Frames and use basic HTML instead.
Which
is the most important area to include your keywords?
Page title and Body text are the most important
areas where we can include keywords for the SEO purpose.
What
are webmaster tools?
Webmaster tools is a free service by Google from
where we can get free Indexing data, backlinks information, crawl errors,
search queries, CTR, website malware errors and submit the XML sitemap.
A
customer can give you an access to only one tool, which one will you choose,
Webmasters or Analytics?
Of Course Webmaster tools, because these are
almost the essential tools for the search engine optimization, we can have some
analytics data in the webmasters as well. But now due to the inclusion of
webmaster data in Analytics, we would like to have access to Analytics.
What
is the main purpose of search engine spiders?
Index sites, because even though spiders visit
sites, their main function is not only to visit them but to index their
contents spiders do not monitor sites for unethical activities.
What
is the best way to maximize the frequency of crawling of your website by search
engines?
Frequently adding new, original and quality
content on the website.
When
do you apply for re inclusion in a search engine’s index?
If our website is banned by the search engines for
black hat practices and if we have corrected our wrong doings we apply for
reinclusion.
What
aspects of a hyperlink are important for SEO?
The place from which the link originates, The
anchor text, especially the keywords in it is very important. The place to
which the link leads and for back links the reputation of the web site from
which the link originates is also crucial, because if you link to link farms,
this might get you banned from search engines.
What
is robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a text file used to give
instructions to the search engine crawlers about the caching and indexing of a
webpage, domain, directory or a file of a website.
What
is Keyword Difficulty?
Keyword difficulty identifies how difficult it
would be to rank well for a particular keyword. and the value is higher for
more popular words because it will be more difficult to compete with 1,000s of
other sites for a popular word than with 10s of others for the less popular
ones
Which
of the options below is the best way to select the keywords to optimize for?
Use a tool to determine the theme of your web
site, because it is the whole theme of a website that is more important than
separate keywords. Selecting competitors keywords which have the highest
density is not recommendable because if
your competitor has wrongly selected the keywords, or even if the keywords are
right for them, this does not mean that they are right for you, so actually you
get on the wrong trace from the very beginning.
Which
is better Robots.txt or Meta Robots Tag?
Meta Robots tag is much better as it helps in
forcing the search engine crawlers not to index and display the hidden pages in
your server.
What
is a landing page?
A landing page is a page in the website which is
designed to attract the visitors to contact/subscribe/buy a service or the
product by reading few lines of important information about that particular
service or the product on that page.
If
you have a site that is targeted at a particular country only, which of the
following are recommendable to do in order to rank well in country specific
search results?
Use the appropriate language attribute in the HTML
code of the page, The web site should be hosted in the same country, so that
its IP falls in the range of IPs that are specific for this country. Have the
web site written in the language of the country. Submit the site to local
search engines, search engines use their own algorithms to determine the
language of a a particular sites, even there are SEO experts who say that no
efforts on your side are necessary for ranking well in country specific search
results.
Why
are metatags important?
Because search engines still use them for
estimating search relevancy. although search engines might not rely on metatags
to generate search results, metatags are used (to a differing extend) by most
of the search engines Because it is a professional approach to Web design to
have complete and accurate metatags,
since metatags are part of the html code of a page, they must also be
done professionally, as the rest of the code.
Do
you know who Danny Sullivan is?
He is a Journalist who covers the field of web
search, considered as search engine guru and editor at searchengineland.com
Who
is Matt Cutts?
He is the head of web spam team at Google.
From
SEO point of view, which is better – one big site or several smaller site?
If you have enough content in the same niche it is
better to have it in one big site because first, this way the site is easier to
maintain and the great number of pages is good for ranking high in search
results. Many small sites allow focusing on specific niches, therefore
competing for different keywords.
How
do you know how much to pay for a text link from another site to yours?
The price of a text link from another site to
yours depends on many factors, The price is often different because it depends
on the current rating of the site that will back link to us. The most important
of which is the Web Site the back link originates from, because there can’t be
universal prices for text links. when you don’t know the real price of a link,
negotiating to drop the price is pointless and generally, reputable sites are
not going to negotiate the price of their links.
Do
you use separate SEO strategies for Google,Yahoo and Bing?
Yes I use separate strategies for Google,Yahoo and
other search engines.Morebacklinks are required for Google. It pays more
attention to backlinks 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.
Which
technique is unethical and can be a reason for banning?
Creating a doorway page instead a home page is
considered as unethical because doorway pages are aimed at misleading search
engines.
Explain
some SEO practices?
Building back links. Rewriting the titles to
include the target keywords, Rewriting dynamic URLs into static.
For
which of the following file types a SEO expert needs to provide an alternative
textual description?
(swf. – gif.) Since .html, .pdf and .doc are text
file formats and spiders can read their contents directly, it is pointless to
provide an alternative textual description. On the contrary, .swf and image
file types, like .gif and .jpg, need alternative textual descriptions because
spiders cannot read their contents directly.
What
is Keyword proximity?
It measures the distance between two keywords in
the text. Keyword proximity is used by some search engines to measure relevancy
of a given page to the search request. The idea is that the closer two keywords
to each other are, the more relevant the page , keyword density measures how
many times (not how far) a given keyword appears on a page.
If
you were a SEO for a technology web site, what would you do to build backlinks
for it?
Four practices are a quite legal and recommendable
way of building backlinks are:-
- Post in technology blogs.
- Submit articles to technology engines.
- Exchange links with other reputable technology web sites.
- Provide free syndicated content to partner-websites.
Explain
onsite search box, and how it helps to attract traffic?
An onsite search box allows searching for pages
that are inaccessible to unregistered users (i.e. search engine spiders). When
you have an onsite search box, your visitors will get more search results than
in comparison to using Google and the other search engines. If you have an
onsite search box and see what users are searching for, you will be able to
notice new keywords that are of interest to your audience.
Using the “site:” operator in search engines makes
onsite search boxes obsolete is false because generally search engines do not
index every single page of a site, even if these pages are not disallowed in
the robots.txt or are password-protected. A good onsite search box is really
valuable but it is a fact that occasionally onsite search boxes use so
imprecise algorithms that using the “site:” operator in Google gives much more
reliable results.
What
are the advantages of submitting sites to search directories?
By submitting to a search directory, you get a
back link to your web site. When your site is listed in search directories,
this increases the chances that search engines will index it sooner, compared
to when it is not listed. Submitting to search directories is a good Web
marketing initiative. Because that increases the chances of having your web
site index and when your site is listed in a search directory, you list its URL
as well, so you actually get a valuable link
Submitting to search directories neither gets
higher ranking nor gets your web site certified.
What
are the criteria for the uniqueness of a page (unique as opposed to duplicate
content)?
Code similarity, Text similarity, Page names.
Titles, headings, page titles and metatags.
What
does the abbreviation PPC stand for?
Pay per click, Pay per Click measures how much
online advertisers must pay each time their advertisement is clicked on.
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 the index.
Will
you use an ordinary html sitemap with Google?
Google has a special format for sitemaps rather
than ordinary html format. So it is good to use special XML format that Google
uses for sitemaps.
What
is Page Rank?
This is the Google technology for measuring
popularity among users. Yahoo has a similar technology, called Web Rank, and
Alexa Rank is the Alexa technology. The way Google measures how popular a given
page is based on the number and quality of sites that link to it.
You have just launched a new web site.
Unfortunately, nobody visits it, even search engines’ spiders don’t notice it.
What can you do for its SEO success?
Submit the URL of the web site to search engines
and search directories.
If
you own a web site and have a weekly newsletter that features the same content
as the site, how can you include Google AdSense in your newsletter when you
mail it to your subscribers?
We can’t include AdSense in our newsletter,
because we cannot include Google ads in offsite content, as an e-mail
newsletter.
Difference
between exit rate and bounce rate?
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leaves
a particular website just after visiting a single page on this and exit rate
refers to the percentage of people who leaves from a particular page.
Can
search engines see password protected pages?
In most of the cases Search engines are not
different from regular users. Search engines cannot go anywhere that a regular
user cannot go. If we have a password protected area on our website that cannot
be accessed without a login and password then the search engines also cannot
see it.
For seo which is better text links or graphical
links?
Text links are better for SEO. Text links can
contain the anchor text that our web page wishes to rank well for and that is
an important factor in many search engines, especially Google. Image links are
still valuable but do have less benefits compared to text links.
What
is Cross Linking?
Cross Linking- a strategy that can come in handy
to get high search engine rankings, by leveraging multiple domains owned by
you. Search engines value these links, as they are from relevant sites, with
related content- and you stand a chance of getting a better rank
What
is Google EMD updates?
The EMD Update – for “Exact Match Domain” – is a
filter Google launched in September 2012 to prevent poor quality sites from
ranking well simply because they had words that match search terms in their
domain names. When a fresh EMD Update happens, sites that have improved their
content may regain good rankings. New sites with poor content – or those
previously missed by EMD – may get caught. In addition, “false positives” may
get released.
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