This post is about SEO interview questions which have
compiled SEO interview questions & answers. These are very helpful for SEO
job interview that will definitely bring a successful and bright career. These
SEO interview questions and answers 2012 are congregated by our SEO experts in
order to save your precious time and efforts and deliver a collection of best
and most frequently asked questions just for you.In the field of internet marketing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been
emerged as an excellent method to promote a website that’s means promoting a
website in search engine with motive to enhance the ranking in search engine
page result. However, in order to get top ranking position in search engines a
website must be appears as search engine friendly.
As people accessing internet is proliferating dynamically, the extent of
online or internet marketing is also on the hike accordingly. From huge
corporate companies to small business establishment comprehending the
importance of online marketing which tends to rise of demand for SEO and SEM
expert. However, the interview held for SEO jobs is seems to be very confounded
as most often it comprises various challenging questions that proves your
capability of reasoning, logic, problem-solving skills and creative thinking.
Therefore, either you are a fresher or experienced SEO professional, I am here
to help you by presenting most frequently asked
SEO interview question
that would not only show your skills and knowledge but also helps to achieve
the SEO jobs and make you the winner.
Moreover, being a SEO professional you would have to prove your skills and
knowledge of SEO as well as SEO services in order to show your expertise in
Search Engine field. Hence, in the coming section of this post I am going to
present almost everything which concerns with SEO job interview question &
answer which ensure your success in the SEO interview. So, just go ahead and go
through these set of
SEO interview question & answers
.
Q: What is Search Engines?
Ans: Search Engines are very critical key element useful to
find out specific and relevant information through huge extent of World Wide
Web. Some major commonly used search engine:
Q: Tell me something about Google.
Ans: Google is the world’s largest and renowned search engine
incorporating about
66.8% 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. Apart of 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.
Q: Define SEO?
Ans: SEO is the abbreviated form of “
Search Engine
Optimization”. It is the set of process in account of which a website
or web page is being constructed or optimized that helps them to enhance their
appearance or visibility at top in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
Q: Explain distinct types of SEO practice?
Ans: 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.
Q: What are the different techniques used in Offpage SEO?
Ans: There are lots of techniques used in Offpage SEO work.
Major Techniques are:
- Directory Submission
- Social Bookmarking
- Blog Post
- Article Post
- Press Release Submission
- Forum Posting
- Yahoo Answer
- Blog Comment
- Deep link Directory
Submission
- Regional Directory Submission
and all that.
Q: Define blog, article & press release?
Ans: A
blog is referred as an information or
discussion published on website or World Wide Web incorporating distinct
entries called as posts. Basically, the blog is referred as everything thing
where you can include others too. It is more individual in contrast to article
and press release. It is also considered as very personal in subject to both
style and comprised ideas and information and can be written in the way just
like you may talk to your readers. It is also called Web diary or Online Diary.
The
articles are concerned with specific topic or event and
are highly oriented towards an opinion instead of information. An article is
supposed to be more oriented towards showing up opinions, views and idea.
Generally, it is written by a third party or expert of any specific
field.
Press Release is related with 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.
Q: What are Meta Tags?
Ans: HTML
meta tags are usually
referred as tags of page data which sits between opening and closing head tags
of a document’s HTML code. Actually these are hidden keywords who sits in
the code. These are invisible to visitors but are visible and readable by
Search Engines.
Example:
<head>
<title>Not considered as Meta Tag,
even required anyway</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Write your description here” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Write your keyword here” />
</head>
Q: Difference between keyword & keyword phrase?
Ans: The
keyword term is basically
concerned with a one-word term, on the other hand a
keyword phrase
considered as employment of two or more word-combinations. Therefore, it is
very confounded to get high ranking in account of one-word keyword term until
the one-word keyword has little online competition. Therefore, this practice is
not encouraged to employ. In order to drive more traffic and top ranking in
SERP it is recommended to employ keyword phrase.
Q: What do you know about Black Hat SEO?
Ans: In order to attain High Ranking in search engine result
page, websites go for various methods and techniques which are characterized by
two categories.
The method which are implemented and acceptable according to search engine
guidelines are
White Hat SEO, on the other hand, the method
which are less acceptable or instructed to avoid in search engine guidelines
are “
Black Hat SEO”.
Q: Can you tell me some Black Hat SEO techniques?
Ans: Some Black Hat SEO techniques are:
- Keyword Stuffing
- Cloaking
- Doorway Pages or Gateway
Pages
- Link Farming
- Hidden Text, etc.
Q: What is spider?
Ans: Spider also called as
bot,
crawler
or
robot is a set of computer program that browses World Wide
Web in methodical and orderly fashion as well automatically scan the web-page
and website for updated content and download a copy to its data center to
index.
Q: Name the bots (spider) of major search engine?
Ans: The name of bots/spider of Google search engine is
GoogleBot,
Yahoo Slurp for Yahoo search and
BingBot for
Bing search engine.
Q: Can you differentiate ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’?
Ans: Nofollow link is exactly
vice-versa of dofollow link. These are non-crawling link which are not passed
by search engines bot and hence can’t be cached or indexed. It is obvious when
we wish to prevent a link from crawling and indexing.
Dofollow link is a kind of hyperlink which says all search
engines crawlers to pass through which also put an impact over page rank. When
we opt to employ or attempt to achieve a dofollow link then it is counted by
search engines and sits in the eye of Google, Bing, MSN, Yahoo etc. as a
backlink for your website and enhances your site ranking.
Q: Define Page Rank.
Ans: PageRank is a set of algorithm for
link analysis named after
Larry Page and employed by Google
search engine towards defining a numerical value from
1 to 10
to each component of hyperlinked documents like world wide web. The value
accepts only round figure that means decimal are not allowed. Page rank is
calculated by their
inbound links.
Q: Establish a difference between PR & SERP.
Ans: PR is
Page Rank which is defined by
quality inbound links from other website or web-pages to a web page or website
as well as say the importance of that site.
SERP stands for
Search Engine Result Page is the placement
of the website or web-page which is returned by search engine after a search
query or attribute.
Q: What is Cache?
Ans: Cache is the process performed by search
engine crawler at a regular interval of time. It used to scan and take snapshot
of each page over world wide web as well as store as a backup copy. Almost
every search engine result page incorporates a cached link for every site.
However, clicking over cached link show you the last Google cached version of
that specific page rather than of current version. Also, you can directly
prefix “
cache:http://www.webgranth.com” with desired URL
to view it cached version.
Q: Define Alt tag?
Ans: The alt attribute also called as alt tag are employed in
XHTML and HTML documents in context of defining alternative text that is
supposed to be rendered when the element can’t be rendered to which it is
applied. One great feature of alt tag is that it is readable to ‘screen reader’
which is a software by means of which a blind person can hear this. In
addition, it delivers alternative information for an image due to some specific
reason a user can’t view it such as in case of slow connection and an error
occurred in the src attribute.
For example, the HTML for this image will appear something like this:
<img alt=”you can define alt tag just below the input box of image
title while uploading or editing a image.” src=”<http://www.webgranth.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Alt
tag.jpg”>
Q: What do you know about Adsense?
Ans: 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.
Q: Can you define Adword?
Ans: Adword is referred as the main
advertising product of Google which is useful to make appear your ads on Google
and its partner websites including Google Search. This Google’s product offer
PPC (
Pay Per Click) advertising which is a primary module and
incorporate a sub module CPC (
Cost Per Click) where we bid
that rate that will be charged only when the users click your advertisement.
One another sub module is CPM (
Cost Per Thousand Impression)
advertising where advertiser pay for a thousand 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.
Q: What is PPC?
Ans: PPC is the abbreviated form of Pay Per
Click and is a advertisement campaign conducted by Google. It is referred as a
primary module with two sub module CPC (Cost-per-click) and CPM (Cost per
thousand impression) through bidding and flat rate respectively. In CPC the
advertiser would be only charged when the user click over their advert.
Q: What are the aspects in SEO?
Ans: The main aspect in SEO are divided in two class: SEO
On-Page and SEO Off-Page.
SEO On-Page includes Meta
tag, description, keywords optimization, site structure and analysis, etc.
SEO Off-Page aspect are Keyword Research, unique and
quality content, link building through Blog Comments, Blog Posting, Article
submission, Press Release, Classified posting, Forum posting.
Q: What do you know about RSS?
Ans: RSS stands for
Really Simple Syndication
is useful to frequently publish all updated works including
news headlines,
blog entries etc. This RSS document also known as web feed, feed or channel
that incorporate summarized text including metadata i.e. authorship and
publishing dates etc.
However, RSS feeds make the publishers flexible by syndicating the content
automatically. There is a standardized file format XML that lets the
information to be published once which can be visible to several distinct
programs. Also, this make readers more ease to get updates timely by allowing
them to subscribe from their favorite sites.
Q: How would you define Alexa?
Ans: Alexa is a
California based subsidiary
company of
Amazon.com which is widely known for its website
and toolbar. This Alexa toolbar congregate browsing behavior data and send it
to website, where the data is analyzed and stored and create report for
company’s web traffic. Also, Alexa provides data concerned to traffic, global
ranking and other additional information for a websites.
Q: How can you achieve Google Page Rank?
Ans: Generally,
Google Page Rank is based
on
inbound links, therefore, more backlinks you congregate
more your page rank will be. Also, it is influenced by rank of page which is
linked to you. One other thing to consider is that older your website will be,
it will be more favorable and trusted to Google. Google reward those websites
who incorporates lots of pages, tons of incoming link and also healthy quantity
of internal links to another pages within the site. In respect of SEO projects,
relatively it is not so significant but delivers a picture about work to
perform towards earning inbound links.
Q: Why the Title Tag in Website is valuable?
Ans: In our SEO efforts
Title Tags are very
earnest. It is highly recommended to include a Unique Title that exactly says
about the contents sits in that page. It is valuable because this is thing
which appears in the search engine result section and tells the user &
search engine, what is about this page.
Q: What is Site Map and distinguish between HTML sitemap and XML
sitemap?
Ans: A
sitemap incorporates list of
web-pages which is accessible to users or crawlers. It might be a document in
any form employed as a tool for planning either a web page or web design that
enables them to appear on a website as well as typically placed in a
hierarchical style. This helps search engine bots and users to find out the
pages on a website. The site map renders our website more search engine
friendly as well enhances the probability for frequent indexing.
HTML sitemap can be incorporated directly in a web page for
user’s flexibility and can be implemented through proper design. On the other
hand,
XML sitemap is useful only for search engine crawlers or
spiders and doesn’t visible to users. It sits in the root of website.
such as: http://www.webgranth.com/sitemap.xml
Which is better: an HTML site map or XML Sitemap? BY Matt Cutt
Q: What’s the significance of Robots.txt file in a website?
Ans: Robots.txt file is considered as a
convention useful to prevent cooperating web robots and web crawlers from
accessing all or part of a website or its content for which we don’t want to be
crawled and indexed but publicly viewable. It is also employed by search
engines to archive and categorize website and to generate a rule of no follow
regarding some particular areas of our websites.
Q: How Keywords are implemented for optimization?
Ans: The best way to opt and implement keywords is to
designate those keywords which are popular, relevant to our content, comprises
high search volume and effective. Stuffing and over employment of keywords must
be avoided. In order to get best result and effect, our pages shouldn’t contain
keyword density more than 3-4%. Including keywords into title and description
is highly recommended.
Q: What is cloaking?
Ans: Cloaking is a technique which is used in
Black Hat SEO that enables to create two distinct pages where
the page content being presented to search engine spider is different from that
which is being presented to user’s browser. These techniques does not come
under the guidelines of search engines.
Q: Do you know about Blog Flipping?
Ans: Blog Flipping is the practice to sale
a blog when it becomes famous and popular as well as driving healthy amount of
traffic.
Q: What you opined about HTML either it is Case Sensitive or Case
Insensitive?
Ans: HTML is
case Insensitive. It doesn’t
matter and deliver identical result either you write in Upper Case or Lower
Case.
Under what circumstances you would intend to eliminate pages from
search engines through robots.txt vs. Meta
robots tag?
Ans: Generally, I would continue to employ robots.txt in
order to make search engine indexing a directory on a website. This might be
often a directory that is concerned with admin function or incorporate contents
only in form of script or image gallery. Generally, robots.txt is employed to
prevent a directory and its sub-folders and files to crawl by search engine bot
as well as
Meta
robots tag for a specific web page.
Q: What things are significant in organically ranking a website?
Ans: Basically there are various things that is being
employed for organically ranking a website which can be classified in 3
distinct categories:
- Website content:
It must be quality and unique content as well as most be well optimized
and well structured.
- Website structure:
This include TAGS, clear navigation, ensuring usability, validation of
HTML errors and miscellaneous.
- Back-links:
You can create a link for any where but prior to this it is obvious to
ensure for relevant site and healthy link.
Q: What steps would you follow to optimize a website?
Ans: These are following steps to be followed while optimizing
a website:
- First of all we will
interview webmaster or website owner to congregate relevant information,
goals and website’s purpose.
- Performing keyword analysis
and find out the best search volume keywords that should be incorporated
into the website as well as individual pages of the website.
- Analyzing the content of
website in order to ensure usage of content relevant keywords and phrases.
This comprises titles, “alt” attributes and META tags (Meta Title, Meta description & Meta Keyword).
- Target & implementing
keywords as H1, H2 & so on relevant to the site and its content.
- Analyzing website navigation.
- Ensuring the robots.txt file
and sitemap existence as well as check their efficiency.
- If required, making
recommendations for modifications in website as well as its each and every
page and so on…..
Q: SEO Checklist for New Websites
Q: What is considered as more significant – Creating great content
or building backlinks?
Ans: Both are obvious. Creating quality content is
considered as the first element responsible for ranking as well as building
backlinks is useful to build authority to a site as well as coined as a metric
for ranking well.
Q: What will be your step when the company website you are working
with wish to migrate its all content to a new domain?
Ans: First of all I would update the previous website with
permanent redirect to new page for each and every page. Later eradicate
previous content from search engines in context of avoiding duplicate content
issues.
Q: What’s your opinion about link buying?
Ans: Generally I avoid this practice. Though other means of
paid marketing are also available. The process of link buying is don’t liked by
search engines. It doesn’t comes under the guidelines of search engine.
Q: Can you establish a difference between SEM and SEO?
Ans: SEO is a set of processes to get our website or pages
appear in search engine result page. On the other hand SEM is search engine
marketing being used in practice to purchase advertising space in search engine
page result.
Q: What strategies would you implement for backlinks?
Ans: I would request for backlinks to competitors relevant
website as well as provide reciprocal link if required. In addition, I would
attempt to submit press release, article submission, blog submission and other
aspects of off-page SEO to most relevant and quality sites.
Q: What do you think about social
media in SEO strategy?
Ans: Social networking websites are
considered as social media which is very effective and robust for viral
marketing. Viral marketing has been proved as very powerful resource, in the
case if our content is unique, attractive and appealing. Some media Site:
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Linkedin
- Myspace
- Digg
- Youtube
- Myspace, etc.
Q: In order to prevent penalty, what things you shouldn’t perform to
increase ranking?
Ans: I would discard links from those websites which is
supposed to act as link farm as well as poor quality sites which have low page
rank. Ensure that our site must contain unique and quality content without
keyword stuffing. Also, I used to avoid any practices of ‘spam’ which include
certain affiliate advertising websites, unsolicited e-mail campaigns etc.
Q: What mistakes you should avoid while optimizing the website?
Ans: The main mistakes that should be avoided are filling
keywords in Web-Page, employing identical anchor text for link building,
keyword stuffing, getting low quality backlinks etc.
Q: Define and Differentiate Webmaster Tool &
Analytics Tool?
Ans: Webmaster Tool is a free service catered
by Google which provide us a complete report for indexed data, crawling errors,
backlinks information, search queries, website malware errors, CTR and
submitting XML sitemap. Basically, it acts as a mediator between website and
server provide complete overview of data, issues and other queries.
Google Analytics is a free web analysis
tool first rolled out in late 2005 but generally it become available for users
in August 2006. This tool acts between website & internet browser/users and
offers complete overview of visitors statistics which exactly says about
general website activities like page views, site visits, bounce rates, average
time spent on site or pages, sources of traffic, location etc. It is also
obvious for tracking Adword queries.
Q: How can you enhance the crawling frequency by search engines for
your website?
Ans: Including new, original, unique and quality content on
our website more frequently enables search engines to crawl more frequently.
Q: What do you know about Keyword stemming?
Ans: It is the practice to find out root word from search
query. For instance, a keyword like “playful” will be split to the word “play”
by stemming algorithm that turns it possible. Thus, the search result appear on
the screen will contain the word “play” in it.
Q: What do you know about LSI?
Ans: LSI is the abbreviated form of
Latent Semantic
Indexing. It has been emerged as a technique of fetching data via
establishing a communication among words as well as employing synonyms in the
midst of retrieving the data from the index.
Q: Can you tell me about Frames in HTML?
Ans: Frames in HTML are obvious as they used to
discriminate the page content into distinct fragments. Search engines treat
these frames as absolutely different pages as well as frames also put an
negative impact over SEO. Therefore, we should avoid the practice of using
Frames and implement basic HTML instead.
Q: How can you know about your SEO campaign whether it is working or
not?
Ans: First of all I would attempt to make a search on all
search engines employing relevant keywords and keyphrases, I am optimizing for.
The analysis of result will say whether the methods of optimization have gain
results or lost. I would analyze the report regularly as search engine make
update and index. I would attempt to another aspect of website statistics which
says about origin of traffic.
Q: What is the meaning of competitive analysis?
Ans: Competitive analysis, as its name suggested it is
establishment of a comparison of data between the website I am optimizing and
that website who rank highly in search results. It will be a great source of
idea.
Q: After implementing distinct SEO methods for a site, if you
haven’t got any improvements. What would be your next step?
Ans: I would make troubleshooting for the issues. Firstly,
I would designate whether it is a new project. Again I will analyze relevant
keywords and phrase for the site I am optimizing for as well as took an insight
study of competitive analysis. If the website and pages has been index and
appears in the first 10 pages of search engine result page but not in the top
three, I would go for some transformation to on page text, page titles and page
descriptions. But in the case if website has not been indexed still or dropped
from index, might be it comprises some big issues and total re-submission and
re-work might be required.
However, I opined here that this post will be highly beneficial for who are
stepping towards marshaling their career as SEO professional especially for
those who are still freshers. Moreover, in this post I have also listed some
useful
SEO interview question for experienced professionals
that will definitely help them to grab their dream job and offer a great
opportunity to add sparkles in their career.
To know more
click
here
Ans: 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.
