Top Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers 2024

Top Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers 2024

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 other major search engines.

Doeso 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 nowadays there are so many paid tools available in the 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 period until they establish themselves as being displayed on the search results. It happens by building too many links within a short period.

What is the difference between On Page SEO and Off Page SEO?
Page Optimization means optimizing your website and making changes to the title, meta tags, site structure, site content, solving canonicalization problems, managingrobots.txt eOff Page Optimization means optimizing your web presence which involves backlink building and social media promotion.

What are the limitations of title and description the titleitle tag can be between 66-70 characters the 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 as a 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 website.

If the meta robots tag has a value of “no index, no follow” what does it mean? Does Goouseuses 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 users from the old page URL to the new page URL. 301 redirect is permanent and helps to pass the link juice from the URL URL to the URL URL.

What do you understand by Cloaking?
Cloaking involves using deceptive techniques which present the user with a different version of the webpage than that presented to the search engines.

What methods would you apto decrease the loading time of a website?
I would use external style sheets, fewer 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?
Top Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers 2024 – I have used blogs like Blogger, WordPress, and Tumblr etc, social bookmarking sites like Digg, Jumptags, Delicious etc., social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn etc., and Video Sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo etc.

Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers 2024

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 an HTML technique which divides the content of a page into several parts. Search engines see Frames as completely different pages and as such Frames hurt Seo. We should avoid the usage of Frames and use basic HTML instead.

Which is the most important area to include in 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 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 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 wrongdoings we apply for inclusion.

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 website 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 search engine crawlers about the caching and indexing of a webpage, domain, directory or 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?
Top Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers 2024 – Use a tool to determine the theme of your website, because it is the whole theme of a website that is more important than separate keywords.

Selecting competitor’s 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 track 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 on the website which is designed to attract visitors to contact/subscribe/buy a service or product by reading a few lines of important information about that particular service or 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 to rank well in country-specific search results?
Top Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers 2024 – Use the appropriate language attribute in the HTML code of the page, The website 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 website written in the language of the country. Submit the site to local search engines, search engines use their algorithms to determine the language of a particular site, even though 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 extent) by most of the search engines Because it is a professional approach to Web design to have complete and accurate meta since metatags are part of HHTML 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 a search engine guru and editor at searchengineland.com

Who is Matt Cutts?
He is the head of the web spam team at Google.

Fan from an SEO point of view, which is better – one big site or several sites?
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?
Top Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers 2024 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 backlink to us.

The most important of which is the Web Site the backlink 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 Goo gle, Yahoo and Bing?,
Top Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers 2024, Yes I use separate strategies for Google, Yahoo and search engines More backlink sinks are required for Google. It pays more attention to backlinks and site authority while Yahoo and Bpaypays 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 had a home page is considered unethical because doorway pages are aimed at misleading search engines.

Best Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers 2024

Explain some SEO practices. ces?
Building backlinks. Rewriting the titles to include the target keywords and rewriting dynamic URLs into static.

For which of the following files does an SEO expert need 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?
Top Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers 2024 It measures the distance between two keywords in the text. Keyword proximity is used by some search engines to measure the 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 want an SEO for a technology website, what would you do to build backlinks for it?
Four practices are a quite legal and recommended ways way of building back:-
Post in technology blogs.
Submit articles to technology engines.
Exchange links with other reputable technology websites.
Provide free syndicated content to partner websites.

Explain the 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 the other search engines.

Top Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers 2024 – 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 the genre, ally 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 backlink to your website. 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.

Top Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers 2024 – Submitting to search directories is a good Web marketing initiative. Because that increases the chances of having your websindexedndex and when your site is listed in a search directory, you list its URL as well, so only get a valuable link
Submitting to search directories neither ga gets a higher ranking nor gets your website 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 a 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 the ordinary html format. So it is good to the 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 is based on the number and quality of sites that link to it.

You have just launched a new website. Unfortunately, nobody visits it, even search engine spiders don’t notice it. What can you do for its SEO success?
Submit the URL of the website to search engines and search directories.

If you own a website 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 leaving a particular website just after visiting a single page and exit rate refers to the percentage of people who leave a particular page.

Can search engines password-protect 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?
Top Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers 2024 – 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 fewer benefits compared to text links.

What is cross-linking?
Top Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers 2024 – 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 are Google EMD updates?
Top Basic SEO Interview Questions & Answers 2024 – 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” be get released