SEO Interview Questions and Answers

Doman is a string which is used in finding and identifying computers in the World Wide Web where the web site, document or videos are stored. Domain resolves to numeric identifiers called as IP addresses. Instead of remembering the computers with a numeric identity, Domain helps in identifying the computers with easy to remember strings within the Internet. Example of a Domain is: www.google.com

URL or Uniform Resources Locator is a logical address that points to a location in the server where the specific web page, document or video of the World Wide Web is stored.

The last segment of the Domain is called the Top Level Domain and it is also called as Domain Extension. Top level domain extensions are .com, .net, .org etcetera. There are also country specific top level domains such as “.in” refers to India, “.us” refers to the United States.

Search Engines are Programs that search for relevant information which has a close similarity to the keywords or terms given by the user. This program is used to search information on the World Wide Web.

Google Search is the most popular search engine. Besides you have search engines like Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, AOL.com. Also many people have started using apps like Amazon, Flipkart and YouTube for their specific product searches. Hence they can also be considered as search engines but their search scope is limited to that application’s database. For example, when searching in YouTube for a video, YouTube searches for the specific video only within its scope and not in the entire World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web is a collection and connections of millions of computers and servers scattered across the world where valuable information is stored in the form of web pages. Search engines not only unites these whole repositories of information by indexing it, but also helps in searching and finding the relevant information required for the users. If there are no Search engines, then the entire WWW information repository becomes useless.

There is no exact explanation for the term “Google”, but a common interpretation is that the word “Googol” – meaning a very large number – is misspelled. Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in the year 1998.

SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization is a practice through which a website is optimized with the content, technical and structural changes to achieve the highest rank naturally in the Search Engine Page Results or SERP. As users trust organic results compared to paid advertisements, getting the highest rank organically increases the quantity of potential traffic to the website or webpage. SEO Training in Chennai at FITA provides an in-depth training of the SEO concepts and its application under the mentorship of real-time professionals.  These are commonly asked SEO Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

Google has become the friend, philosopher and Guide for everybody now. Most of the users now search in Google to find their requirements for anything they need and they trust the results of Google Search. It is claimed that just less than 5% of the search users even bother to see the second page of the search results.

Having your business on the top results means, more trusted users visits your website resulting in more sales without any high marketing costs. 

The results that are displayed by the Search engine against a user’s search terms are called the Search Engine Results Page or SERP. The SERP is displayed with Organic Results and can be referred to as, “our business is listed in the No.1 position of the SERP”. 

When Google decides that a web page can provide the most valuable content to searchers, then it selects those web pages and displays it in the SERP. This is called Organic Search Results as the rank and selection of the displayed web pages are not influenced by payments but rather by its quality, relevance and popularity. 

It is the number of times that a keyword appears in webpage which is measured in terms of percentage to the whole content of a web page.

There is no guidance or definition for this. Analyze the website of competitors who are ranking high in the SERP and the number of times they used the keyword can be taken as a point to start with and experiment.

Not necessarily. This is a very tricky question. Actually Google ranks the individual Web pages and not the websites. But the Domain also plays its role in the rank determination.

Once the website is developed and completed, it must be accessible by the user. Web hosting is a process through which the website is stored in the server which is connected to the Internet. The Domain Name is then pointed to the server where the website is stored or hosted. This makes the website accessible by users. This whole process is called hosting. Please note that website hosting is a paid service.

As the SERP is more valuable because it is seen by the potential user, advertisers can pay and display their ads in the search results page or the SERP. Ads that are relevant to the search terms may get the attention of the user and they can prefer to select the ads by Clicking on the ads, besides the search results. 

Keywords are words or group of words known as Phrases that are used by the users to search their requirements in the search engine. These are also called as Search Queries or Search Terms.

While searching for a match, Google verifies the contents of your web page to determine whether the page is relevant to the keywords by analyzing whether the keywords are used regularly. Google also checks for the image and metadata for relevance to the keywords.

Keywords create the connection between the user searches and the websites. Without keywords, there is no way to get connected to the potential online users. Using the right keywords sensibly at the right place and at the right number of times in a web page will help Google to understand how far your website will benefit the right users especially the users who are most likely to buy. These are commonly asked SEO Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

Meta tags are short but descriptive texts that describe the content of a web page. These texts do not appear as part of a web page in the browser but help other programs such as the search engines and crawlers to understand what the web page is all about.

There are four important Meta Tags, they are;

• Title Meta Tag-Limited to 60 characters in Length
• Description Meta Tag-Limited to 160 characters in Length
• Keyword Meta Tag-Limited to 200 characters in Length
• Meta Robot Tag-Not Applicable

Search Engines uses software robots also called as “bots” or “Spiders”, to systematically crawl or browse the websites of the World Wide Web. Crawling is done to either index web pages or to update already indexed web pages.

There are three different types of SEO that can be performed, they are;

• On-Page Optimization or On-Page SEO
• Off-Page Optimization or Off-Page SEO
• Technical SEO

These Optimizations are performed in the individual pages of a web site itself. The optimizations are carried out on the contents, keywords, design, meta descriptions and the speed at which the page loads. These changes will help to improve rankings. This is also called On-Page SEO.

As its name implies, the Off-Page Optimization or Off-Page SEO is not performed in the web page or website. Google determines the right website by its relevance, quality and popularity. Hence these optimizations are performed by increasing interactions with other websites by way of building back-links from most trusted sites which can improve the ranking. By connecting your site to Social Media and performing Social Media Marketing can also help to increase the popularity of the websites.

Technical SEO is optimizing the entire website technically in terms of design, structure and support to help search engines to crawl, index and interpret the websites in an easy way by optimizing the Meta tags, Header tags and Alt tags.

Long-tail Keywords are longer search terms that are used by the searchers with more specific keyword phrases. The advantages are, they are easy to rank when compared to the primary keywords and results in better conversions. This is because, searchers use long-tail keywords when they are closer in decision to purchase a product or service.

The important use of ALT tags is, they can be used to provide description text for an image. This is used by Search Engines like Google to understand the purpose of an image and how it relates to the contents of the website. This result in better understanding of a page by Search Engines for a better ranking. ALT tags are also called as Alt Attribute or Alt Description.

This is a HTML tag which provides a shorter description about the website. This is used by Search Engines like Google to understand the purpose of your website better. This Meta Description is also displayed in the Google SERP. As the Meta Descriptions are visible to the user, it is highly recommended that they are more related to keywords. The SEO Course in Chennai at FITA provides a comprehensive training of theSEO practices and guides you to write the appropriate and captivating meta descriptions to cover the customers.  These are commonly asked SEO Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

A link that a website gets from another website is called a Backlink. This happens when a website is referenced from another website. When a website gets more backlinks or its referred from more number of other websites, it certainly creates an impact in the search engine results. 

When a link is created for another website from within a website, there is an option to add an attribute to the link tag, which is the rel=”nofollow”. This attribute, when attached to a link communicates to the search engines that authority must not be passed to the target website. Backlinks with No-Follow backlinks may not favor SEO for the target site.

When a link is created from within a website to another website without the “nofollow” tag, and then it is considered as a Do-Follow backlinks. This informs the search engines that the Authority and Trust of the current website can be passed to the target website. This has a huge positive impact in the improvement of the target website in terms of ranking. More Do-follow links, more better ranking.

Yes, it is. Backlinks are a really very important part of Off-Page SEO and can certainly help in improving the rank of a website or web page. Because Google sees the backlink present on a right website as a positive signal that the target website can be trusted. 

When a link is created in one page of a website which refers to another page of the same website, they are called Internal Linking. Apart from this helping users in Navigation this informs the search engines to pass on the Trust and Authority of the current page to the referred page which increases the ranking of the target page.

When another website has a link which refers to your website, then it is called an Inbound-link or IBL. They are also called backlinks. 

When your website refers to another website with a link, then it is called an Outbound-link. This is of no use from the point of view of SEO. 

When there is a link in a website which displays the URL directly, it is called naked URLs. Instead of showing the naked URL as a link, a text can be assigned for a link which is displayed to users instead of the URL. This text is called Anchor Text. When the users click on the anchor text, they are taken to the URL defined in the link.

Using keywords relevant to the website in the anchor text can be more valuable in point of view of SEO. But, optimization of the Anchor text has to be limited, as over optimization of anchor text will be punishable by Google.

The following tools can be used for various activities of SEO, Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner, MOZ, SEO Analyzer, SEMrush, Open Site Explorer.

The following are the common mistakes that many do while SEO, 

• Contents that are not written properly and not optimized for keywords
• Repeating the same anchor texts
• Not optimizing the Meta tags
• Focusing on more quantity of backlinks than quality backlinks

A website which loads faster is certainly an important parameter for optimization. The following can be done to increase the speed of website loading;

• Optimizing the image size but yet maintaining the quality of the image
• Avoiding videos that are self-hosted
• Enabling the browser caching to avoid reload of static contents
• Optimizing the CSS delivery which results in reduced HTTP requests

These are commonly asked SEO Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

It is a standard file and format which can be used by websites to provide instructions to the web crawlers and other software robots.

Keyword difficulty refers to the difficulty level or challenges in attaining the rank for specific keywords. This can be because of the popularity of the keyword or keywords which address broader range.

A website URL can be submitted to Google Search Engine in order to make the Google search engine aware of the presence of the website and its pages. After submission, Google crawls and indexes the site. This is an important step, as without submission, SEO cannot be initiated for a website.

A web page which acts as an entry point to a website is called the Landing Page. For example, if a specific page that is dedicated for a product is referred in backlink will make that page as a Landing page for the users who click the backlinks

Yes, there are many tools which will help to find the number of backlinks a website has. Some of them are Backlink watch, Open Site Explorer and Alexa

While we browse, we bookmark certain websites in our browser. But these bookmarks are accessible only by us and are saved in our own computer. Social bookmarking are websites which allow us to bookmark websites, documents, images etcetera so that we can access it later anytime. We can also share those bookmarks with others.

Links to a website can be submitted to popular social bookmarking sites such as Reddit, Pinterest which can increase our sites ranking.

Social signals are Likes, dislikes, shares, up vote, down vote, pins, views etcetera. These signals are shared in social media for a website or a web page content by its users. A huge amount of social signals for a web page or web site is considered as increased popularity by Google.

It is a kind of content marketing used for link building. A webmaster can offer to write content for another website in which he can create a backlink for his own web site or blog. This can be done for free or can be charged by a site.

Posting comments on a blog or web page with a backlink to your site is called Blog Commenting. This can be done either manually or automatically. Tools can be used to put a huge number of blog comments, but generally not recommended. Posting a comment which really adds some value to the post can serve as a most useful link building process which can result in improved ranking. SEO Training in Coimbatore at FITA provides the best-in class training of the SEO concepts such as link building, blog commenting, and much more under the guidance of real-time SEO experts. 

Google uses your data such as Name, Address and Phone Number – NAP, to determine whether your website can be listed for certain geo-tagged searches. Adding NAP can help in local SEO.  These are commonly asked SEO Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

SEO can be approached in three ways, they are;

• White Hat method
• Gray Hat method
• Black Hat method

This is a method which uses disapproved practices in order to increase the page rankings in the SERP. Some of the few techniques that are used for the Black hat methods are;

• Performing Content Automation
• Stuffing keywords extensively
• Performing Article Spinning
• Creating pages and domains with Duplicate Contents
• Performing Negative SEO – that is Reporting the Competitors
• Manipulating links – Purchasing Links and spamming blogs etcetera

If the intention is to just increase the rankings without adding any value to the user, then it qualifies as a Black Hat technique. Black hat must NEVER be performed as Google has various Algorithms to detect and identify such inflated ranked sites. Google can penalize such sites to the extent of even banning those sites.

This is a method in which all the guidelines provided by Google or any other search engines are followed promptly. Pages are optimized with an intention to make it more useful, relevant and valuable to the users rather than just aiming for ranking. Keywords are used sensibly, backlinks are created manually using blog commenting and with good intentions for feedback or adding any valuable information. These kinds of techniques will sure prove to yield better page rankings but it will take time to show results. Though, once achieved, the rankings will be more or less stable as the content of the website itself will be valuable and useful to users. This is typically what Google is using to rank a website.

This method has no proper definition, though it could be understood that Gray Hat falls in between the White Hat and Black Hat practices. Neither too black nor too white and slightly the guidelines are violated but to the extent of not getting noticed by the search engines. Anyhow, it is best to follow White Hat practices for a long term benefits.

Google uses machine learning algorithms to detect and identify sites which is of good quality and contain the most relevant information that can be best served to the users. These algorithms are often updated to learn and detect sites which use unfair practices to gain ranking. These are called algorithm Updates. There are many types of Updates that Google uses and often remove sites which follow black hat practices. Examples of updates are Panda Update, Penguin Update, Hummingbird update etcetera.

These updates primarily check whether best design practices and white hat principles are followed in a site for optimization. It also checks further for relevant content, content quality, think or thick content, quality of the links both inbound and outbound, and whether the contents are duplicated.

The Panda update was released by Google in the year 2011, which is designed to identify and promote websites which has valuable and relevant contents. This update also identifies and removes or penalizes the websites which uses unethical practices to gain rank.

The Penguin update was released in 2012. The primary object of this update is to screen sites for link spamming and following black hat techniques like link buying to increase the rankings.

From the year 2013, Google emphasized on understanding the context of the queries in addition to keywords to provide better search results. For example, “How to use digital thermometer” and “Omron Digital thermometer” are two queries with keywords “digital thermometer”, but their intent are completely different. The first query has to be provided with results which gives a solution to a problem while the second one has to be listed with stores to buy the item. This update helped in identifying more relevant sites.These are commonly asked SEO Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

Basically websites can be hosted on a secured encrypted server with HTTPS and SSL or it can be hosted on a plain HTTP server. The HTTPS is very secured whereas the HTTP only servers are prone to security issues. Google wanted to promote secured sites on their search results thereby providing more security to the users. This update helped move sites to HTTPS based hosting in order to gain better ranking.

Google penalizes sites which follows unethical or black hat practices to gain site ranks. Websites are penalized by getting automatically removed or reduced ranking when Google runs its various Updates frequently. Apart from this, sometimes Google exclusively and manually penalizes sites for intentional spamming, irrelevant and thin contents, for practices of Cloaking, keyword stuffing and unnatural links.

A site map is a file which is generated in a XML format that contains details about all the pages of a website. The details include the number of pages, how frequently they are updated and the last modification date and time of a web page. This helps Google or other search engines to index the sites properly. XML is Extensible Markup Language.

A Score that is developed and given by MOZ, for the websites which ranks well on the Google Search Engine Results Page which is named as Domain Authority Score or simply Domain Authority. This is also mentioned as DA. Higher the DA, more valuable is the website

Visitors who visit a page of a website or the website itself and move away quickly without spending much time is called the Bounce Rate. Bounce Rate is often used to measure the quality of a website, as quality and relevant content means more time spent by the visitors.

Google My Business is a tool which helps small businesses to list their local business on the Google Search and Maps results page. Google verifies the presence of the physical business location and displays the listing for relevant searches. As these listings are verified by Google and are listed in an exclusive box for search results, this gains more attention from the search users. 

SEO Audit is a process of thoroughly analyzing a website for its optimizations and various parameters in terms of quality. This includes audit for On-page and Off-page optimizations, technical SEO optimizations, Link profiles, Accessibility and Indexability of a website, meta data, site structure, etcetera. The purpose of audit is to identify areas of weakness and fix them for better performance.

This is an open source code standard which can be used to optimize a website or a webpage to load faster on a user device. If a website or a web page loads slowly, then most likely users tend to move away. This may result in potential loss of customers.

This is a tool provided by Google which is used to monitor keywords popularity. The popularity of keywords can be monitored region wise and period wise. Google provides this data based on its real time analysis of billions of searches happening through its services.

Google Analytics is a tool provided by Google to monitor important activities that happen on your website. Google Analytics can provide very valuable statistical insights that can be used to optimize the websites for better ranking. It can also help to understand user trends and behavior with respect to your website. Information includes the website traffic, current number of users in your website, their classifications based on their geographical location, devices they use, their interest and through which channel they reached your website. This tool can also be used to find out which pages are the most popular in your website, how fast your web pages are loading, the most popular or top selling products etcetera.

This file can be used to prevent the search engines from crawling or indexing specific pages of your website. This is a text format file. The web pages that are listed in this file will be ignored by the Search Engines. SEO Classes in Chennai at FITA provides a professional training of the SEO concepts and its application along with certification upon completion. 

This indexing and the ranking data can be accessed from the Google Search Console. Anyhow a simple method is to use the “site:<url>” format in Google Search. For example, “site:www.fita.in” will display all the pages that are indexed as the search results. This format can be used to check any website.

Time-on-page is statistical information about how much time a visitor spends on a web page. If the webpage has valuable, relevant and quality content, the visitor will spend more time on a page. Hence, this is considered as one of the important signals for ranking by Google. 

The time taken by users to return back to the search page after clicking on a result link is called the Dwell time. Users may come back to the search results page after exploring a link, or they might not come back at all. This behavior is used by Google to measure the quality of its search results.

Google started displaying simple questions and answers in a separate box on the Search Engine Results Page for certain queries like “How”, “What” etcetera. Users has the advantage of clicking on these questions to learn what they are looking for right in the search results page itself without visiting the website. Mostly the answers are simple and brief.

This is an analysis that is performed to see the competitors who are ranking higher than your website for a given keyword or phrase. The aspects that are to be analyzed are the Content of the web pages, number of pages, backlinks and to the domains which they refer to. This analysis can be used to pick key points that can be used to optimize your site for a better ranking.

The number of visits your site gets from various other sources other than the Google Search results. This is reported by Google as Referral Traffic.

To decrease the load time, or to load a website faster, the following suggestions can be implemented. Ensure to optimize the image size as more size of an image takes longer time to download. Always try to use a Content Delivery Network or the CDN for your libraries. It is recommended that you always minify your code for production versions. This can help improve the load time of a website.

Google is more focusing on displaying results based on User Intent than the keywords. User Intent can be described as the Goal for which a user is performing the search. Displaying results targeting their intent can be more useful that for mere keywords.

Every user who uses Google Search would have experienced Google Autocomplete or the Google Suggestions option. When you start typing a keyword, immediately Google displays a list of suggestions related to the keyword or the word you have typed. This feature is called the Google Autocomplete or the Google Suggestions. This, besides saving time for the user, also provides an idea about popular search terms related to the words provided by the user.

This is a method with which users are redirected to another webpage or website by creating a redirection for a specific webpage or URL. These are commonly asked SEO Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher and Experienced candidates

This is a redirect method used by SEO to redirect users to a new URL instead of displaying the old URL. For example, you want your users to visit a newly designed web page for an existing webpage, then you can redirect users who reach your page by using the familiar URL to the newly designed webpage.

In terms of SEO, improving the content of a web page, creating an intuitive design and layout for the landing page and trying different functionalities can help improve conversions.

URL Optimization is a technique by which the URL for a web page is optimized with keywords. This is considered as a very important point in SEO. For example web page URLs like www.<domainname>.com/best-corei3-laptop-models, is an Optimized URL for a web page.

The important areas of a website to ensure the presence of keywords are the Title, Meta Description, the Body Text, Anchor Texts.

Google Sandbox is a theory which is popular among SEO professionals. This theory states that usually the new websites that are launched will undergo a kind of boxed period, and will not be ranked by Google for important keywords. Even though it’s never acknowledged officially, this has been mentioned by Google while discussing other topics. 

Keyword Prominence is about where your keywords are placed on your web page. It is generally recommended that the keywords must be placed in the first and last paragraph of a webpage or a blog.

This is a measure of how close the keywords are repeated on a web page.

This is a technique used to create visibility for your website or web page. Highly used as an Off-page optimization technique, this involves creating a profile on forums that are relevant and engaging with the users by creating a thread. If used properly, this can be a great way to create popularity for a website.

These are domain names which typically match a popular keyword. For example, LearnToBakeCakes .com

Sometimes there arises a necessity to create the same webpage in a different format such as one for Desktop and one for Mobiles or with a little variation of the same page. Usually, Google detects those as duplicates which can impact ranking. To avoid this situation, a URL can be designated as Canonical. Google will make use of attribute indication to understand that this is the Original Page and others are variations and not duplicates of the original page.These are commonly asked SEO Interview Questions for freshers

The purpose of this Update by Google is to increase the quality of local searches by identifying relevant sites and rank decreasing the irrelevant sites from getting displayed in the local search results.

Cloaking is a very bad Black Hat method followed to increase the rank of irrelevant web pages by positioning them as the relevant web page for a user query. 

Conversion is a term used to measure the actual usefulness gained from a visitor of your site. For example, a visitor arrives at your site from a Search Engine Page Results. If the visitor performs or completes an action such as Signing up for a Newsletter or buying a product or creating a trail account, this action is considered as conversion. Conversions will benefit businesses.

This means, Google prioritizes the mobile optimized versions of your webpage for indexing. It is very important to optimize all your pages for mobile compatibility as almost 60% of the searches happen through mobiles now. No surprise that Google follows Mobile First Indexing.

Optimizing is no longer just about keywords. RankBrain is an Artificial Intelligence system that is a part of the Hummingbird Algorithm Update. This AI system analyzes web pages to decide its relevance based on the content that matches with the Intents of the users search query rather than merely based on keywords. As the RankBrain is an AI system, it continuously improves itself to learn new patterns to identify relevant web pages to match user queries. As RankBrain is not based on keywords, there is no way to optimize a web page to overcome RankBrain as it is purely based on the content quality and not keywords.

This is an advanced Algorithm update by Google which uses Natural Language Processing to understand the context of a user search query rather than to search for the keywords. This is similar to the algorithms that are used in Virtual Assistants such as Google Assistant, Alexa, Cortana etcetera. This enhances Google to understand the intents of the user and to match them with exceptionally quality search results.

Schema Markup is a valuable piece of information that is marked for Search Engines to understand the content of a website with a better interpretation. The given markup of structured data is used by Search Engines like Google to display it on the Search Engine Results Page or SERP. For example, a bus provider can create a markup of scheduled bus timings of the day. Google will display this information whenever the bus provider ads appear in the SERP. Just imagine how much it can help a user. There are no direct advantages that have been established in terms of ranking of a website based on Schema Markup. But it certainly helps users to click on your ads. This, of course, can increase the Click rates and indirectly help in better ranking.

Analyze and understand the reasons properly and fix those issues immediately. Then the site can be applied for re-inclusion

Event Tracking is a very useful feature which can be used to track key events or interactions that are performed by users. If a user watches a video or downloads a file from your website, these actions are Events. This can be helpful to understand user requirements and optimize further to add more value to the users. This can be set for any web page independently.

The best redirection method is using the 301 redirect. This helps to absolutely retain the SEO value which is accumulated for the given URL.

SEO Training in Bangalore at FITA aids you in mastering the concepts of SEO such as Keyword Research, Rank Tracking, On-Page Optimization, Off-page optimization, and much more under the guidance of Real-time professionals with certification.  These are commonly asked SEO Interview Questions candidates