SEO?

SEO means search engine optimization and it is the process of improving rank

of our web pages higher in search engines for given search terms or keywords.

A.Onpage

B – Off page optimization or link building or back links creation

2- What was the recent update which Google had and what changes would you

suggest for it?

Google recently had the Hummingbird update which was a change in the core

search algorithm. Google moved from keyword based searching to concept based

searching. It included semantic level analysis in order to find out real

answers and searcher's intent behind the user query. I would add comprehensive

and fresh content to my site after the Hummingbird update.

Prior to the Hummingbird update, Google 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.

3- 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.

4- What do you know about Google 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.

5- 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.

6- 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.

7- 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.

8- 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.

9- 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.

10- 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.

11- 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.

12- Does Google uses keyword tags?

No, Google does not make use of keyword tags.

13- 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.

14- What was your exact job profile in your previous company?

Provide a suitable explanation about your job profile which would include your

job responsibilities and the amount of work you have handled so far.

15- 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.

16- What tools do you use for doing seo?

I use Google webmaster tools, Google Analytics, Open site explorer, Alexa,

Ahrefs,Website grader etc.

See:- List of free seo tools

17- What are your good qualities?

You will have to answer here about your good qualities like- I am hardworking,

sincere, punctual, love to accept challenges etc.

18- 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.

19- 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.

20- 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.

21- Do you use separate Seo strategies for Google,Yahoo and Bing?

Yes I use separate strategies for Google,Yahoo and other search engines.More

backlinks 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.

22- How will you increase the Pagerank of a page?

By building more backlinks from authority sites and high page rank webpages.

23- 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.

24- Which is more important- Building backlinks to a website or building great

content?

Both are important. Building great content is necessary as it is your first

step towards ranking ;and building backlinks helps to build authority to your

website and is an important metric for ranking well. Hence both should go

parallel and both are equally important.

25- Who is Matt Cutts?

Matt Cutts is the head of Google's web spam team.

26- If a website has a search engine saturation of 40% , what does that mean?

It means 40% of web pages from that particular website are indexed by the

search engine.

27- What do you mean by anchor text?

Clickable text written on an hyperlink is known as anchor text. It is of great

value to the search engines and is used for evaluating the relevance of web

pages with respect to search queries.

28- 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.

29- 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.

30- Which tools do you use for choosing keywords?

I use Google Keyword tool, Wordtracker tool, Wordstream, Seo book keyword tool

etc.

*Remember certain tools are paid but you may use the trial version for some

days.

31- What blogs and sites do you regularly visit to update yourself?

I follow Matt Cutts blog. Seomoz blog, Seochat forums,

Searchengineland.com,Seo book, Seosandwitch, Seroundtable, Seobythesea,

seochat etc.

32- What are doorway pages?

These are pages that are specially created to rank high on search engines

using deceptive techniques.Doorway pages do not provide useful content but

instead redirect users to the main page.

33- What are the Social Media channels you have used for marketing?

I have used blogs like blogger,wordpress,typepad, tumblr etc, social

bookmarking sites like Reddit, Stumbleupon, Delicious etc., social networking

sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc., Video Sharing sites like

Youtube,Vimeo etc.

34- 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.

35- 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.

36- Which is the popular search engine in Russia?

Yandex is popular in Russia.

37- 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.

38- Who is Rand Fishkin?

Rand Fishkin is the CEO and Co founder of Seomoz, 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.

39- How will you restrict the search engine crawlers from indexing a folder

named "Secret" that is present in the root?

The following code when added on the robots.txt text file would restrict the

crawlers from accessing the folder

User-agent:*

Disallow: /Secret/

40 - What do you understand by Google Dance?

Google Dance happens when major updates happen on the database maintained by

Google. Constant shuffling leads to unstable rankings of the Web Pages.This

continues for some days and is known as Google dance. It was witnessed in the

past before the real time searching happened. Now, Google updates its index

almost everyday and changes are witnessed narrowly.

41- Which are the top 3 social media websites that you will suggest to your

client for SMO work?

I would suggest Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

42- 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.

Read more here:- Using Google Plus for Seo

43- What is a Pizza Box in terms of Google?

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

44- How important is to have a keyword in a domain name?

After the recent EMD update, the weightage on the presence of keyword on a

domain has reduced. It is therefore important to go for a domain name that can

focus on building a brand rather than using only keywords which could make a

domain look spammy. Although having keywords in the domain helps but it would

work only if the combination comes out as brandable. Some popular examples of

website which succeded without having keywords in it are flipkart.com,

myntra.com, ebay.com, digg.com, reddit.com and ofcoz google.com etc. But,

there are some themes where the presence of keywords becomes necessary like

the presence of the keyword "recipes" in allrecipes.com or the presence of the

word "food" in the domain foodnetwork.com . Hence, its important to take

decisions based on the theme you need to target.

45- What do you understand by "Engagement Metrics" with relation to social

media?

Engagement metrics comprises of information which is used to measure the

importance of user (customer) engagement with respect to a particular social

data.Some example includes likes, retweets, plus ones, clicks, favorites,

repins, comments etc.

46- What are your favorite ways of attracting natural backlinks to your site?

Having user friendly content on the site is the best way to attract natural

backlinks but one of my favorite ways of attracting natural backlinks is by

offering free widgets and free infographics to my audience.

47- Have you heard about ASO?

ASO stands for App Store Optimization which is a process of improving the

visibility of mobile apps on app stores like iTunes and Google Play.

48- How can you search with the exact keywords you type on Google without using

quotes?

We can use the Verbatim tool in order to search with the exact keywords

entered on Google.

49- What do you understand by Google Authorship and how can you use it for Seo

benefits?

Google Authorship allows you to link your Google Plus Profile to the content

you create. This is a way to enhance the overall user experience and stop

spamming. Results containing content from original and reputed authors are

valued highly by Google and chances of spamming are also reduced. Hence,

implementing Google Authorship is really useful for Seo as it helps a webpage

to rank higher based on the author rank.

Read more:- How to Make Full Use of Google Authorship Profile

50- How can you make a website mobile friendly?

I will create a mobile friendly version of the website for Googlebot-Mobile,

use meta.txt for specifying special instructions to mobile search engine

crawlers, use mobile.xml sitemap and will have mobile optimized content on the

site.

Read more:- Mobile Seo

51- 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.

Read more:- Difference between clicks and visits

52- How can you track Facebook likes using Google Analytics?

We can do this with the help of social interaction web tracking. I will add a

custom script using FB.Event.subscribe function to start tracking clicks. (

Learn how to track Facebook likes )

53- 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.

54- What is the difference between HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps?

HTML sitemaps are created for the user and contains a basic structure for

displaying all the pages of the website in a hierarchy. XML sitemaps are

created for the search engines and helps a search engine bot to easily cache,

index and discover new pages.

55- How many keywords do you think are enough to target on a web page?

There are virtually no limits on the number of keywords that we can target on

a web page. Best approach is to focus on our main keyword and all the

secondary keywords would find way for itself in the search engines. The old

method of targeting 3 keywords per web page does not works any more. You can

have 10-15 keywords or even more to target on a single web page.

56- What is the difference between soft 404 and 404 errors? How will you find

and remove these errors?

A 404 error is returned when the browser requests a resource from the web

server and the server is unable to find that resource so it returns 404 file

not found error. On the other hand, soft 404 error is returned when the

browser requests a resource from the web server and the server returns 200 OK

response for a file that does not exist on the server. Hence, in both the

cases, file is not present on the server but in case of soft 404 the server

returns 200 OK response code by mistake. We can find out these errors with the

help of Google Webmasters Tool and we can either remove them by adding proper

redirects and by creating a custom 404 page for helping the user in proper

navigation while browsing the site.

57- Is there a limit to robots.txt file?

Yes, googlebot reads the first 500 KB present in the robots.txt file.

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

https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=SEO+question+answer+in+interview&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-

8&client=firefox-b-ab&gfe_rd=cr&ei=3DW0V8W5Kq7M8ge6woCIAg

Question: What is a Search Engine?

Answer: Search Engines are very critical key element useful to find out

specific and relevant information through the huge extent of World Wide Web.

Some major commonly used search engine:

Google

Yahoo

Bing

Question: Tell me something about Google.

Answer: Google is the world’s largest and renowned search engine

incorporating about 67.6% 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.

Question: Define SEO?

Answer: SEO is the abbreviated form of ‚Search Engine Optimization‛. It is

the ;set of process on account of which a website or web page is being

constructed or optimized that helps them to enhance their appearance or

visibility on top in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Question: Explain distinct types of SEO practice?

Answer: Primarily two types of SEO are being sported 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 includes 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.

Question: What are the different techniques used in Off Page SEO?

Answer: There are lots of techniques used in Off-page 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.

Question: Define blog, article & press release?

Answer: 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 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.

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.

Question: What are Meta Tags?

Answer: 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>

Question: Difference between keyword & keyword phrase?

Answer: 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 words

combination. 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.

Question: What do you know about Black Hat SEO?

Answer: 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 methods 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‛.

Question: Can you tell me some Black Hat SEO techniques?

Answer: Some Black Hat SEO techniques are:

Keyword Stuffing

Cloaking

Doorway Pages or Gateway Pages

Link Farming

Hidden Text, etc.

Question: What is spider?

Answer: Spider also called as bot, crawler or robot is a set of computer

program that browses the World Wide Web in methodical and orderly fashion as

well automatically scan the webpages and website for updated content and

download a copy to its data center to index.

Question: Name the bots (spider) of major search engine?

Answer: The name of bots/spider of Google search engine is

GoogleBot, Yahoo Slurp for Yahoo search and BingBot for Bing search engine.

Question: Can you differentiate ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’?

Answer: Nofollow link is exactly vice-versa of dofollow

link. These are non-crawling link which is not passed by search engine bots

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 engine 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.

Question: Define Page Rank.

Answer: 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

the world wide web. The value accepts only round figure that means decimal are

not allowed. Page rank is calculated by their inbound links.

Question: Establish a difference between PR & SERP.

Answer: PR is Page Rank which is defined by quality inbound links from other

website or webpages 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

webpage which is returned by a search engine after a search query or

attribute.

Question: What is Cache?

Answer: 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 the desired URL to view its cached

version.

Question: Define ALT tag?

Answer: 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 a slow connection and an error

occurred in the source attribute.

For example, the HTML for this image will appear something like this:

<img alt=‛you can define at tag just below the input box of image title while uploading or editing an image.‛ src=‛<http://www.webgranth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Alt tag.jpg‛>

Question: What do you know about Adsense?

Answer: 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 the website and

audience. These advertisements are included, maintained and sorted by Google

itself and earn money either by per-click or per-impression basis.

Question: Can you define Adword?

Answer: 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

impressions on flat rate to the 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 the geographical area to show your ads.

Question: What is PPC?

Answer: PPC is the abbreviated form of Pay Per Click and is an 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 impressions) through a

bidding and flat rate respectively. In CPC the advertiser would be only

charged when the user click over to their advert.

Question: What are the aspects in SEO?

Answer: The main aspect of SEO is divided into two classes:

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 is Keyword Research, unique and quality content, link

building through Blog Comments, Blog Posting, Article submission, Press

Release, Classified posting, Forum posting.

Question: What do you know about RSS?

Answer: 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 makes readers more ease to get updates timely by allowing

them to subscribe from their favorite sites.

Question: How would you define Alexa?

Answer: Alexa is a California based subsidiary company of Amazon.com which is

widely known for its website and toolbar. This Alexa toolbar congregates

browsing behavior data and send it to website, where the data is analyzed and

stored and create reports for company’s web traffic. Also, Alexa provides

data concerned with traffic, global ranking and other additional information

for a website.

Question: How can you achieve Google Page Rank?

Answer: Generally, Google Page Rank is based on inbound

links, therefore, the more backlinks you congregate higher your page rank will

be. Also, it is influenced by rank of a page which is linked to you. One other

thing to consider is that the older your website will be, it will be more

favorable and trusted by Google. Google rewards those websites who incorporate

lots of pages, tons of incoming link and also healthy quantity of internal

links to other pages within the site. In respect of SEO projects, it is

relatively not so significant but delivers a picture about work to perform

towards earning inbound links.

Question: Why the Title Tag in Website is valuable?

Answer: 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 on that page. It is valuable because this is a thing which appears in the

search engine result section and tells the user & search engine, what is on

this page.

Question: What is Site Map and distinguish between HTML sitemap and XML

sitemap?

Answer: A sitemap incorporates list of webpages which

are 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

as 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 the website.

such as: http://www.webgranth.com/sitemap.xml

Which is better: an HTML site map or XML Sitemap? BY Matt Cutt

Question: What’s the significance of Robots.txt file in a website?

Answer: Robots. text file is considered as a useful convention 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.

Question: How Keywords are implemented for optimization?

Answer: 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 other employment of keywords must be

avoided. In order to get best result and effect, our pages shouldn’t contain

a keyword density more than 3-4%. Including keywords in title and description

is highly recommended.

Question: What is cloaking?

Answer: 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 the user’s

browser. These techniques do not come under the guidelines of search engines.

Question: Do you know about Blog Flipping?

Answer: Blog Flipping is the practice for sale a blog when

it becomes famous and popular as well as driving healthy amount of traffic.

Question: What you opined about HTML either it is Case Sensitive or Case

Insensitive?

Answer: HTML is case Insensitive. It doesn’t matter and

deliver identical result either you write in Upper Case or Lower Case.

Question: Under what circumstances you would intend to eliminate pages from

search engines through robots.txt vs. Meta robots tag?

Answer: 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 the 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.

Question: What things are significant in organically ranking a website?

Answer: Basically there are various things that are 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 includes TAGS, clear navigation, ensuring usability,

validation of HTML errors and miscellaneous.

Backlinks: You can create a link to anywhere but prior to this it is obvious

to ensure for relevant site and healthy link.

Question: What steps would you follow to optimize a website?

Answer: 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…..

Question: SEO Checklist for New Websites

Question: What is considered as more significant – Creating great content or

building backlinks?

Answer: 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.

Question: What will be your step when the company website you are working with

wish to migrate its all content to a new domain?

Answer: First of all I would update the previous website with a permanent

redirect to new page for each and every page. Later eradicate previous content

from search engines in the context of avoiding duplicate content issues.

Question: How can I merge two sites? By MAtt Cutt

Question: What’s your opinion about link buying?

Answer: Generally I avoid this practice. Though other means of paid marketing

are also available. The process of link buying is not liked by search engines.

It doesn’t come under the guidelines of search engine.

Question: Can you establish a difference between SEM and SEO?

Answer: SEO is a set of processes to get

our website or pages appear in the search engine result page. On the other

hand SEM is search engine marketing being used in practice to purchase

advertising space in the search engine page result.

Question: What strategies would you implement for backlinks?

Answer: I would request for backlinks to a competitor’s relevant website as

well as a provide reciprocal link if required. In addition, I would attempt to

submit a press release, article submission, blog submission and other aspects

of off-page SEO to most relevant and quality sites.

Question: What do you think about social media in SEO strategy?

Answer: Social networking websites are considered as social media which is

very effective and robust for viral marketing. Viral marketing has proven as a

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.

Question: In order to prevent penalty, what things you shouldn’t perform to

increase ranking?

Answer: 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.

Question: What mistakes you should avoid while optimizing the website?

Answer: The main mistakes that should be avoided are filling keywords in

webpage, employing identical anchor text for link building, keyword stuffing,

getting low quality backlinks etc.

Question: Define and Differentiate Webmaster Tool & Analytics Tool?

Answer: Webmaster Tool is a free service catered by Google which provide us a

complete report for indexing data, crawling errors, backlink information,

search queries, website malware errors, CTR and submitting an XML sitemap.

Basically, it acts as a mediator between website and server provide a complete

overview of data, issues and other queries.

Webmaster Tool Video By MATT CUTT

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 a complete overview of visitor

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.

Beginners Guide to Google Analytics

Question: How can you enhance the crawling frequency by search engines for your

website?

Answer: Including new, original, unique and quality content on our website

more frequently enables search engines to crawl more frequently.

Question: What do you know about Keyword stemming?

Answer: 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 appears on

the screen will contain the word ‚play‛ in it.

Question: What do you know about LSI?

Answer: 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.

Question: Can you tell me about Frames in HTML?

Answer: 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 a negative impact over

SEO. Therefore, we should avoid the practice of using Frames and implement a

basic HTML instead.

Question: How can you know about your SEO campaign whether it is working or

not?

Answer: 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 results will say whether the methods of optimization have gained results or

lost. I would analyze the report regularly as search engine makes updating and

index. I would attempt to another aspect of website statistics which says

about origin of traffic.

Question: What is the meaning of competitive analysis?

Answer: Competitive analysis, as its name suggested it is the 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 ideas.

Question: After implementing distinct SEO methods for a site, if you haven’t

got any improvements. What would be your next step?

Answer: 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 have been indexed and

appears in the first 10 pages of search engine result pages 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 the index, might be it comprises some big issues and total re-

submission and re-work might be required.

Question: Why do we need to specify alt and title attribute in image tag?

Answer: Alt attribute should be specified in the image tag because of three

primary reasons

Search engine bots do not read the image without text.

Alt attribute describes what the image signifies.

It adversely affects the user experience for those users who have disabled the

image in their browsers.

Title attribute must be specified in the image tag because

This attribute is for the human readers and not for the search engine crawler.

As title text appears when the users hover over the images, it gives an idea

about the image.

It can can also double up as a call to action label.

Question: How have the new web technologies like XHTML, CSS, Flash, and XML

changed the way search engines function?

Answer: These web technologies, especially, CSS has transformed the layouts

from table-based to CSS-based. As the ratio of content to markup improves

considerably, the loading time of the webpage reduces by 10% to 20%.

Question: What do 301 and 302 mean in SEO?

Answer: A 301 is referred to as a permanent redirect and is used when the URL

of the website changes. The entire link juice is passed onto the redirected

page and so it is the most preferred redirection.

A 302 redirection is a temporary redirection and does not pass any link juice

to the redirected page. This redirection is never recommended from the

perspective of SEO.

Question: What is meant by Flux in SEO?

Answer: Flux is the shuffling of the position of the website in the search

engine result when new search engine algorithm updates are rolled out.

Question: Highlight tools you mostly used for website audit?

Answer: For website audit most of thing like back-links, index pages,

duplicate content etc we should check manually. Apart from this here is a blog

that would be helpful for website audit: http://goo.gl/6fvAGp

Question: What is Disavow link?

Answer: Sometimes your website’s ranking is marred by the low-quality links

that are not under your control. To prevent the damage caused by these links,

you can ask Google to not consider these links while accessing your website

for ranking. Apart from this, you should also put all-out efforts to remove

these unnatural links that point to your website.

Question: What is the process to disavow bad links?

Answer: Disavowing a link is a 2-step process. In the first step, you need to

download the list of links that point to your website and in the 2nd step, you

have to upload a file that contains the links that you wish to disavow. All

the old disavowed files will be lost as soon as you upload the new ones.

Question: How to neutralize the toxic links that point to your website?

Answer: It is easy to know about the links to your website using the Backlink

Quality Checker. You need to access the ‘ Toxic link’ report, and here you

will find all the links that are harmful to your website. All such links that

match the links in the Toxic link report need to be removed immediately.

Google disavow tools can help you with this, and all you have to do is to

upload such links to the Google Disavow tool and have them removed.

Google Update: SEO interview Questions & Answers

Question: What is Phantom Update?

Answer: Phantom Update by Google is the quality filter that has been

integrated with the ranking algorithm of Google. It targets the webpages with

low quality and low rankings and does not affect the entire domain. However,

the pages that are impacted also indirectly create adverse effects on the

domain as a whole.

Question: What is Panda Update?

Answer: Panda update was rolled out by Google in the year 2011 with an aim to

prevent websites with poor quality of content from securing top ranks in the

search engine result pages. This search filter is updated at a regular basis.

After each update, the websites are spared if they have made the appropriate

changes and fresh ones with poor content are caught.

What is meant by EMD (Exact Match Domain) update?

Answer: Exact match domain is an algorithm update that was launched by Google

in the year 2012. The purpose of this update is to prevent some websites from

getting good rank just because their domain names contain words that exactly

match the searched term. Every EMD update aims at filtering such websites and

give good ranking to the websites that have improved their content.

Question: What is Pigeon update?

Answer: Pigeon update is a search engine algorithm update by Google, rolled

out on July 24, 2014 to improve the ranking of the local listings. It is aimed

to give preference to the local searches making it useful for the local

businesses or businesses targeting customers based on locations. This update

ensures that the search results are based on the location of the user and the

listing in the local directory.

Question: What is Penguin update?

Answer: The Penguin update from Google was first announced in 2012 and is

aimed towards reducing the ranks of those websites who use spam link building

techniques and such practice is called Link spamming, and it comes under the

violation of the guidelines of Google’s Webmaster.

Question: What is Hummingbird update?

Answer: This update is called Hummingbird update because it is meant to be

fast and precise. It is a new search algorithm that Google is using since

September 2013. The purpose of this update is to comprehend the meaning of the

search query in entirety and push those web-pages ahead that cater to the full

meaning and returns best result.

Question: Explain Mobilegeddon update

Answer: Mobilegeddon is the latest search engine algorithm update that aims

towards giving preference to mobile-friendly websites and discards those which

are not compatible with the mobile phones and other devices like tablets and

iPads. This update majorly impacts mobile search result.

Question: What does Microblogging refers to in SEO?

Answer: Microblogging is a broadcasting web service that allows easy sharing

of data and other information through different social media channels like

Twitter, Jaiku, Soup and Chryp. Businesses, marketers and subscribers make use

of these micro blogging sites to share short and aggregated messages with

their target audience in the form of news updates, notifications, etc.

Question: What does urllist.txt means in SEO?

Answer: Urllist.txt in Yahoo is same as sitemap.xml is in Google. It is a

simple text file that contains URLs in a list placed line by line. Webmasters

working on Yahoo can easily get their site crawled by search engines with the

help of these sitemaps i.e urllist.txt.

Find Site on Google

Some SEO Myths By MAtt Cutt

How to structure a site?

However, I opined here that this post will be highly beneficial for who are

stepping towards marshaling their career as an SEO professional especially for

those who are still fresh. 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.

o 1. What is SEO?

It is the method of changing the rank of a web page or a website in the search

results of a search engine.

o 2. What are the Types of SEO?

There are mainly two types of SEO are present: On Page Optimization and Off

Page Optimization.

o 3. What are the SEO Techniques available?

Two SEO Techniques are: White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO which is also called

as Negative SEO.

o 4. What is On Page Optimization?

On-page optimization gives outcome to a web page or website ranking on Search

Engine Results Page. This will regulate your webpage by page coding or by you.

o 5. What is Off Page Optimization?

Off Page Optimization is a type of SEO which is not regulated by your page

coding. Link building, Image Sharing, Blog posting, Document Sharing, Info

graphics submission, Video Sharing, Increasing Page Authority or Page Rank,

Getting high quality links from relevant sites and Article submission are the

few examples of Off-page optimization.

o 6. What do you mean by Page Rank or PR?

For every web page, Google will give a rank, which is called as Page rank.

Normally page rank ranges from 0 – 10. Google Web Search Engine algorithm is

responsible for calculating the page rank of every web page.

o 7. What is a Back link?

Back links are the incoming links to your webpage or website and getting these

back links from good PR and relevant site is always better for your site.

o 8. What is an out bound Link?

An outgoing link or outbound-link is a link from your own webpage or website

to another webpage or website.

o 9. What is a keyword?

o Keyword is a particular term used for searching through Search

Engines like Google in order to get outcomes related to your

searched question.

o 10. What is Anchor Text?

Anchor text is also known as link text or link label or link title, which is a

clickable hyperlink. This is used to increase your webpage ranking by

receiving the incoming links after clicking the contained keyword.

o 11. What are organic results?

Organic results are the page views which come directly via SERP and not from

any Off Page Optimization.

o 12. What is Googlebot?

Googlebot is a kind of software used by the Google as a search bot to index a

webpage. This software collects the information from every webpage by doing

the crawling, caching and then indexing of a webpage.

o 13. What is a Meta Tag?

You can observe many Meta tags being used in HTML coding, but the important

ones are the four Meta tags. They are: Meta Title, Meta Keywords, Meta

Description and Robot tags.

o 14. What tools do you use for doing SEO?

Most common tools used in SEO are: Google Analytics, Google webmaster tools,

Alexa, Open site explorer and Website grader. Nowadays you can also find some

paid SEO tools like spydermate, seo Moz and bulkdachecker in market.

o 15. 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.

o 16. 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.

o 17. 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.

o 18. How will you treat Web standards while optimizing a website?

o 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.

o 19. What is 301 redirect?

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

page URL.

o 20. What is Cloaking?

Clocking is the procedure of using some deceptive techniques which allows the

user with a different version of the website than that presented to the search

engines.

o 21. What methods would you apply for decreasing the loading time

of a website?

We can use the external style sheets, minimum images, decrease the file size

of the images that we use, without compromising on the quality and use the CSS

sprites to regulate the HTTP requests.

o 22. What are webmaster tools?

It is a free service provided by the Google to get the information about the

indexing data, backlinks, search queries, crawl problems, malware complaints

and XML site map.

o 23. What is robots.txt?

It is a kind of text file utilized to provide the instructions to the crawlers

about the caching and indexing of a website, directory, domain or a file of a

webpage.

o 24. What is Keyword Density?

It is a very important factor to increase your webpage ranking. Keyword

density is the percentage density of a particular phrase or keyword available

on a website compared to the total number of words on the particular page.

o 25. 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.

1) What is the main advantage of using Meta Description tag in SEO

a) It helps to rank high in search engines

b) Meta Description tags helps search engines list a website

c) Meta Description tags are not important in SEO

d) It helps the searcher to get a brief idea about the page before he click

Ans: d) It helps the searcher to get a brief idea about the page before he

click.

Note: Meta Description tag serves as a copy that will tempt searchers to click

on your listing

2) If you have URL like www.example.com/admin what is the best direction to add

in robots.txt to restrict search engine bots from crawling the page.

a) Allow:

b) Disallow: /admin

c) Allow: /admin

d) Disallow

Answer: b) Disallow: /admin

3) Which is most advisable SEO friendly URL (URL structure) to start a blog in

a website

a) www.blog.example.com

b) create blog.com and attache to website

c) www.example.com/blog

Answer: c) www.example.com/blog

4) Which is the nick name of Google Panda Algorithm Updation

a) Farmer

b) Pigeon

c) Caffeine

d) Vince

Ans: a) Farmer

5) Which hyperlink placed in a webpage passes highest link value in SEO

a) A link placed in Menu

b) A hyperlink added in a main body content portion

c) A link placed with footer

d) A hyperlink placed with right side menu button

Answer : b) A hyperlink added in a main body content portion

Note: Keep in mind that a hyper linked keyword which comes with in the content

portion passes highest recommendation value than a link placed as the main

menu, side menus or a footer link. IT is also an important fact to know that a

link achieved from a content rich page which is published in own topic content

will give high recommendation vale the pointing page.

6) What is mean by Inbound Link in SEO

a) A pointing link to a page with in the website

b) A pointing hyperlink added from a keyword

c) A hyperlink pointing to our website from another website or web page

d) A link pointing to another website

Ans: d) A hyper link pointing to our website or website page from another

website ( preferably anchored from an appropriate or relevant keyword).

Normally most of SEO freshers commit mistake with the question what is mean by

inbound link. Do understand the difference of inbound link and internal link.

(very important SEO question on links)

7) What is mean by Google Page Rank

a) A Ranking position achieved by a website in search result

b) A position denoting in SERP

c) A grade mark awarded by Google based on the quality of back links achieved

by a website page

d) A ranking provided by Google as per the number of visits achieved by a

website

Ans: C) A grade level allotted to website pages by Google as per the number of

quality back links achieved by a website page.

Note: There are many SERP checker tools available. I prefer SERP checking

tools like Rank Checker & Whats my SERP. As these are free SERP checker tools.

Continuous usage of these tools are not recommended for all of you.

8) What is mean by on page SEO optimization

a) A number of modifications made within website and website pages

b) Practice of analyzing website

c) Practice of building back links

d) Researching on website’s quality levels & improving

Ans: a) Modifications made with in website like changes and alterations made

in head & body sessions of website page and over all modifications made with

in the website can be called as on page SEO optimization.

9) The company which provides Traffic Ranking & analysis tools names ‚Alexa‛

a) Google

b) Yahoo

c) Amazon

d) Ask

Ans: c) Amazon

Reference: Alexa is website traffic analysis tool provided by Amazon.com.

Alexa traffic ranking is estimated on the data signals send by alexa tool bars

installed in browsers.

10) Google Algorithm Penguin is connected which kind of spamming activity

a) Low quality content publishing

b) Low quality link building

c) Connected with low google page rank

d) Connected with local visibility

Ans: b) Low quality link building

Reference : Penguin algorithm update is an update conducted by Google against

low quality link building for effecting manipulation of search engine listing.

11) Which one below is the best seo practice while conducting title

optimization

a) Use less than 512 px width for your title with 50 to 70 characters

b) Use important keywords near to the beginning

c) The titles used in each pages should be unique

d) All the Above are best seo practices in title optimization

Ans: d) All the above are best seo practices in title optimization

12) If robots meta tag is not included in a website page the effect is

a) The website page will not indexed by search engine bots

b) The website page will not be followed by search engine bots

c) The website page will be indexed and followed by search engine bots

d) The website page will be not followed and indexed in search results

Ans: c) The website page will be indexed and followed by search engine bots

Reference : For every web pages the default value for robots meta tag will be

‚index, follow‛ so website pages will be crawled, cached and indexed by the

website.

13) Which HTPP status code shows ok or success message about a website page

a) 200

b) 500

c) 404

d) 503

Ans: a) 200

Reference: HTPP status code 200 says ok or success message about a website

page

14) Which Google algorithm update was created to manipulative link building

techniques to rank in Google search engine ranking

a) Panda

b) Penguin

c) Pigeon

d) Humming bird

Ans: b) Penguin

Google’s Penguin Algorithm update was aimed to avoid manipulative search

engine listing generated by low quality and spam link building techniques.

15) Which on below is the best practice when your produce a meta description

for a website page as part of search engine optimization

a) Complete the meta description with in 155 characters

b) Use unique descriptions in your meta description tags

c) Produce the best description to achieve better click through rate (CTR)

d) All the above are best practices

Ans: d)

16) Which HTTP status code given below represents a permanent redirect status

for a webpage

a) 200

b) 301

c) 404

d) 500

Ans: b) HTTP Status code 301 says a permanent redirect for a website page

17) Name of Google’s algorithm update rolled out on 21st April connected with

mobile optimized websites

a) Pigeon

b) EMD Update

c) Mobilegeddon

d) Humming Bird

Ans: c) Mobilegeddon

Mobilegeddon is the latest search engine algorithm update made by Google which

provides better search engine ranking for website which are optimized for

mobile devices. As a initial step, the Mobilegeddon Google algorithm update

will reduce ranking for websites with less readability text with out tapping

or by zooming. Google’ web master central has officially confirmed the

rolling out of Mobilegeddon algorithm update on 21st April 2015.

18) Main role or responsibility of Canonical tag in SEO optimization

a) Canonical tag provide clear indication to URL actually preferred

b) Canonical tag helps to avoid bad impact of content duplication problems

c) Canonical tag passes the same value as in 301 redirection (permanent 301

redirection)

d) All the Above roles

Ans: d) All the above

19) In SEO, URL provided with canonical tag gives equal effect of which

redirection to search engines

a) 301 permanent redirection

b) 302 temporary redirection

c) 307 Redirect

d) Meta Refresh Redirection

Ans: a) 301 permanent redirection rule

20) How many Disavow files (disavow documents) are allowed for a website at a

time

a) 1

b) 2

c) 3

d) 4

Ans: a) only 1 file document (disavow file) can be used at time. The document

need to be created as TXT file following its document creation directions.

21) What is mean by disavow tool

a) Tool for panda recovery

b) Tool for Penguin recovery

c) Tool for recovery from EMD Update

d) Tool for Link submission

Ans: b) Tool for Penguin recovery. Disavow tool is used to recover from link

penalties caused by low quality link building.

22) What is mean by SEO Bookmarking ?

a) On page optimization technique

b) off page optimization techniqe

c) Link Building techniqe

d) off page link building technique

Ans : d) Off page link building technique.

Note: SEO bookmarking is an off page link building technique where high

quality book marking websites are used to book mark the page or article, blog

posts with most powerful and relevant book marking websites. Before conducting

SEO bookmarking the domain authority, page authority, Google page rank values

and organic traffic rates of websites should be keenly checked. Important

guidelines related SEO book marking is use fresh and unique content

description for book marking also. Don’t try to use the original content

description used in the original pages or posts.

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Basic SEO Interview Questions and Answers for Freshers

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SEO Interview Questions and Answers

SEO Onpage Optimization Training Course

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1) What is SEO and introduce its types?

Search engine optimization or SEO is a process of keep changing the position

of a web page or website in a search engine results by using keywords or

phrases.

Two Types of SEO are:

1. On Page Optimization

2. Off Page Optimization

2) What are the SEO tools do you use?

The SEO tools that I use are Google analytic, keyword search, Alexa, open site

explorer, Google Webmaster.

3) What do you mean by Backlink?

The incoming links to your website or webpage is referred as Backlink.

4) What are out bound Links?

The outbound links are our website links to other webpage or website.

5) Can you tell me something about Googlebot?

To index a webpage Google uses the Googlebot software. Caching, Crawling and

indexing of a webpage are done through Googlebot by collecting details from

that webpage.

6) What is Cross linking and what are the function of Cross linking?

1. Cross linking is used to refer the process of linking one site to another site

and provide a way to allow the accessing to it.

2. It provides the users with reference sites that consists the content related

to the search.

3. It doesn’t need to be owned by the same person as it provides the methods

that have been built on the Internet.

4. It serves the purpose to display the page on the search engines using search

engine optimization techniques and methods.

5. The site ranking is calculated on the basis of the relevance of the sites and

then it is reflected on the search engine.

6. It uses SEO tools that provide reciprocal links and inbound links that can be

used as our SEO.

7) What is the main purpose of using keyword in SEO?

Keyword is a single word, and while a combination of those keywords makes

phrases. These keywords or phrases are used by the search engines to populate

the subjects over the internet. Search engine stores keywords in the database,

and when search is done, it will come up with the best possible match.

8) Can you mention the functions of body content relevance?

Whenever there is a text that does not have images on the web page is referred

as body content relevance or non-image text. It helps in good optimization of

the sites and also to improve your ranking in the search engine.

9) What are Spiders, Robots and Crawlers and what are their functions?

Spiders, robot and crawler, they are all same and referred by different names.

It is a software program that follows, or ‚Crawls‛ different links

throughout the internet, and then grabs the content from the sites and adds to

the search engine indexes.

10) What does it mean if nothing appears on doing search on the domain?

On doing search on your domain and if nothing appears then there are three

possibilities.

1. May be the site is banned by search engines

2. May be no index by search engines

3. Some canonical issues

11)What is keyword stemming?

The process of finding out the root word from the search query is referred as

keywords stemming.

12) Name some SEO blogs that you frequently read?

1. Jimboykins

2. Search Engine Land

3. SEOSmarty

4. MOZ

5. Search Engine Journal

13) What do you mean by Cloaking?

Cloaking is a deceptive way of optimizing search. In this technique a

different content will be searched by the search engine than what is presented

or searched by the users.

14) How many types of Meta Tags are there in SEO and what are their characters

limits?

There are two types Meta tags in SEO.

1. Description Meta tag with 150 characters limits

2. Keyword Meta tag with 200 characters limits

15) How many characters limits in Title tag?

We can add 70 characters in title tag.

16) What is Google Sandbox?

Google sandbox is an imaginary area where new websites and their search rating

are put on hold until they prove worthy for ranking. In other words, it checks

the standard of the website.

17) Tell me something about Black Hat SEO?

In order to get a high ranking in search engine result page, websites go for

various methods and techniques which are characterized by two categories. One

method that is acceptable by search engine guidelines is known as White Hat

SEO, while the other method which is not acceptable by search engine

guidelines is known as Black Hat SEO.

18) Name few Black Hat SEO techniques?

1. Link Farming

2. Hidden text, etc.

3. Gateway or Doorway pages

4. Cloaking

5. Keyword Stuffing

19) Can you differentiate between ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’ link?

Nofollow links are not passed by search engines bot and therefore cannot be

cached or indexed. Dofollow link is a kind of hyperlink and it passes through

all search engines and it puts an impact over page rank.

20) What is the difference between PR (page rank) and SERP (Search engine

result page)?

Page rank is calculated on the basis of quality inbound links from other

website or webpages to our webpage or a website.

SERP (Search Engine Result page) is the placement of the website or web-pages

which is returned by the search engine after a search query or attribute.

21) Why the Title Tag in website is valuable?

Title tags are very essential in SEO, as it tells about the contents on that

web page. Through title tags only the search engine will tell the user, what

is there in the page.

22) What is considered as more significant, creating content or building

backlinks?

Both are necessary, creating quality content is equally important to building

backlinks. Although, building backlinks are useful in building authority to a

site and for ranking as well, quality content is the first element that is

considered to be more responsible for ranking.

23) Can you mention the difference between SEO and SEM?

SEM (Search Engine Marketing), it is used for the promotion of website through

Search Engine Result Page (SERP) , while to optimize the search result of your

webpage or website SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is used.

24) What do you know about LSI?

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. This technique is established to

obtain the data by relating the word to its closest counterparts or to its

similar context. For example, if you are searching something with a keyword

‚CAR‛ it will show all the related things like classic cars, car auctions,

Bentley car, car race etc.

25) How will you cross-check whether your SEO campaign is working or not?

To check whether your SEO campaign is working or not, the first approach is to

check the websites statistics, which tells you about the origin of

traffic. The other way of checking is to make a search based on the relevant

keywords and key phrases and look for the search result. The number of search

result will tell you whether your SEO campaign is working or not.

26) What is the meaning of competitive analysis?

Competitive analysis does the comparison, between the website I am optimizing,

and the website that is ranked highly in search results.

27) What will be your next steps if your SEO methods or technique does not

work?

My first attempt would to try analysis the problem and resolve them step by

step

1. Firstly I would try to see whether it is a new project, and then like to re-

check the key words.

2. Also, I would look for relevant key-words that can be helpful.

3. Even though the webpage and website has been indexed well and still not

appearing on the first 10 pages of search engine result page, then I would

make some changes in page text, titles and description.

4. If website is not indexed well or dropped from the index, than it might

comprises serious issues and re-work might be required.

28) What is PPC?

PPC stands for Pay Per Click and is an advertisement campaign hosted by

Google. It is segmented into two modules CPC ( Cost per click) and CPM ( Cost

per thousand impressions) through flat rate and bidding respectively. In CPC,

if the user clicks on the advert, only then the advertiser will be charged.

29) What is 301 redirect?

It is a method by which the user is redirected to new page url to old page url

. It is a permanent redirect and it is also useful in directing link juice to

new url from old url .

30) What are Webmaster tools?

Webmaster tool is a service provided by Google from where you can get backlink

information, crawl errors, search queries, Indexing data, CTR etc.

31) What is keyword density and what is the formula for knowing keyword

density?

From SEO point of view, keyword density will definitely help to stand out your

content from others. The formula to know the keyword density is ( Total number

of keyword/ total number of words in your article) multiply by 100.

32) What is robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a text file. It is through this file, it gives instruction to

search engine crawlers about indexing and caching of a webpage, file of a

website or directory, domain.

33) What will you do, for the company website you are working for, decides to

move all the contents to new domain?

The first step would be to update the previous site with a permanent redirect

to new page for all the pages. After that, I will remove the previous content

from search engine in order to avoid duplicate content issues.

34) Can you optimize the website which has pages in millions?

From SEO point of view, for dynamic website, special additional SEO stuffs

have to be implemented.

1. Good Internal link structure

2. Generation of dynamic title and description

3. Dynamic XML sitemap generation

35) What is the latest update in SEO?

The latest updates in SEO are:

1. Panda

2. Penguin

Bonus! 3 More!

36) What are the key aspects of Panda update?

Panda is to improve the search in Google. The latest version has focused on

quality content, proper design, proper speed, proper use of images and many

more.

37) What are the key aspects of Penguin update?

Penguin is the code name for Google algorithm. Its main target is to decrease

the ranking of that website that are violating the Google Webmaster

guidelines. These guidelines are violated by using black hat techniques like

cloaking and stuffing.

38) How will you neutralize a toxic link to your site?

Through Backlink Quality Checker you can know who links to your website. Now,

you have to go to ‘ Toxic link’ report, where you will find all the links,

that are harmful to your websites. If there is any link in ‘ Toxic link

report’ that matches with the link on your website, then you can remove it by

using ‘Google Disavov tool’.