1. What is a Search Engine?
Ans. A search engine is a web-based software system which is developed to search and locate relevant information on the World Wide Web. Search engines generally answer the queries entered by the users and give them a list of search results.
2. What is SEO & why is it so important?
Ans. In simple words, SEO or Search Engine Optimization denotes to any activity performed for the improvement of Search Engine rankings of websites, products, services or other content. It shows unpaid results which is also referred to as “FREE”, “organic”, “natural” or “earned” results.
3. Name of a few search engines.
Ans. The names of some search engines are- Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, DuckDuckGo and Yandex.
4. Who are the Founders of Google?
Ans. The founders of Google are Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
5. In which year was Google founded?
Ans. Google was founded on 4th September 1998.
6. What is World Wide Web?
Ans. The World Wide Web (WWW) or the Web, which was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in the year 1989, is an information system of internet servers containing webpages where specially formatted documents and resources, supported by Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP, can be located by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) with other hypertext links.
7. What is a Domain?
Ans. On the internet, the domain is simply a part of the network address and acts as a descriptor for websites. It includes email addresses, website addresses and addresses of Internet Protocols such as SSH, IRC and FTP.
8. What is domain extension?
Ans. Domain extension refers to the notation found at the end of web addresses. The extension is used to specify a country code or any web category. For example, Edu is a domain extension to specify educational institution as the web category.
9. What is a website?
Ans. A website contains a collection of web pages or formatted documents that can be accessed over the Internet. Websites are generally identified with domain names or web addresses.
10. What is a Web server?
Ans. A web server is a computer program with an IP address and domain names that display web pages to users when requested. Web server accepts, and processes requests sent via HTTP.
11. What is Web Hosting?
Ans. Web hosting refers to any service providing space for websites over the Internet. Web host enables your website to be viewed by others via modem or network by making space over its server.
There are various kinds of web hosting services available today which are used as per the needs and requirements of the web developers.
12. What is Crawling?
Ans. Crawling or web crawling refers to an automated process through which search engines filtrate web pages for proper indexing.
Web crawlers go through web pages, look for relevant keywords, hyperlinks and content, and bring information back to the web servers for indexing.
As crawlers like Google Bots also go through other linked pages on websites, companies build sitemaps for better accessibility and navigation.
13. What is Indexing?
Ans. Indexing starts when the crawling process gets over during a search. Google uses crawling to collect pages relevant to the search queries, and creates index that includes specific words, or search terms and their locations.
Search engines answer queries of the users by looking up to the index and showing the most appropriate pages.
14. What is SERP?
Ans. Search Engine Result Page or SERP refers to the page that is displayed when a specific search query is entered over the search engine. Apart from showing a list of results, SERP might also include advertisements.
15. What is the definition of keyword?
Ans. Keyword means any word serving as a key. Keyword in SEO refers to the key phrases and words included in the web content which helps the users to find the specific website by entering relevant search queries over the search engines.
16. What are Heading tags?
Ans. In SEO, heading or header tags are used to separate the heading and sub-heading of any content from the rest of the web page. There are 6 heading tags used in SEO in a top down hierarchy.
Ranging from h1 to h6, header tags bring coherence in content along with relevancy and keyword consistency in the search results displayed on SERPs.
17. What is Canonical URL?
Ans. Canonical URLs relate to the concept of selecting the best URL for the web pages that the visitors want to see. Also, known as canonical tags, these URLs help in content syndication when multiple versions of a same page become available over the Internet. Thus, it is used to resolve issues related to content duplication.
18.What is Page Title?
Ans. Page title, also known as title tag, is a phrase used for describing a web page content. The title tag appears on the search result pages just above the URL (see below) and also appears at the top of a browser.
19. What are the most important Google ranking factors?
Ans. According to Andrey Lipattsev, the Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, the top 3 ranking factors affecting the search engine algorithm of Google are:
- #1 Content
- #2 Backlinks
- #3 Rank Brain
20. What is HTML Sitemap?
Ans. An HTML sitemap comprises of one single HTML page that bears the links of all the web pages of any specific website. This sitemap holds the foundation of all web pages of any website.
21. What are doorway pages?
Ans. Doorway Pages, also known as gateway pages, portal pages or entry pages, refer to web pages or websites that are developed for higher ranking when specific search queries are entered.
22. What is Domain Authority?
Ans. Considered to be one of the most influential SEO factors, domain authority is a key performance metric developed by Moz, which rates any website on a 1-100 scale.
23. What is Article submission?
Ans. Article submission is considered a part of Off Page SEO optimization. Article submission, which involves the presentation of articles to online article directories like Ezine Articles, Go Articles, Article Trader etc. with proper anchor text for link building, is performed for the promotion of any website.
24. What is Forum Posting?
Ans. Forum posting is the act of engaging, interacting, and writing on a forum thread by leaving a simple response to the thread or to a post by a user on the same thread. Posting on popular forums is a powerful method of engaging and interacting with new users, while driving prospective clients to your website or business.
Example: FileZilla Forums, WebmasterWorld…
25. What is a Business directory?
Ans. A business directory is a website or printed listing of information which lists all businesses within some category. Businesses can be categorized by business, location, activity, or size.
Business may be compiled either manually or through an automated online search software.
26. What is Social Bookmarking?
Ans. Social bookmarking is a way for people to store, organize, search, and manage “bookmarks” of the web pages. Users can save these links to the web pages that they like or want to share, using a social bookmarking site to store these links.
These bookmarks are usually public, and can be viewed by other members of the site where they are stored.
27. What is Social Networking?
Ans. Social networking is the practice of expanding the number of one’s business and/or social contacts by making connections through individuals, often through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and Google+.
28. What is RSS Feed?
Ans. RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. RSS feeds enable publishers to syndicate data automatically. A standard XML file format ensures compatibility with many different machines/programs.
RSS feeds also benefit users who want to receive timely updates from their favorite websites or to aggregate data from many sites.
29. What is Guest posting?
Ans. Guest posting is the process of creating content and publishing it on another person’s website. Guest posting blogs allow to show author bio (writer) at the top or bottom of an guest post.
30. What is Google Pigeon Update?
Ans. Google Pigeon is the code name given to one of Google’s local search algorithm updates released on July 24, 2014.
It aimed to increase the ranking of local listing in a search which also affects the search results shown in Google Maps along with the regular Google search results.
31. What are Google Sitelinks?
Ans. Google Sitelinks are the sub-listings that will sometimes show under the first listing on the first page of Google search results.
32. What is Google Knowledge Graph?
Ans. The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base utilized by Google to improve its search engine’s results with semantic-search information gathered from a wide variety of sources.
33. What is Google’s Rich Answer Box?
Ans. A rich answer is any attempt by Google to answer the searcher’s query in search results in a way not requiring a click through to a website.
34. What is Black Hat SEO?
Ans. It is the use of aggressive SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus only on the search engines and usually do not obey search engines guidelines.
35. What is Duplicate content?
Ans. Duplicate content, as the name suggests, generally refers to the substantial parts of content within or across domains that are either identical or appreciably similar.
36. What is bounce rate?
Ans. Bounce rate is the number of visitors which a site receives only for them to leave the site after viewing only one page. It represents the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave or “bounce” rather than continuing on to view the other pages within the same site.
37. What is referral traffic?
Ans. Referral traffic is Google’s way of reporting visits that came to your site from sources outside of its search engine.
For example, when someone clicks on a hyperlink to go to a new page on a different website, Google Analytics tracks the click as a referral visit to the second site.
38: What are crawl stats?
Ans. The Crawl Stats report provides information on Googlebot’s activity on your site for the last 90 days. These stats take into account all the content types that are downloaded by Google such as CSS, JavaScript, Flash.
39. What was the recent update which Google had and what changes would you suggest for it?
Ans. 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 useful content, fresh content, good social media presence and quality organic links.
40. What all verticals have you handled in your SEO career so far?
Ans. Verticals means on what themes of websites have you worked so far- this may include education, real estate, IT, travel, Shopping, jobs etc.
41. What do you know about Google Panda update?
Ans. 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.
42. What is Google Sandbox in SEO?
Ans. Google Sandbox is an imaginary area where new and less authoritative sites are kept for a specified 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.
43. What is the difference between on page SEO and off page SEO?
Ans. 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.
44. How will you solve canonicalization issue or what is. htacess file?
Ans. .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.
45. What is keyword stemming in SEO?
Ans. 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.
46. What is LSI?
Ans. 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.
47. What do you know about the Florida update?
Ans. 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.
48. What are the limitations of title and description tags?
Ans. Title tag can be between 66-70 characters and meta description tag can be between 160-170 characters.
49. Does Google uses keyword tags?
Ans. No, Google does not make use of keyword tags.
50. What is 301 redirect?
Ans. 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.
51. What was your exact job profile in your previous company?
Ans. Provide a suitable explanation about your job profile which would include your job responsibilities and the amount of work you have handled so far.
52. What do you understand by Cloaking?
Ans. Cloaking involves using deceptive techniques which presents the user with a different version of the webpage than that presented to the search engines.
53. What tools do you use for doing SEO?
Ans. I use Google webmaster tools, Google Analytics, Open site explorer, Alexa, Ahrefs, Website grader etc.
See: – List of free SEO tools
54. What are your good qualities?
Ans. You will have to answer here about your good qualities like- I am hardworking, sincere, punctual, love to accept challenges etc.
55. 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.
56. What is PPC?
Ans. 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.
57. Which is better Robots.txt or Meta Robots Tag?
Ans. 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.
58. Do you use separate SEO strategies for Google, Yahoo and Bing?
Ans. 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.
59. How will you increase the PageRank of a page?
Ans. By building more backlinks from authority sites and high page rank webpages.
60. How will you check the number of backlinks of your competitors site?
Ans. 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.
61. Which is more important- Building backlinks to a website or building great content?
Ans. 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.
62. If a website has a search engine saturation of 40%, what does that mean?
Ans. It means 40% of web pages from that particular website are indexed by the search engine.
63. What do you mean by anchor text?
Ans. Clickable text written on a 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.
64. How will you treat Web standards while optimizing a website?
Ans. Google loves web standards hence I will apply the web standards provided by W3C while optimizing a web site.
65. What methods would you apply for decreasing the loading time of a website?
Ans. 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.
66. Which tools do you use for choosing keywords?
Ans. 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.
67. What blogs and sites do you regularly visit to update yourself?
Ans. I follow Matt Cutts blog. SEOmoz blog, Seochat forums, Searchengineland.com, SEO book, Seosandwitch, Seroundtable, Seobythesea, seochat etc.
68. What are doorway pages?
Ans. 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.
69. What are the Social Media channels you have used for marketing?
Ans. 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.
70. What do you understand by Frames in HTML?
Ans. 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.
71. Which is the popular search engine in Russia?
Ans. Yandex is popular in Russia.
72. 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.
73. Who is Rand Fishkin?
Ans. 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.
74. How will you restrict the search engine crawlers from indexing a folder named “Secret” that is present in the root?
Ans. The following code when added on the robots.txt text file would restrict the crawlers from accessing the folder
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Secret/
75. What do you understand by Google Dance?
Ans. 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 every day and changes are witnessed narrowly.
76. Which are the top 3 social media websites that you will suggest to your client for SMO work?
Ans. I would suggest Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.
77. How does Google Plus helps in SEO?
Ans. 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.
78. What is a Pizza Box in terms of Google?
Ans. Google server comes in a standard case which is commonly known as “Pizza Box”.
79. How important is to have a keyword in a domain name?
Ans. 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 succeeded without having keywords in it are flipkart.com, myntra.com, ebay.com, digg.com, reddit.com and of coz 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, it’s important to take decisions based on the theme you need to target.
80. What do you understand by “Engagement Metrics” with relation to social media?
Ans. 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, favourites, repins, comments etc.
81. What are your favorite ways of attracting natural backlinks to your site?
Ans. 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.
82. Have you heard about ASO?
Ans. 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.
83. How can you search with the exact keywords you type on Google without using quotes?
Ans. We can use the Verbatim tool to search with the exact keywords entered on Google.
84. What do you understand by Google Authorship and how can you use it for SEO benefits?
Ans. 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.
85. How can you make a website mobile friendly?
Ans. 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.
86. What is the difference between clicks and visits in Google Analytics?
Ans. Clicks indicates the number of times any user clicks on an ad while visits indicate the number of unique sessions each visit create. Read more: – Difference between clicks and visits
87. How can you track Facebook likes using Google Analytics?
Ans. 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).
88. How will you plan an SEO strategy for a website already affected by Penguin update?
Ans. 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.
89. What is the difference between HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps?
Ans. 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.
90. How many keywords do you think are enough to target on a web page?
Ans. 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.
91. What is the difference between soft 404 and 404 errors?How will you find and remove these errors?
Ans. 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 codes 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.
92. Is there a limit to robots.txt file?
Ans. Yes, Googlebot reads the first 500 KB present in the robots.txt file.
93. What is Google Webmasters Tools, why do you use it?
Ans. GWT is used for managing our site properties and settings on Google search engine. Some of the most key features are
- Geographic Targeting
- Search Queries – We can analyse the top queries for our website in 90 days period
- Backlinks Tool – To analyse the number of backlinks as seen by Google Bot
- Geographical Targeting
- Remove pages tool
- Fetch as Google Bot
- Snippet Testing Tool
- Sitemaps
94. What is important on page techniques?
Ans.
- Unique title with relevant keyword
- Search engine friendly URLs
- Proper meta description tag
- Using heading in proper order
- High-quality content with keyword density
- Structured data in page
- Social Sharing
- Internal linking
- Latent semantic keywords
- Schema integration
95. What are common types of Schema’s used in websites?
Ans. The most commonly used schema codes are as follows
- Video Schema
- Aggregate Reviews
- Person information
- Events
- Single review
96. What is Domain Authority?
Ans. It is considered as one of the most important SEO factors. Domain Authority is just like a key performance metric which is developed by Moz on this websites rating is done on a scale of 1-100. In order to achieve huge traffic and high ranking in the SERP, your DA of the websites should be high.
97. What is RSS Feed?
Ans. The term RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a kind of format for delivering regularly changing web content. It enables publishers to syndicate data automatically. This even ensures compatibility with so many different machines/programs which is a standard XML file format.
98. What is Google My Business?
Ans. The Google My Business is a tool which is free of cost and easy-to-use for businesses, artists, brands, and organizations for maintaining proper online presence across Google, including Search and Maps.
99. How can you categorize the digital marketing?
Ans. The digital marketing/communication is categorized into two segments
Inbound Marketing: This technique takes the help of social media, digital content in e-books, webinars or e-newsletter for attracting the attention of prospects via content creation to increase the number of clicks on links and learn more about a company and its services.
Outbound Marketing: This segment includes placing ads, cold-calls, e-mails or reach out potential customers through digital mediums.
100. What are the various digital marketing techniques?
Ans. Various digital marketing techniques are-
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Search engine marketing (SEM)
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
- PPC (Pay per click marketing)
- Campaign marketing
- Display advertising
- e-books
- Influencer marketing
101. Why is online marketing preferred over offline marketing?
Ans. Currently online marketing preferred by many businesses mainly because we are living in the digital era.
- Online marketing allows you to reach a large number of people and create brand awareness
- Technically online marketing is less expensive in terms of applying aggressive promotional strategies.
- No need to bother about printing, painting. Fabrication, rents, offline execution, negotiation etc.
- Ability to target specific audiences from specific locations with ease.
- ROI based marketing is now available.
- One can reach many individuals online and you can set your target as worldwide.