SEO Interview Questions and Answers (Part 1)

SEO Interview Questions and Answers for both experienced SEO & freshers as well.
If you are fresher than must read each and every question either you know the answer or not instead of this if you are experienced SEO can focus only those from which you are not familiar.  Here are 100+ top best SEO interview questions. You going to attend SEO interview then once have a look on advanced SEO interview questions which may be asked you.

Q01- What is SEO?
Ans- SEO is an acronym for ‘Search Engine Optimization’ or ‘Search Engine Optimizer’. It is used to changing the rank of a website in the search results of a search engine and it’s a part of Internet Marketing. SEO is technique or process via this we can improve website visibility in major search engines like Google, Yahoo & Bing etc.

Q02- What is SEO and introduce its types?

Ans- 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

Q03- How many types of SEO? or Did you know what are the types of SEO?
Ans- Yes, there are 2 types of SEO which are
1. On Page Optimization
2. Off Page Optimization

Q04- Who do SEO?
Ans- A person who is known as webmaster, SEO engineer or Website optimizer does SEO.

Q05- What is On-Page Optimization?
Ans- On-page optimization is one of the most important parts of SEO and plays a vital role in the webpage improvement of SERP (Search Engine Result Page). We can whatever changes made by us in coding or internal part of our webpage call on page for instance content adding, Keyword Selection, Meta tag placing, Meta description, broken link checker,  image alt tag, Fresh Content, Site Structure, Google Webmaster Tool, Google Analysis etc.

Q06- Which  Important factors makes ON Page Optimization better?
Ans- Keyword selection, Fresh content, Broken link checker, Meta tag, Title tag, Images, Sitemap, Internal linking and Bread crumb are the important factors that makes ON Page Optimization better.

Q07- Which are top 5 most important onpage factors according to you?
Ans- In the light my experience and knowledge the 5 most important on-page factors are:
1. Title
2. Description
3. Heading Tag
4. Image Optimization
5. Content Optimization

Q08- What is Off Page Optimization?

Ans- Off Page Optimization is a type of SEO that we have adding our website links to another popular websites, so that more traffic will come on your website. In a simple language we can say off page optimization don’t allow you to make any changes in the website. It’s the process of building quality links, image sharing, blog posting, document sharing info graphics submission, business listing, video sharing, increasing page authority or page rank, getting high quality links from relevant sites and article submission,  forum discussion, article, directory, bookmarking etc to boost the rank of your website.

Q09- Which  Important factors makes Off Page Optimization better?
Ans- There are some important factors that makes Off Page Optimization better like- Directory Submission , Artical Submission, Forum Discussion, Blog Writing/posting/creation, Classified Submission, Social  Media, Press Release etc.

Q10- 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.

Q11- What is Pagination in SEO?
Ans- Pagination is the practice of dividing a piece of content into different pages while at the same time allowing Google to better understand the important pages to be indexed. Read the Google’s advice on using the pagination.

Q12- What is a keyword?

Ans- Keyword is a particular term used for searching through Search Engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo etc. in order to find relevant results to your searched question.

Q13- What is Keyword & Keyword Phrase?
Ans- Keyword is simple word like “SEO” “Internet” etc instead of this keyword phrase is “Seo BD” “SEO Services BD” etc these both type of word use to find related results in search engines.

Q14- Do you types of Keywords?
Ans- Yes, the types of keywords are primary keywords, secondary keywords, branded keywords, non branded keywords, and seasonal keywords.

Q15- What is Keyword Difficulty?
Ans- Keyword difficulty let us know who difficult to rank a particular keyword.

Q16- What is Keyword Density?
Ans- It is a very important factor to increase your webpage ranking. Keyword density let you know how many time you have used the particular keyword or keyword phrase in web page. And it makes your content stand out in crowd.

Q17- What is the method to content optimization?
Ans- Everyone use his own method to optimize content but in my opinion few best content optimization methods are: Keyword density in content, Keyword Proximity & Keyword Prominence etc.

Q18- What is keyword density and what is the formula for knowing keyword density?

Ans- 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.

Q19- What is the main purpose of using keyword in SEO?

Ans- 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.

Q20- What is keyword stemming?

Ans- Keyword stemming is the process of finding out the root word from the search query.

Q21- 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 work any more. You can have 15-20 keywords or even more to target on a single web page.

Q22- Does Google use keyword tags?

Ans- No, Google does not make use of keyword tags.

Q23- What is a Meta Tag?

Ans- 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.

Q24- What is meta tags?
Ans- Meta tag is combination of several meta tags but it included 4 major meta tags which are meta title, meta description, meta keywords & robots tags.

Q25- What are Meta Tag?
Ans- Top four meta tags that are used for SEO are following.

1.     Meta Title

2.     Meta Keywords

3.    Meta Description

4.    Robot tags

Q26- What is Meta Title?
Ans- Title tag is important factor of website and its place at the header of page under title section. Meta Title should be located within head section. It should tell some useful information about that page. Meta title contain should be less then 60 characters. If your title characters are more than 60, then google will skip the remaining characters. If the web page doesn’t have contain title tag, then Google would select the H1 tag as title or it will provide the title by its own.

Q27- What is Meta Description?
Ans- A description tag should describe about the webpage. It should be contain 150 – 160 characters. Few word about your website or webpage which can describe about your page service, product in best manner calls description. For instance we can see the page description just below the title. Meaning-less description would affect your webpage. If you provide empty or meaningless description, Google would take the description from the content available in that page.

Q28- What are Meta Keywords?
Ans- Meta keywords should be containing less than 250 characters. Its’ are very important tag for Search engine. It’s an easy way to tell our important keywords to search engine.

Q29- How many types of Meta Tags are there in SEO and what are their characters limits?

Ans- There are two types Meta tags in SEO.

1.    Description Meta tag with 150 characters limits

2.    Keyword Meta tag with 200 characters limits

Q30- Why the Title Tag in website is valuable?

Ans- 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.

Q31- What are the limitations of title and description tags?

Ans- Title tag can be normally between 66-70 characters and meta description tag can be arround 160-170 characters.

Q32- How many characters limits in Title tag?

Ans- We can add 70 characters in title tag.

Q33- What are the limitations of title and description tags in Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com?
Ans- Every search engine has its own algorithm and word limitation, meta tag limitation for different search engines are as follows:
Google.com: Title length should be normally 50- 60 character & description length 150-160 characters.
Yahoo.com: Title length should be normally 60-72 character & description length 155-165 characters.
Bing.com: Title length should be normally 65 character & description length 155 characters.
Ask.com: Title length should be normally 70 character & description length 312 characters.

Q34- What is Googlebot?
Ans- Googlebot is Google’s own software which do index, crawl & caching of webpage & update its collected data time to time from every webpage by doing the crawling, caching and then indexing of a webpage.

Q35- Can you tell me something about Googlebot?

Ans- Googlebot is a kind of software used by the Google. 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.

Q36- What is Google Sandbox?
Ans- Google sandbox is an imaginary area where less authoritative and new sites taking place while they are popular and authorized on the web. It’s generally happen due to building high volume of links in short time. In other words, it checks the standard of the website.

Q37- What is PR or Page Rank?
Ans- PR or Page Rank is provided by Google and its help to understand the value of a website or webpage. The Page Rank is calculated by Google algorithm which is based on number of backlinks received for particular page, visitor’s reaction, bounce rate etc.

Q38- What do you mean by Page Rank or PR?

Ans- For every web page, Google will give a rank, which is called as PR (Page rank). Normally page rank ranges from 0 to 10. Google Web Search Engine algorithm is responsible for calculating the page rank of every web page. Page Rank is based on backlinks.

Q39- What is the difference between PR (page rank) and SERP (Search engine result page)?

Ans- PR (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.

Q40- What is a Back link?

Ans- Back links are the incoming links from another website to your website and getting these back links from good PR and relevant site is always better for your site.

Q41- What do you mean by Backlink?

Ans- All the backlinks created for your website on another website called backlinks. The incoming links to your website or webpage is referred as Backlink.

Q42- How will you find number of backlinks of your competitors site?
Ans- There are many free tools available online for free to find out the backlinks of website like link operator on Google, Alexa, Backlink Watch , Open Site Explorer,Backlink finder etc.

Q43- 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 info-graphics to my audience.

Q44- 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.

Q45- 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.

Q46- What is considered as more significant, creating content or building backlinks?

Ans- 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.

Q46- How does Google see backlinks from guest posts?

Ans- They treat guest post backlinks like they treat any other backlinks. Every linking source has to earn Google’s trust.

I have been warning people not to use guest posts as a linking strategy for almost two years now, but not because guest posts are bad.  It is the pattern that you create when you do something “just for links”, “just for the search engines” that gets you into trouble.

Guest posting has always created incredible value for both writers and readers when the content was the most important part of the process. The moment you start guest posting for links you devalue the content and yourself and that shows.  So naturally the search engines lose interest in what you are trying to say.

Being known by a million people is better than boosting a site to the top of a single popular keyword for a few weeks or months with links.  After the links stop working people stop reading your content because you made the links more important than your own name.

Q47- What kind of competitor analysis tools you are using? Can you suggest best tools to track competitor backlinks?

Ans- When we look at backlinks my partner and I tend to use Majestic SEO and AHREFS.  But we don’t really recommend looking at competitor backlinks.  That’s usually a good way to find links that will get you penalized.

Q48- What is the meaning of competitive analysis?

Ans- Competitive analysis does the comparison, between the website I am optimizing, and the website that is ranked highly in search results.

Q49- What will be your next steps if your SEO methods or technique does not work?

Ans- 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.

Q50- What Is Alexa?
Ans- Alexa is nothing but the data that shows the number of traffic at your site.

Q51- What is an out bound Link?

Ans- An outbound-link is a link from your own webpage or website to another webpage or website. It is also called outgoing link.

Q52- What are out bound Links?

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

Q53- What do you mean by outbound links?
Ans- Links to other website or webpage from your own website.

Q54- What is Cross Linking?
Ans- Cross linking considered as one of the best strategy that is used to refer the process of linking one site to another site and provide a way to allow the accessing to it.

Q55- What is Cross linking and what are the function of Cross linking?

Ans-

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.

Q56- What is Sitemap? 
Ans- Sitemap is a place where one can find all internal links of a website or blog. Basically we submit xml sitemap to Google webmaster tools, So that all links should be crawled by Search Engines.

Q57- Will you use an ordinary html sitemap with Google?
Ans- No, As Google has special format to sitemap compare to ordinary html sitemap and we can create these sitemaps for free which Google accept.

Q58- 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.

Q59- How will you optimize a website which is made on Flash and what is your suggestion for your client?
Ans- Search engines don’t crawl images and its hard to optimize fully flash website. So, I will recommend to client use the alternative of flash like HTML 5 which is more search engine friendly.

Q60- What do you understand by Frames in HTML?
Ans- Frame is a HTML technique which split the content into several parts & search engines see frame page as completely different pages which left negative impact on SEO. So we should avoid the usage of Frames and use basic HTML instead.

Q61- What would you suggest to the client who has a website made on Flash?  How would you do Seo for that site?

Ans- 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.

Q62- 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?
Ans- Very first thing I will check is that website in appropriate language if have than use language attribute in HTML code of page. I will recommend hosting the website on the same country hosting after doing will submit website to local search engines.

Q63- What is Anchor Text?

Ans- Anchor Text is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. 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.

Q64- What do you mean by anchor text?

Ans- 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.

Q65- What are organic results?

Ans- Organic results are the page views which come directly via SERP and not from any Off Page Optimization.

Q66- What do you mean by organic results?
Ans- Particular web page which comes in search engine result page and not through any off page optimization is known as organic results.

Q67- Best possible way to decipher the ‘not provided’ organic keywords?

Ans- I don’t actually worry about it.  Why do you need to know that you received 1,000 visits for “FAVORITE KEYWORD”?  What is that going to tell you?

If you receive 1,000 visits for PAGE ALPHA and 1 visit for PAGE BETA then you know you need to do something about BETA.

Q68- Who is Matt Cutts?

Ans- Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s web spam team.

Q69- Do you know Matt Cutts, Sergey Brin & Larry Page.
Ans- Yes, Sergey Brin & Larry Page are the founder of Google. Matt Cutts is the head of Web Spam team currently.

 
Q70- What Seo tools do you use ?
Ans- Google analytic, Google webmaster tools, Alexa, keyword research, open site explorer.  Well there are many paid SEO tools are also available like Moz.

Q71- 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.

Q72- What is webmaster tools ?
Ans- Webmaster tools is free service offer by the google that helps you maintain your site's presence in Google Search results. We can also check all the details like how many pages are indexing by google, daily user, search query, stats, XML sitemap etc.

Q73- What is Bookmarking Sites?
Ans- Bookmarking sites helps you to getting instant traffic on your site by his powerful social media factor.You can easily bookmarks this site on your favorites list and when it requires you can click on this and you will get this.

Q74- Top 6 Bookmarking sites name?
Ans- Top Bookmarking Sites.

1.    Twitter

2.    Pinterest

3.    reddit

4.    stumble upon

5.    Digg

6.    Delicious

Q75- What is Google Anayltics?
Ans- Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that tell us about website activity and performance. It tell us website traffic source.
Q76- A client will allow you to take only tool either Google Analytics or Google Webmasters which one you choose?
Ans- Off-course I will go with webmaster tools as we can see few analytics data in webmaster tools.

Q77- 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 indicates the number of unique sessions each visits create.

Q78- 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 subscribes function to start tracking clicks.

Q79- What are the SEO Techniques available?

Ans- Two SEO Techniques are: White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO which is also called as Negative SEO.

Q80- What is the difference between White Hat & Black Hat SEO?

Ans- White Hat SEO- It’s the technique which is like by search engines. If you are following search engine guidelines, rule and regulations, algorithm and policies to improve your website position is called White Hat SEO techniques.

Black Hat SEO – Black hat seo is also known as a Negative SEO and its just opposite of White hat seo. If you are not following the search engine guidelines and using unnatural method to get higher position in search engines called black hat seo. Few instances of Black Hat SEOs are:

• Low quality of duplicate content
• Getting link from non-thematic website to manipulate Page Rank
• Links from spam sites
• Links from adult content sites
• Keyword stuffing
• Cloaking
• Google Bowling etc.
• Getting too much backlinks from a single page with different anchor text that targets a single page of your website.
•  

Q82- How many SEO techniques do you know?
Ans-There are 3 types of techniques in SEO.

1.    Black hat seo

2.    White hat seo

3.    Gray hat seo

Q83- What is White Hat Seo and how many techniques used in it?
Ans- In White Hat Seo, follow all rules of google in seo which is called White Hat Seo. We use fresh and good content for site; never use any kind of duplicate contents in it.
White Hat Techniques- Quality contents, Titles and Meta data, Effective keyword and Keyword research use, Quality inbound links.

Q84- What is Black Hat Seo and how many techniques used in it?        
Ans- Not follow the google rules and more chance to spamming your sites in black hat seo. Black Hat seo is used for duplicate issues like photo, video, content, keyword stuffing, shidden links, doorway pages etc. These are not good for our website because when Google starts its crawling it considered the site is full of duplicate issues and he penalized the site minimum +30 Google page ranking. Black Hat Seo Techniques- hidden link, keyword stuffing, doorway pages, incorrect keyword , link farming, mirror side.

Q85- Tell me something about Black Hat SEO?

Ans- 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.

Q86- Name few Black Hat SEO techniques?

Ans-

1.    Link Farming

2.    Hidden text, etc.

3.    Gateway or Doorway pages

4.    Cloaking

5.    Keyword Stuffing

Q87- What is Gray Hat SEO?
Ans- Gray hat seo is combination of Black hat and White hat seo. In Gray Hat seo your sites are less chances to spamming. It includes both activities to promote a website or blog. It includes high keyword density, buying links, duplicate content, reciprocal link exchange etc.

Q88- Which SEO techniques are popular?
Ans- Mainly two type of SEO technique is popular
1. White Hat SEO
2. Black Hat SEO (Negative SEO)
One more type of SEO techniques which is also known is “Grey Hat SEO”.

Q89- What is the difference between Crawling and Indexing?
Ans- Crawling- When the Search Engines come to your site and read the data, this process is called Crawling.
Indexing- Whenever Search Engines come to your site, which pages are they crawl by search engine, they take a copy of that page with them and save it on their server. It is called Indexing.

Q90- What will do you do maximize the frequency of crawling of your website by search engines?
Ans- I will do add more quality content to my web pages for fast crawling and indexing by search engines.

Q91- What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
Ans- 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.

Q92- What is robots.txt?

Ans- 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.

Q93- What are the different method to control the robot?
Ans- We can control the robots via 3 methods which are:
1. Robots.txt
2. Robots Meta Tag
3. Rel= nofollow

Q94- Difference between Sitemap and robot.txt?
Ans- Sitemap- is a collection of pages in a web site accessible to crawlers or users.

Robot- It contains information about which pages to crawl and what to index.

Q95- 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.

Q96- Is there a limit to robots.txt file?

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

Q97- What are Spiders, Robots and Crawlers and what are their functions?

Ans- 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.

Q98- Where do you put your robots.txt file?
Ans- I will submit it to in Google Webmaster tools or in the root directory of the domain or subdomain which I am promoting.

Q99- “Unreachable robots.txt” in Webmaster Tools crawl errors means?
Ans- If getting such issues it simple mean that you don’t have robots.txt file or search engine can’t reach robots. txt file on server. If not have these option it could robots.txt file requires password or robots.txt file disallows access to your robots.txt file.