Do you want to apply for a beginner level of SEO? If yes, then we are here to help you out in this challenge. We have prepared a list of the top 50 SEO interview questions for your job interview to remain ahead of others—many of these SEO interview questions and answers for those who own one year of experience.
Here is a list of Best Seo Interview Questions and Answers
1) What do you understand by SEO? And, what are its different types?
Search engine optimization, popularly known as SEO, is simply a method of raising website traffic quality and quantity through organic search engine results. Through SEO, companies target unpaid traffic rather than paid traffic or direct traffic.
Search engine optimization helps companies improve the ranking of their web pages or websites on the search engine result pages by using keywords and phrases.
There are three different types of SEO:
- Technical SEO
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
2) What are the best SEO tools you would recommend for use?
One of the most important SEO interview questions and answers to know before the interview.
The SEO tools that we’ve found quite good in performance are Google Keyword Planner, Google Analytics, Google Webmaster, Alexa, and open site explorer. As you can see, most of them are from Google. Therefore, they can easily be considered pretty reliable. In this answer, you can also mention those tools you’ve used to give you more confidence.
3) What do you understand by Backlinks?
A backlink also referred to as an incoming link or inbound link, is a link created when one website links to another. Backlinks are considered “votes” for specific pages by almost all the major search engines, including Google, and web pages with a higher number of backlinks are likely to have high organic search engine rankings.
4) What is the difference between Backlink and Outbound link?
Backlinks or Inbound links are links from other websites to yours, which means they bring traffic from other sites to your website. Outbound links are intended to take away your website visitors to other websites as they are links from your website to other websites.
5) What is Googlebot?
Googlebot, also known as the web spider, is the term used for Google’s web crawler. Googlebot web crawler software gathers information and documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google search engine.
There are two different types of web crawlers in Googlebot:
- A mobile web crawler that simulates a user on a mobile device.
- A desktop web crawler that simulates a user on a desktop.
6) In SEO, what is the main objective of using keywords?
Keywords are the words, and combinations of those keywords become phrases that people type into the search engine box to look out for what they’re seeking.
Search engines use these keywords or phrases to populate the subject over the internet. Search engines store keywords and phrases in their database so that when a search is done, they can give a result with the best and most relevant matches.
7) What do you mean by Body content relevance?
Body content relevance is nothing but a text that doesn’t contain images on the websites’ web page. Generally known as non-image text, it presents the description and relates it to the title, keywords, and description.
Body content relevance helps you optimize your websites and enhance their ranking on the search engine result page.
8) Crawler, robot, spiders, what do these terms indicate?
Crawlers, robots, spiders are all the same process, just referred to by different terminologies. All three are the terms used for an automated software program designed for search engines to keep up to date with web activities and search new links and details to index in their database.
This automated software program goes from site to site and gathers all the new data and information regarding the web page’s what about so that search engines’ database can be timely updated.
9) While searching for a specific domain, what does it indicate if nothing appears on the search engine result page?
If a person searches for your domain and nothing appears, then, in this case, three reasons can be possible:
- Your website is relatively new, and the search engine hasn’t indexed it yet.
- The search engine may ban your website.
- There are some canonical issues with your website.
10) What is keyword stemming?
Keyword stemming, quite famous in SEO, is a process used by marketing analysts to find new keywords from the same root keyword. By adding a suffix, prefix, or pluralizing the root keyword, marketers create new keywords. The benefit of keyword stemming is that it enables marketers to tap into different sets of search terms with a single content copy.
11) Recommend a few SEO blogs that helped you to improve your content marketing strategies.
After analyzing, we’ve found out these SEO blogs are quite good:
- BacklinkO
- Search Engine Journal
- SEOSmarty
- Google Webmaster Central
- Search Engine Land
- MOZ
12) What do you mean by Cloaking?
Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which different content or URL is shown to human users and search engine crawlers.
Cloaking is considered a deceptive way of optimizing a website for search as it violates Google’s webmaster guidelines by providing users with different results than they hoped for.
13) Name down the types of Meta Tags that are there in SEO
There are four major types of meta tags in SEO worth knowing about. It is one of the most important SEO interview questions and answers:
- Meta Description tag – A concise description of the web page.
- Title Tag – The text that will appear at the top of your browser. Search engines view this text as the “title” of the web page.
- Meta Keywords tag – A group of keywords you consider relevant to the web page in question.
- Meta Robots tag– An indication to search engine crawlers or spiders as to what they should do with the web page.
14) According to you, how many characters should be in a Title tag and Meta description tag?
a) Title tag: It has been observed that if a person keeps a title tag under 60 characters, he can expect around 90% of his titles to correctly appear on the search engine result page. Therefore, our recommendation for the title tag is between 50-60 characters.
b) Meta description tag: You must write meta descriptions long enough so that they’re sufficiently detailed regarding the content of your webpage; therefore, our recommendation for the meta description tag is between 70-160 characters.
15) What is Google Sandbox?
Google sandbox is a commonly believed filter that Google uses to keep all new websites and their rating under restriction until they prove worthy for ranking. You can think of it as a probation period, even if you do everything according to the rules, in which Google sandbox checks all the standards of your website.
16) What is Black Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO is a technique that is against search engine guidelines but is still used to increase web pages’ ranking on the search engine result pages (SERP).
For the violation of the search engine’s terms and conditions of services, companies that take the help of these practices can be banned from the search engines and affiliate sites.
17) What are some recognized Black Hat SEO techniques?
Below is the list of famous Black Hat SEO techniques; you can mention any three to four of them while answering this question: One of the most asked SEO interview questions.
- Link Schemes
- Content Automation
- Article Spinning
- Doorway Pages
- Rich Snippet Markup Spam
- Hidden Text or Links
- Keyword Stuffing
- Automated Queries to Google
- Reporting a Competitor (or Negative SEO)
- Sneaky Redirects
- Cloaking
- Guest Posting Networks
- Link Manipulation (including buying links)
- Link Farms, Link Wheels, or Link Networks
18) “Do-follow link” vs. “No-follow link,” what’s the difference between them?
Let’s talk about the practical difference between a Do-follow link and a no-follow link. A Do-follow link passes link juice onto another site, which means it’ll impact Google Ranking Algorithm, whereas a No-follow link won’t have any impact on Google Ranking Algorithm as it doesn’t pass link juice.
19) What is the difference between PR (page rank) and SERP (Search engine result page)?
Page rank, usually known as PR, is a kind of algorithm used by search engines to rank websites in their search engine results. The search engine result page or SERP is the result page that Google displays when you search for a keyword or keyword combinations (phrases).
20) Why are Title tags important in SEO?
One of the most important SEO interview questions is to prepare before the interview.
The title tags are important in SEO because they help search engines understand what the page is all about. Not just search engines, but also help searchers comprehend the content on your web page, which means they can choose the most relevant webpage on the result page for whatever they are seeking.
One thing to remember is that putting the most appropriate keywords at the head of the title tag can be beneficial for your website in terms of ranking in the search results of the search engines.
21) Creating content or Building backlinks; what is considered as more significant?
Both are quite necessary for your website. There is no equation available out there on which we can compare both of them. Building backlinks is equally important as creating good content.
But still, if the interviewer asks you to choose one, we would recommend you prefer more consideration to content creation over building backlinks.
Suppose a person wants to rank his website higher on the ranking page. In that case, he has to update his website with trending and valuable content from time to time in the form of articles and blogs, and when once you start doing this in your regular practice, you can focus on building backlinks.
Indeed, Building Backlinks is one of the best methods to get a good amount of traffic on the website; however, if you don’t have good content on it, getting the right traffic won’t be an easy task, too.
22) What’s the difference between Search engine marketing (SEM) and Search engine optimization (SEO)?
The major difference between them is Search engine optimization (SEO) focuses on the optimization of websites to increase their organic ranking which leads to increased traffic. Search engine marketing (SEM) is about doing paid advertisements of websites to increase their visibility on the search engine results page in the Ads section so that more traffic can be generated.
23) What do you understand by Latent Semantic Indexing?
Latent semantic indexing, or LSI, is a method that Google and search engines use to acquire data by relating the keyword to its similar context or its closest counterparts.
For instance, if a person searches for something with the keyword “CAKE,” then search engines will display all the associated results such as delicious cakes, small cakes, eggless cakes, etc.
24) What are the ways a person can check whether his SEO campaign is working or not?
Below are two major ways you can check whether your SEO campaign is working or not:
- Do a search based on the related keywords and phrases and observe the search result. The number of search results will tell you whether your SEO campaign is working or not.
- Analyze the website’s statistics, which shows you the traffic sources that your website is getting.
25) What do you understand by SEO competitive analysis?
An important one in the SEO interview questions is to prepare this before the interview.
In SEO Competitive analysis, marketers compare websites that they are optimizing and their competitors’ websites highly ranked on the search engine result pages and then analyze the differences.
In SEO competitive analysis, marketers do proper research of the links, content, keyword, and more of their SEO competitors so that they can reverse-engineer the best elements of these tactics into their strategies.
26) What would be your strategy if your SEO technique doesn’t work?
As an SEO specialist, your first task would be the analysis of the problem and then try to resolve it step by step:
- Check whether it’s a new project or not, cause most of the time, mistakes happen initially, and make sure that you’ve put the right keywords.
- Research for more relevant keywords that can be helpful for your website.
- If the website hasn’t been indexed or dropped out from the index, it can be a major problem, and re-work might be needed.
- Even if your webpage and website have been indexed by the search engines but still not appearing on the initial ten pages of the search engine result page, then you would have to make some improvements in the page texts, titles, and description.
27) What do you understand by PPC?
PPC stands for Pay Per Click, a marketing model in which whenever a person clicks on your online ad, you’ll have to pay a certain amount of fee to the host of the platform.
There are numerous types of PPC out there, such as:
- Search advertising.
- Display advertising.
- Social media advertising.
- Remarketing.
- Sequential remarketing.
- Google Shopping.
28) What are the top social media sites used for SEO?
There are six of the best social media sites for SEO:
- YouTube.
- Twitter.
- Facebook.
- Instagram.
- LinkedIn.
- Pinterest.
29) Tell us the most important areas to include in your keywords.
There are three most important areas to include the keywords:
- Page title
- Meta Description
- Body text
30) What would you do if your website got banned by the search engine for black hat practices?
If your website got banned by the search engines for black hat practices, then you can go for the option of re-inclusion after correcting your wrongdoings.
31) What are the latest updates in SEO?
There are two latest updates in SEO are:
- Penguin
- Panda
32) What are the major aspects of the Panda update?
it is one of the most asked SEO interview questions and answers. The main objective of the Panda update is to reduce the rank of websites with irrelevant and lower-quality content and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results. It makes the whole searching process on Google easier and has focused on quality content, proper design, proper speed, proper use of images, and many more.
33) What are the major aspects of the Penguin update?
The main objective of the Penguin update is to penalize websites that were using manipulative techniques to achieve high rankings. This update diminishes the ranking of those websites that are violating Google Webmaster guidelines by using black hat techniques to increase the rank of the web pages. It is one of the most frequently asked SEO interview questions and answers to know about.
34) What do you understand by 301 redirects?
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect method that transfers complete link equity (ranking power) to the redirected page. With the 301 redirects, Users can be redirected from the new page URL to the old page URL.
35) What is robots.txt?
The robots. Txt file, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or standard, is a text file that instructs search engine crawlers about indexing and caching a webpage, file of a website or directory, or domain.
The robots.txt file makes web robots understand which pages on your website to crawl or which aren’t
36) What are Webmaster tools?
Google Webmaster Tool is a service given by Google that communicates with webmasters and helps you in understanding the issues with your website. Webmaster tool provides you with data regarding your website such as backlink information, crawl errors, search queries, Indexing data, CTR, etc.
37) How can you optimize a website that has millions of pages?
As an SEO professional, You can recommend the implementation of special SEO techniques to optimize such a dynamic website:
- Dynamic XML sitemap generation
- Generation of dynamic title and description
- Good Internal link structure
38) How to prevent someone from building or redirecting a low-quality backlink to a site?
There are numerous tools available out there that can help you in preventing someone from building or redirecting a low-quality to your website, such as:
- Ahrefs
- Open Site Explorer
You can also request the webmaster from time to time to remove or disavow the bad links.
39) What do you understand by keyword density? And How can you find what’s the keyword density of your page?
Keyword density tells you how many times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on that page.
Anyone can easily find the keyword density of any webpage by applying this formula:
(Total number of keywords /Total number of words on the webpage) multiply by 100
40) How often should our company do a link audit?
A link audit is not an easy task and sometimes can be quite complicated.
Suppose there is a regular website that is not much worried about negative SEO, is not in a competitive space, and hasn’t been much involved in building low-quality links. In that case, a link audit every 6-12 months is reasonably good.
41) What is a Rank brain in SEO?
It is one of the frequently asked questions and answers. Rain brain is an artificial intelligence system that supports Google search engines for some of its search results, in particular, rare or one-of-a-kind queries. It started in 2015 and was applied by Google globally.
42) What do you understand by Link Building in SEO?
Link building refers to “attaching various links to a website.” You can do link-building through different methods.
Here are a few samples of Link Building:
- Reciprocal linking is a kind of linking when two webmasters choose to link to each other’s sites.
- When you submit your Website to website directories, you receive a link from these directories to your Website.
- When you purchase blog posts from a blogger, where he or she writes a blog post about your site and links to it, it’s a great way to build Links.
- If another site posts a popular newsletter and places your Website name with a link to it, this is also considered link-building.
43) Tell me some benefits of link building in Seo?
It is one of the most important SEO interview Questions and answers to know about.
a) Benefits of link building in Seo
- Link building improves the quality of traffic from relevant sites.
- If a website has higher quality backlink, another Website that is linked to is also considered higher quality.
- Bringing more traffic through your link-building efforts means more revenue from your Website.
44) What is Canonical URL?
Canonical URLs are one of those URLs that are preferred among different versions of your Website URL. It aids the search engine to pick one to utilize among multiple. You can place the canonical URL of your Website or page below
<link rel=”canonical” href=”your-preferred-URL”/>
45) What are the LSI keywords?
LSI means Latent Semantic Indexing. These keywords are related terms that search engines apply to deeply read the content on a webpage.
46) What are the long tail keywords?
Long-tail keywords are those keywords that are used to target specific user queries. Long-tail keywords are longer and have two or more words.
47) What makes a website search engine friendly?
Many factors make a website search engine friendly, involving keywords, metadata, quality content, titles, etc. A website requires these factors to be placed by a search engine and therefore found by a user.
48) What On-Page and Off-Page Optimization consists of?
On-Page and Off-Page both perform a crucial role in the SEO of a website. It is one of the most asked SEO interview questions and answers.
On-page Seo Activities consist of:
- Page Titles Optimization
- Meta Descriptions Optimization
- Utilize search engine-friendly URLs
- Use (H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.) heading tags in your content body.
- Keyword Density: Use relevant keywords in your article.
- Optimizing page images.
- Proper Internal Linking.
Off-page Seo Activities list:
- Blogging
- Social Bookmarking
- Video Marketing
- Social Networking Sites sharing.
- Blog Marketing
- Directory Submission
- Image Sharing
- Forum Marketing
- Search Engine Submission
- Quora Answering
- Link Baiting
- Local Listings
- Article Submission
49) What do you mean by Pagerank or PR?
PageRank (PR) is an algorithm utilized by the Google search engine to measure the webpage’s authority. It was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s founders.
50) What is an inbound and outbound Link?
Inbound Links: These links are the kind of links that come to your Website from another website.
Outbound Links: These links are the kind of links that go from your Website to another website.
Wrap up
After reading this guide on the top 50 SEO interview questions and answers, you will get an idea of how to answer beginner or advanced SEO interview questions. We hope these questions help you to learn new things and upgrade your knowledge.
Read More:
If you would like to increase your knowledge simply keep visiting
this web page and be updated with the newest news posted here.