Most Asked SEO Interview Questions and Answers [2020]

I have collected 50 SEO Questions with Answers which are going to help you in your interview. These are the most asked questions for the SEOs. You will be more able to answer the question if you went through it. This “SEO Question and Answer” includes questions from each part such as SEO, Search Engine’s Algorithm, Updates, SEO Tools, On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and more.

Please go through each question carefully. I am sure these SEO Questions and Answers are going to help you a lot.

Best of Luck!! Enjoy the Reading!!!

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Questions Related To Search Engine

What is a Search Engine?

Ans. A search engine is a web-based software system that is developed to provide relevant information on the World Wide Web. Search engines generally answer the queries entered by the users by providing the most possible relevant answer to a list of search results. There are few famous search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex.

Google is the most used and famous search engine. The founders of Google are Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Google was founded on 4th September 1998.

What is Crawling & Indexing?

Ans. Crawling is the process when a web crawler (search engine bot) reads the web pages. It is an automated process. Search engine bot visits to the web pages through the Sitemap provided by the webmasters and find the information.

Web crawlers visit each web page that is public and not blocked by robots.txt. It collects the information and sends it back to the Google servers.

Indexing is the process of organizing the information which is collected by the web crawler. It starts when the crawling process gets over.

Search engines answer queries of the users by looking up the indexed web pages and trying to provide the most appropriate answers.

What is SERP? How will differentiate between Organic and Paid results?

Ans. Search Engine Result Page or SERP is the page where Google displays the results when search action performed by any user. This SERP includes the two types of results – Organic & Paid.

Organic Results are those results that come with the help of SEO and they are not paid. It is also referred to as “free” or “natural” results.

Paid results are those results that come with the help of Google Ads where a company or person needs to pay to Google. Several website owners make payments to Google to display their websites for certain search terms or keywords.

What is “Google Suggest” or “Autocomplete”?

Ans. Google Suggest is a part of the auto-complete function of the Google search engine. Once users start to type the query in Google Search; Google starts to suggest few queries related to the same. It is called Google Suggest. Sometimes it helps the user to find the proper or relevant search term for his/her query.

For example, as you start to type Photoshop tutorial for, you might see other popular Photoshop tutorial related searches like “Photoshop tutorial for beginners” or “Photoshop tutorial for photographers.”

What is Sitelink?

Ans. Sitelinks are the link that displays along with pages that comes during Search Result in Google. These are hyperlinks to website sub-pages that appear under specific Google listings to help users navigate the site. These are automatically added by Google using its algorithms. The SEOs can’t manage this nor make any changes. These are displayed to give some extra information to the users present on that website.

What is Google Knowledge Graph?

Ans. The Knowledge Graph is a part of SERP which provides almost complete knowledge about a product, person, or organization. It displays at the upper-right side of organic/paid searches.

Google Knowledge Graph ensures to provide complete information about the person, place, organization, or product.

What is Google My Business?

Ans. Google My Business is another product of Google. It provides a way to list our businesses on it and provide information about the business at a glance. It is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses, brands, artists, and organizations to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps.

By verifying and editing your business information, you can help the customers in finding you. Your customers also can write stories about your product.

Google My Business is a very helpful product for local businesses. The businesses can post on it, Reply to the reviews and update the information if something has got changed meanwhile.

What is Google’s Rich Answer Box?

Ans. A Rich Answer is an attempt by Google to provide a direct answer to the searchers’ query. It provides the answer to the users in zero clicks or without visiting a website.

Rich answers come in many forms which can be recipes, sports scores, stock graphs, calculators, sliders, text-based answers, numbered step-by-step directions, maps, and much more.

What is RankBrain?

Ans. RankBrain is an Artificial Machine Learning program which helps Google to decide the best result for a query. It also helps Google to make the order of those search results.

The main job of RankBrain is to measure how people are interacting with the search results.

Questions Related To SEO

What is SEO?

Ans. SEO is the abbreviated form for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a technique that is used to increase the visibility of a website. It makes the website more able or suitable to be ranked high in Search Engines for a specific keyword.

The results shown on SERP with the help of SEO are called “organic, ‘or ”natural “ results which are different from paid results.

How many types of SEO?

Ans. There are two types of SEO.

On-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO

On-page SEO refers to the activities which are performed on your own website for which you are doing the SEO. It includes the optimization of the website parts such as Meta Title & Description, Pages Title, Content, Images, Heading, Internal Linking, Keyword Placement, Website Speed, Website Responsiveness, URL Structure, etc.

Off-Page SEO is done on other websites. The main purpose of this activity is to get the backlinks from the high quality and relevant website. It includes Content Marketing, and Link Building performed outside the boundaries of any web page to improve its search ranking.

How many types of SEO Techniques?

Ans. The SEO Techniques are divided into 3 parts –

What is the keyword?

Ans. Keywords are the words that are used to search for anything in the Search Engine. It is very important to understand the keywords in digital marketing.

What is a long-tail keyword?

Ans. Long-tail keywords are the phrases containing more than 3 words in order to search in Google. The more keywords into a search term make it highly specific. This is why these keywords are considered as the most converted keyword.

By targeting long-tail keywords one can draw quality traffic to their websites rather than having irrelevant traffic in mass. Also, long-tail keywords are easy to rank compare to single-word keywords.

What are the LSI keywords?

Ans. LSI keywords or Latent Semantic Indexing are semantically associated with the main keyword that users enter over the search engines. You can find these keywords on the SERP under “Search related to….”

With the use of LSI keywords, which are linked with the main keywords in terms of relevancy, search engines can identify the semantic structure of the keywords and extract the hidden meaning of the text to bring the most appropriate results on SERPs.

What is Keyword Stuffing?

Ans. In order to optimize a web page putting the keywords on the pages forcefully is called Keyword Stuffing. It is considered a bad habit to use this as an SEO technique.

What is Keyword Density?

Ans. Keyword Density is the percentage of the keywords available on a web page. It can be found by (Number of Keywords / Total Number of Words*100).

So, if there is a blog that contains 500 words and 10 keywords, the Keywords Density will be 2%.

NOTE – The keyword Density should be between 2%-3%.

What is Keyword Research?

Ans. Keyword Research is the process of finding the most relevant and profitable keywords for your website. Keyword Research is the most crucial and important part of SEO. All other SEO tasks such as Competitor Analysis, On-Page Optimization, Off-Page Optimization and other promotions depend on keyword research.

Keyword Research creates the path of any website’s progress up or down. In digital marketing, it is a different type of market research. Thus it must be done in a very proper way.

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.

Every page must contain at least one H1 tag. This tag is very important in order to rank a web page in Google. Can We Have More Than 1 H1 tag on A Web Page?

What is Canonical URL?

Ans. The canonical URL helps Google bot to find the real URL. It tells Google that this certain URL is the main URL. Google crawls and Indexes the only Canonical URL.

The Canonical URL is an HTML link element, with the attribute of rel=”canonical”, located between the <head> tag of the web page.

For example:

www.example.com

example.com/

www.example.com/index.html

example.com/home.asp

You may find these URLs as the same URLs but technically all of these URLs are different. Google considers them as a different domain. Thus, to overcome the confusion of selecting the real or main URL, we must have Canonical Tag. Canonical Tag is also used to resolve the issues related to duplication.

What is the Meta Title & Meta Description?

Ans. The meta title is the title which displays in SERP when our results are shown in Google. The title tag appears on the search result pages just above the Meta Description. It conveys the searchers about our page.

The Properties of Meta Title-

It should not be more than 60 Characters
It must contain your top keywords
Never put numbers of Keywords
Every page should have its own Title Tag
It must be written in Simple & Descriptive Language

Title Tag Code Sample

<head><title>Example Title</title></head>

Meta Description is also an HTML attribute. It displays on the SERP just beneath the Title Tag. The Meta Description provides a little bit more information about the page. These are more descriptive and longer than the Title tag. It helps to increase the click-through rates.

The Properties of Meta Description-

It is perfect to have Meta Description within 150-160 Characters
It must contain the top keywords
Never put the Keywords forcefully
Every page should have its own Meta Description Tag
It must be written in Simple & Descriptive Manner

What is an SEO friendly URL?

Ans. SEO friendly URLs are those URLs that don’t contain any text, & special characters. These are also called Static URLs.

The Properties of SEO Friendly URL

The URL Length must not be more than 512 Pixel
The URL also display in the SERP so keep it readable and understandable
Always include your most important keywords in the URL
You should use Dash (-) between two words instead of Underscore (_)
Clean and simple URL helps users and search engines to understand a page topic easily
Search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) and users may have problems with complicated URLs

What is robots.txt?

Ans. Robots.txt is a file that instructs the search engine’s crawler to crawl the particular page or not. You can block the bots from crawling our web page with the help of this file.

Robots Exclusion Protocol, A group of web standards that regulate how robots crawl the web, access & content.

The Syntax –

User-agent: [User Agent Directives]

Disallow:

Sitemap:

There are different User-agent directives for each Search engine –

Google – *
Yahoo- Slurp
Bing- Bingbot
MSN- msnbot

If you have to block “/contact-us” page

User-agent: *

Disallow: /contact-us

Sitemap: www.searchenginelibro.com/sitemap.xml

If you have to block a specific folder

User-agent: *

Disallow: /category/

Sitemap: www.searchenginelibro.com/sitemap.xml

If you have to block a specific page that contains a sign “?”

User-agent: *

Disallow: /*?

Sitemap: www.searchenginelibro.com/sitemap.xml

If you have to block a specific page which ending with .asp

User-agent: *

Disallow: /*.asp$

Sitemap: www.searchenginelibro.com/sitemap.xml

If you have to block the pages which contain ?$=

User-agent: *

Disallow: /?$=

Sitemap: www.searchenginelibro.com/sitemap.xml

(It will stop the crawling those pages)

Robots.txt file must be placed in a websites’ top-level directory. It is case sensitive. It must be named robots.txt, not Robots.txt. Each root & sub-domain uses separate robots files.

Note- It is better to not have those pages which you have put in the robots.txt file.

Creating Robots.txt File –

Public.html/www.abc.com

Create New File Named robots.txt.

Write the Syntax. Mention the pages which you want to block.

What are Meta Robots?

Ans. Meta Robots is a directive code that provides instruction to Search Engine crawlers. This controls whether the page should be indexed or not. We can stop the Search Engine crawler from indexing any pages from our website. Robots.txt & Meta Robots have the same goal but in a different way.

The Different Types of Robots Meta Tag Value –

The values have different impacts on Search Engine crawlers. We can convey the crawlers to index, not index, follow, do not follow, and more by using these Tag Values.

index – There is no restriction on indexing the pages.

noindex – There is a restriction on indexing the page. The crawler will not index the pages which include Noindex tag value.

nofollow – It instructs the crawler to not follow the links on this page.

all – There are no restrictions for indexing.

none – It is equivalent to noindex, nofollow. This will neither index nor follow the links on the page.

noarchive – This will stop showing the cached links in search results while making any search in Google.

nosnippet – It will stop to show the text snippet in search results. It will not show the Meta Description in the SERP.

How To Write Meta Robots?

Meta Robots Tags are placed between the <Head> tag. These Meta Robots Tags Value can be written separately or combined. It is better to write them in a combined manner. The structure will be as follows –

What is Sitemap? How many types of Sitemap?

Ans. A sitemap is the collection of all pages of a website. It contains all pages of the website and helps the crawler to let know the pages of the website. It helps search engine bot to find & crawl the website’ pages.

There are two types of sitemap-

XML Sitemap
HTML Sitemap

XML Sitemap – XML or Extensible Markup Language is primarily created to facilitate the functionality of the search engines.

The XML sitemap can be found here –

www.searchenginelibro.com/sitemap.xml

HTML Sitemap – An HTML sitemap comprises one single HTML page that bears the links of all the web pages of the website. This sitemap holds the foundation of all web pages of any website.

HTML sitemap contains all formatted text files and linking tags of any website. It is particularly useful when you have a large website with multiple web pages because it helps you to improve the navigation of your website by listing all the web pages in one place in a user-friendly manner.

The HTML sitemap can be found here –

www.searchenginelibro.com/sitemap.html

NOTE- XML Sitemap is used for Search Engine while HTML Sitemap is used for users.

What is 301 Redirect?

Ans. There are two methods to redirect a web page to another web page.

301 Redirect (Also called Permanent Redirection)
302 Redirect (Also called Temporary Redirection)

301 Redirect is used when you have to move the web page to another webpage permanently. It is considered the best redirection. With the help of this redirection, we can also redirect the users from the old to a new one. Search Engine passes all the values associated with the old webpage to the new one. Moreover, 301 redirect also pushes all the link juice to the new web address that keeps the ranking of the website unaffected.

302 redirection is a temporary redirection. It is mostly used when development work is going on the website. It might be for a few hours or a few days.

What is HTTP Status Code? Please define 1XX, 2XX, 3XX, 4XX & 5XX status codes.

Ans. HTTP Response Status Codes are the codes that are issued by the server in response to client requests. As there might be different types of server responses, so there are status codes too. Let’s have a look at the most important status code in regards to SEO-

1xx informational response – the request was received, continuing process
2xx successful – the request was successfully received, understood, and accepted
3xx redirection – further action needs to be taken in order to complete the request
4xx client error – the request contains bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled
5xx server error – the server failed to fulfill an apparently valid request

101 – Switching Protocol

200 – OK

201 – Created

301 – Moved Permanently

302 – Found (Previously Moved Temporarily)

400 – Bad Request

402 – Payment Required

403 – Forbidden

404 – Not Found

500 – Internal Server Error

502 – Bad Gateway

503 – Service Unavailable

504 – Gateway Timeout

What is anchor text?

Ans. A text with the link is called Anchor Text. This Text can be clicked and land us to another web page or website.

Google also uses Anchor Text to understand the context behind the link. So. It might be a “Ranking Signal” too.

<a href=”link”>Anchor Text</a>

It helps users to connect to diverse data that are relevant to the source page or content. It can be of different types such as keyword-rich anchor, Generic Anchors, Branded Anchors, Image Anchors, and Naked URLs, etc.

SEO best practices dictate that anchor text should be relevant to the page you’re linking to, rather than generic text.

What is Image Alt Tag?

Ans. As we know Google Bots cannot read the images on the web. Therefore, we use the Alt tag with the images so that Google could understand what an image is all about.

The Image Alt text is generally considered as an alternate text for an image, which provides a textual alternative to the web crawlers to index the web page bearing the image.

It is best practice to put your important keyword as an image alt tag. It makes the image more relevant to your targeting keyword or topic.

What is Breadcrumb?

Ans. Breadcrumb is a set of website links which helps the users to navigate the website easily. It tells the users location on the website. It also shows how a visitor reached a specific page. Also, it helps to go back to the previous pages easily.

Read More – How Many Types of Breadcrumb?

Questions Related To Link Building/Backlinks

What are backlinks?

Ans. External links of any website are called a backlink for that website. Backlinks are also called “Incoming Links” or “Inbound Links”. In another way, “The Backlinks are a trust factor for any website in the eyes of Google.”

Backlinks help the users to shift from one web page to another web page. It helps to bring more visitors to the website and let the Google Crawler crawl it more often. Backlinks are very important for SEO.

Google considers it as a very important ranking signal. So, having more quality backlinks can help to rank on top.

There are two types of Backlinks

Do-Follow Links
No-Follow Links

Do-Follow Links are the links which allow the Search Engine crawler to crawl this link. Getting a Do-Follow link is always good for any website. It helps to rank higher.

Also, it is always considered good to get backlinks from the high visiting website. It helps to increase the referral traffic too on the website. The higher the link juice or link points are, the greater would be the search ranking of that web page, as these links make the web page appear very relevant and popular to the Google search engines.

No-Follow Links are those links which tell the Search Engine crawler to ignore the links. It is just the opposite of a Do-Follow link. These links cannot be followed by bots but users can visit the links.

There should be a No-Follow link too on the website but not more than Do-Follow links. If you are getting even No-Follow links from high ranking or visiting websites, you should have links from them. Now Google considers the No-Follow link too. See here what they have said about it.

No-follow link attributes are structured in the following manner:

What is internal linking?

Ans. Internal linking is a process of providing hyperlinks on the web pages that connect to the same domain. It is another way of directing the visitors from one web page to another of the same website. They help search engine crawlers to crawl and index all the inner pages of a website easily.

What is an outgoing link?

Ans. An Outbound Link is a hyperlink that points to a third party webpage/website.

Outbound links bear great importance in SEO as they provide your web pages with more quality and value for the search engine ranking. Google search engine counts outbound links as third-party votes which improve the ranking of your web page.

What are the different types of Off-Page Activities?

Ans. Creating backlinks comes under Off-Page Optimization. We can create backlink with the help of different off-page activities. Here, I am mentioning the top off-page activities which are very helpful in creating the backlink.

Guest Posting
Article Submission
Blog Submission
Directory Submission
Classifieds Submission
Social Bookmarking
Image Submission
Blog Commenting
Forum Posting
Press Release
Content Syndication
PPT Submission
Infographic Submission
Video Submission

Before creating the backlinks you must check the website’s Domain Authority, Moz Rank, and Spam Score. It helps you from creating backlinks on bad or spam websites. Always create the backlink with the low spam score website.

Questions Related To Google Updates

What is Google Algorithm?

Ans. Google algorithm is a set of commands written for the purpose of feeding back with search results relevant to the queries made.

Google’s algorithm does the work for you by searching out Web pages that contain the keywords you used to search, then assigning a rank to each page based on several factors, including how many times the keywords appear on the page, the quality of the page, etc.

Google uses numerous other criteria that change periodically to deliver more relevant results.

The major Google Updates are –

Also See – Google Cheat Sheet. Google Update 2017, Google Update 2019

Questions Related To SEO Tools

What is Google Webmaster Tools/Google Search Console?

Ans. Google Search Console is a tool provided by Google. It provides the facility to submit the new website to Google Bot and ask it to crawl.

It was on 20th May 2015 that Google changed the name of Google Webmaster Tools to Google Search Console.

Google Search Console provides free web services to the webmasters. It shows the online performance of the website along with the issues on the website.

Google Search Console helps the business owners, SEOs, & site administrators to see the Crawl Errors, Crawl Stats, Error in Sitemap, 404 Pages, Backlinks, and more.

What is Google Analytics?

Ans. Launched in 2005 by Google, Google Analytics is one of the most empowering analytical tools in SEO, which helps the webmasters to track and monitor the traffic on their websites.

It is a free & premium web service. It provides more information about the user, website performance in depth. We can integrate Google Analytics with other Google products such as Google Search Console, Google Data Studio, Google Ads, and more.

Important – Top 10 Tools for SEO in 2020

What are the most important Google ranking factors?

Ans. Google has stated almost 200 ranking factors but sometimes you don’t need to work on all those. Also, it is tougher to go through all those 200 ranking factors to make the SEO strategies. So, we have done the research and also taken help from the major SEO blogs such as Moz, Search Engine Land, Neil Patel, and more.

After completing a thorough study of the Search Engine and its algorithms; we have found the following are the major ranking factors. The top 10 ranking factors which affect the search engine algorithm of Google are:

Site Security
Mobile-First Index
Website Page Speed
Internal Linking
Schema Markup
Content Quality and Length
Social Enrichment
Time on Site
The Power of Domain
Optimize Images for Improved UX

How can I see which page is Crawled & Indexed in Google?

Ans. There are two ways to check these both (Crawled & Indexed) –

Search Console Tool
Manually

Search Console Tool – With the help of the Search Console tool, we can check if a website/web page is crawled or indexed. We can also find out the time of crawling and indexing too.

In some cases, if they are not crawled or indexed, we can request Google to crawl & index.

Manually – We can also perform a manual search on Google by typing following on Google search bar

For Index – site: www.searchenginelibro.com

For Crawl – cache:www.searchenginelibro.com

What is Google PageRank?

Ans. Google PageRank is an algorithm that is used by Google to rank the pages. It counts between 0 to 10. The higher number is considered good.

It was developed by Google’s Founder Larry Page & Sergey Brin earlier as software for ranking a webpage.

Google hasn’t updated PageRank for a long time. So it is considering that Google is not using PageRank to rank the web pages anymore now. Google’s John Mueller said Google probably won’t update Toolbar PageRank in the future.

What is Domain Authority?

Ans. Domain Authority is a metric that tells how easily a website can rank in Google. It is developed by Moz. Nowadays it is considered a key metric to check the performance of a website. It scores between 1-100 . The greater your DA, the more likely your website to have strong traffic and high ranking in Google.

There are lots of tools available on the web where we can check the Domain Authority of any website.

Read Also – How to increase Domain Authority

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.

What is Google Penalty?

Ans. A Google Penalty is actually a manual action done by Googlers. Google has deployed a great number of human resources behind this. They manually visit the website and check them. It might be very bad to get reviewed manually. You might lose your Website Traffic, Ranking, Conversions instantly.

If you are doing something very bad, spam, and follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines; you need to be worried.

The Complete List of Google Penalties & How to Recover

What is SEO Audit?

Ans. SEO Audit is a process to check your website in respect of SEO elements. It contains lots of points that must be checked during the performing SEO Audit of any website. It will help you to find the errors on your website. Later you can make changes over there and make your website errorless.

The SEO Audit also helps you in creating the SEO Action Plan for your website.

Search Engine Libro

Be Digital…

SEO Interview Questions & Answers

Questions Related To Search Engine

Questions Related To SEO

Questions Related To Link Building/Backlinks

Questions Related To Google Updates

Questions Related To SEO Tools

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