Top SEO Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher

Top SEO Interview Questions and Answers for Fresher

Find out here top SEO interview questions and answers 2018 for Fresher. Read these SEO interview questions and answers for SEO job interview. When you are preparing to a SEO Interview Questions and Answers apply for SEO Fresher job Get a complete list of top SEO Interview questions and answers for freshers.

1. What is SEO & why is it so important?

Ans:- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the method used to increase a website’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Developing an SEO strategy for your business can help draw consumer traffic to your website as well as grow your sales and revenue.

2. What is a Search Engine?

Ans:- A search engine is a web site that collects and organizes content from all over the internet. Those wishing to locate something would enter a query about what they’d like to find and the engine provides links to content that matches what they want.

Top Search Engines:- Google.com, Bing.com and Yahoo.com

3. What is a Domain?

Ans:- A domain name is your website name. A domain name is the address where Internet users can access your website. A domain name is used for finding and identifying computers on the Internet. Computers use IP addresses, which are a series of number. However, it is difficult for humans to remember strings of numbers.

4. What is a website?

Ans:- A website is a collection of related web pages, including multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name, and published on at least one web server.

5. What is Crawling?

Ans:- A crawler is a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a “spider” or a “bot.”

6. What is Indexing?

Ans:- Indexing is the process of adding web-pages into Google search. Depending upon which meta tag you used (index or NO-index), Google will crawl and index your pages. A no-index tag means that that page will not be added into the web search’s index.

7. Difference Between Crawling & Indexing?

Ans:- Crawling means the search robot crawl or fetch the web pages while Indexing means search robot crawl the web pages, saved the information and it appear in the search engine result page.

8. What is SERP?

Ans:- SERP is the page displayed by a web search engine in response to a query by a searcher. The main component of the SERP is the listing of results that are returned by the search engine in response to a keyword query, although the page may also contain other results such as advertisements.

9. What is On Page SEO?

Ans:- On Page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a pagethat can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.

10. What is Off Page SEO?

Ans:- Off page SEO refers to techniques that can be used to improve the position of a web site in the search engine results page (SERPs). Few SEO Off page Activity are:-

Forum Posting, Article Submissions, Blog Submission, Classified Submission, Question & Answers, Image Submission, Video Submissions, Infographic Submissions and Guest Blogging.

11. What is the definition of keyword?

Ans:- A keyword, in the context of search engine optimization, is a particular word or phrase that describes the contents of a Web page. Keywords are intended to act as shortcuts that sum up an entire page.

12. What is long tail keyword?

Ans:- A long-tail keyword is a keyword phrase that contains at least three words (though some say two or more is considered long-tail). Long-tail keywords are used to target niche demographics rather than mass audiences.

13. What are LSI keywords?

Ans:- LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. These are keywords that are similar to synonyms and related keywords, but not entirely so. They are the words a normal human would use when talking about the keyword topic.

14. What is Canonical URL?

Ans:- A canonical tag is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs.

15. What are backlinks?

Ans:- Backlinks are also known as inbound or incoming links, and they are links to your website from another place on the internet. They are extremely useful to search engines, because they give a good indication that a website is popular.

16. What is a Do-Follow link?

Ans:- Dofollow links allow google (all search engines) to follow them and reach our website. Giving us link juice and a backlink. If a webmaster is linking back to you with this link both Search Engine and Humans will be able to follow you. The best way to give someone dofollow love is allowing keyword in the anchor text.

17. What is No-Follow link?

Ans:- “Nofollow” provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.” Originally, the no-follow attribute.

18. What is internal link?

Ans:- An internal link is a type of hyperlink on a web-page to another page or resource, such as an image or document, on the same website or domain.

19. Difference between Internal & External link?
Ans:- External = links that point to a separate domain
Internal = links that point to content within the same domain

20. What is robots.txt?

Ans:- Robots.txt is a text file webmasters create to instruct web robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl pages on their website.

IF you want to Allow All Search Engine to crawling your website, just put the follow code:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

IF you want to block all Search Engine from crawling your website, just put the follow code:

User-agent:*
Disallow: /

IF you want to block Google from crawling your website, just put the follow code:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

21. What is .htaccess file?

Ans:- .htaccess is a configuration file for use on web servers running the Apache Web Server software. When a .htaccess file is placed in a directory which is in turn ‘loaded via the Apache Web Server’, then the .htaccess file is detected and executed by the Apache Web Server software.

22. What is XML Sitemap?

Ans:- An XML sitemap is a bit of Extensible Markup Language (XML), a standard machine-readable format consumable by search engines and other data-munching programs like feed readers. XML sitemaps convey information about one thing: the URLs that make up a site.

23. Difference between XML Sitemap & HTML Sitemap?

Ans:- XML and HTML Sitemaps are designed for different purposes as XML sitemap is specially designed for the search engines as it is submitted to the webmaster tools for crawling the website. Whereas, HTML sitemap is designed for humans as they can clearly see it on the website as an extra web page and all the visitors of the website can make use of it for understanding the website.

26. What are doorway pages?

Ans:- Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spam indexing. This is for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending visitors to a different page.

25. What are 404 errors?

Ans:- A 404 page is the web-page served to a user who tries to access a page that is unavailable. The 404 error indicates that the server where the page should reside has been contacted but that the page is does not exist at that address. 404 errors can result when pages or files are moved or deleted or when URLS are mistyped.

26. Difference between 404 & Soft 404 errors?

Ans:- The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with a given server, but the server could not find what was requested.

Basically, Soft 404 is a page that looks like a 404 but returns a HTTP status code 200. I mean, the website might show a “Page Not Found”-style page, but search engines such as Google will see the page and think that it’s an actual live page.

27. What is anchor text?

Ans:- Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. SEO best practices dictate that anchor text be relevant to the page you’re linking to, rather than generic text. The blue, underlined anchor text is the most common as it is the web standard, although it is possible to change the color and underlining through html code.

28. What is Image Alt Text?

Ans:- To optimize your image use Alt tag, because crawler couldn’t read the image. So always save the image with Alt tag. It helps search engines understand what an image is about. Alt text or alternate text is an attribute added to an image tag in HTML. This text appears inside the image container when the image can not be displayed.

Image Alt Text Code:-  <img src=”Image Url” alt=”Image name”>

29. What is Google Webmaster Tools?

Ans:- Google Search Console or Webmaster Tools is a free web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check website status like indexing status, Website click, backlink and optimize visibility of their websites.

30. What is Google Analytics?

Ans:- Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin. Google Analytics is now the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet.

31. What is 301 Redirect?

Ans:- A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances, the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website

32. What is 302 Redirect?

Ans:- A 302 redirect means that the move is only temporary. Search engines need to figure out whether to keep the old page, or replace it with the one found at the new location.

33. What is Google PageRank?

Ans:- PageRank (PR) is a calculation, famously invented by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, which evaluates the quality and quantity of links to a web-page to determine a relative score of that page’s importance and authority on a 0 to 10 scale.

34. What is Domain Authority?

Ans:- Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). Domain Authority is calculated by evaluating linking root domains, number of total links, MozRank etc

35. What is Page Authority?

Ans:- Page Authority (PA) is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a specific-page will rank on search engine result pages (SERP). Page Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.

36. What is Search Engine Submission?

Ans:- Search engine submission is an effective tool of web promotion. It is use to cache your website instantly. It refers to the direct submission of a website to a search engine. SES is a form of internet marketing that helps a webmasters increase the rankings of a web pages or pages.

37. What is RSS Feed?

Ans:- RSS is a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format. These feeds can, for example, allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregation.

What is latest Google Update?

38. What is Google Panda?

Ans:- Google Panda is a change to Google’s search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of “low-quality sites” or “thin sites”, in particular “content farms”, and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.

39. What is Google Penguin?

Ans:- The update is aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines by using now declared black-hat SEO techniques involved in increasing artificially the ranking of a webpage by manipulating the number of links pointing to the page.

40. What is Google Hummingbird?

Ans:- The Hummingbird is what Google is calling the latest (greatest?) algorithm that they slipped in under our radar in August. If the rumors are true, the Hummingbird will take a search engine query using long-tailed keywords and try to decipher the context of the question rather than chase the specific keywords within the question. The goal is to provide results that actually answer the question.

41. What is Mobile Geddon?

Ans:- The main effect of this update is to give priority to websites that display well on smartphones and other mobile devices. The change does not affect searches made from a desktop computer or a laptop

42. What is Google Pigeon?

Ans:- The Google Pigeon is the code name given to one of Google‘s local search algorithm updates. This update was released on July 24, 2014. The update is aimed to increase the ranking of local listing in a search. The changes will also affect the search results shown in Google Maps along with the regular Google search results.

43. What is Google Penalty?

Ans:- A Google penalty is the negative impact on a website’s search rankings based on updates to Google’s search algorithms and/or manual review. The penalty can be a by-product of an algorithm update or an intentional penalization for various black-hat SEO techniques.

44. What is Black Hat SEO?

Ans:- The black hat SEO refers to the use of unethical SEO strategies, techniques and tactics that focus only on search engines and not a human audience, and usually does not obey search engines guidelines.

45. What is White Hat SEO?

Ans:- White hat SEO refers to the usage of optimization strategies, techniques and tactics that focus on a human audience opposed to search engines and completely follows search engine rules and policies

46. What is contextual backlink?

Ans:- Contextual backlinks are links to external websites that are placed within the main or primary content of a web page. Contextual backlinks come naturally within content. They are not links that are placed within the navigation, sidebars, widgets, footer or ads.

47. What is Alexa Rank in SEO?

Ans:- The algorithm according to which Alexa traffic ranking is calculated, is simple. It is based on the amount of traffic recorded from users that have the Alexa toolbar installed over a period of three months. The reach refers to the number of Alexa users who visit a particular site in one day

48. What is referral traffic?

Ans:- Referral traffic is Google’s method of reporting visits that came to your site from sources outside of its search engine. When someone clicks on a hyperlink to go to a new page on a different website, Analytics tracks the click as a referral visit to the second site.

49. What is Google Trends?

Ans:- Google Trends is an online search tool that allows the user to see how often specific keywords, subjects and phrases have been queried over a specific period of time. Results are displayed in a graph that Google calls a “Search Volume Index” graph.

50. What is RankBrain in SEO?

Ans:- Rank Brain is an artificial intelligence (AI) program used to help process Google search queries. RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities, called vectors, that the computer can understand.

51. What is Spiders in SEO?

Ans:- A spider is a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a “crawler” or a “bot.”. Spiders can crawl through a site’s pages in several ways.

52. What is a parasite SEO?

Ans:- Parasite SEO is where you use someone else site that has a large authority to build pages on and then rank using links you normally wouldn’t be able to use on your own domain.

53. How to check my website is penalized?

Ans:- The best way to check if your website was penalized by an automatic penalty is to login to Google analytics and review your Google organic traffic. If you see a drop in traffic during the dates that Google released an algorithmic change then most probably you were hit and that’s the reason that your traffic dropped. (or) Some of free tools available in online.

54. What is Broken Links?

Ans:- A broken link or dead link is a link on a web page that no longer works because the website is encountering one or more of the reasons below.

55. What is Guest Blogging?

Ans:- Guest Blogging is a content marketing and SEO technique where someone writes and publishes a blog post on a third party website or blog to promote their personal/corporate brand.

56. What is Guest posting?

Ans:- “Guest posting” means writing and publishing an article on someone else’s website or blog. I offer this on my own site (occasionally) and do it quite a bit on other blogs with audiences that I want to speak to. It’s a great way to connect with new readers and get your name out.

57. What is Content Curation?

Ans:- Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information.

58. What is Content Syndication?

Ans:- Content syndication is the process of pushing your blogpost, article, video or any piece of web-based content out to other third-parties who will then republish it on their own sites.

59. What is Link Reclamation?

Ans:- Link reclamation is the technique of fixing broken links of your company website and other websites with links pointing to your domain.

60. What is keyword cannibalization?

Ans:- Keyword cannibalization is something to take seriously as it can potentially damage your rankings for multiple reasons. Keyword cannibalization happens when a website’s information architecture rely on a single keyword or phrase on multiple place of the website.

61. What is Guestographic Method?

Ans:- Guestographic is a white hat link-building strategy used by SEO experts. They call itguestographic because you are combining “guest post” with an “infographic”.

62. What is Blog?

Ans:- A blog is a website that consists of entries called posts that appear in reverse chronological order with the most recent entry appearing first, similar in format to a daily journal. Blogs typically include features such as comments and links to increase user interactivity.

63. What is Link Bait?

Ans:- Linkbait is content that people link to from their own websites because of the content’s high quality.

64. What is content marketing?

Ans:- The idea of content marketing is that sharing valuable information is a great way to attract an audience and to build a brand. Blogging is one of the most well-known ways of content marketing.

65. What is E-mail Marketing?

Ans:- Email marketing is a kind of internet marketing that occurs when a company sends promotional messages or materials to groups of people by email. Usually, these messages contain advertisements, commercial messages, sales solicitation or donation, or a call for business.

66. What do you mean by Bad Link?

Ans:- Bad links are:

• Links from sites that are not relevant to your site.
• Links from link exchanges.
• Paid links.
• Spammy links from blogs or articles.
• Link from the same anchor texts that come from multiple sites.
• Links from low-rank pages.
• Getting Links from pages with low traffic.
• Links from the sites that are out of Google Index.

67. List of website analytics tools?

Ans:- List of tools are:

• Net Insights
• PageSpeed Insights
• Google Analytics
• Google Webmaster Tool
• Alexa Rank Checker Tool
• Backlink Checker by Ahrefs
• Plagiarism Checker
• Google Trends

68. 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.

69. What are the SEO tools do you use?

The SEO tools that I use are Google analytic, Keyword Planner, Alexa, open site explorer, Google Webmaster.

70. What do you mean by Backlink?

The incoming links to your website or webpage are referred as Backlink. It is also called as an inbound link.

71. What are outbound Links?

The outbound links are a Links, from your website to another webpage or website.

72. Can you tell me something about Googlebot?

To index and update a web-page Google uses the Googlebot (Web Spider). Caching, Crawling and indexing of a web-page are done through Googlebot by collecting details from that webpage.

73. What are Spiders, Robots and Crawlers and what are their functions?

Spiders, robot and crawler, they are all same and referred by different names. It is a software program that follows, or “Crawls” different links throughout the internet, and then grabs the content from the sites and adds to the search engine indexes.

74. What does it mean if nothing appears on doing search on the domain?

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

• May be the site is banned by search engines
• May be no index by search engines
• Some canonical issues

75. How many types of Meta Tags are there in SEO?

There are 3 types of Meta tags in SEO.

• Meta Title Tag
• Description tag
• Meta Keyword tag

76. How many characters limits in & Meta Description and Title tag?

We can add 70 characters in title tag and 222 characters in Meta Description tag.

77. Can you differentiate between ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’ link?

Nofollow links do not pass Link juice and have no impact on Google Ranking Algorithm. Dofollow link passes link juice and has an impact on Google Ranking Algorithm. Any link which has the attribute rel=”Nofollow” is called as No Follow backlink. NoFollow backlinks do not pass any PR value, but still helpful for link diversity.

Can you give examples of NoFollow Backlinks?

Generally all public websites like social media sites, business listing sites etc offer NoFollow backlink. Example: Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia etc site offer these links.

78. What is keyword density and what is the formula for knowing keyword density?

From SEO point of view, keyword density will definitely help to stand out your content from others.

keyword density formula is ( Total number of keyword/ total number of words in your article) multiply by 100.

79. What is the use of link building in SEO?

Links are one of the crucial elements of SEO. With high-quality links, we can improve the ranking of the site.

Can you explain certain rules which you follow in doing link building?

Yes, I use many specific rules to define the quality of links. I will look at following factors before submissions.

• Quality of Backlink (PR, PA, DA must be good)
• Relevancy of the content between 2 sites
• Proper use of Anchor Text
• Avoid site-wide links
• Avoid links from low-quality sites

80. What is SEO friendly URL?

Ans. SEO friendly URLs are used to optimize the structure and word usage in URLs so that the process of indexing a website by search engines become improved. SEO techniques, such as putting keywords and having proper length and file structure in the URLs, help in improving website ranking and enhancing website navigation.

82. How can I see what pages are indexed in Google?

Ans. There are two ways to see if the web pages of any specific website are indexed by Google.

1) One can check the Google Index Status of any specific website through Google Webmaster tools. After adding the website on the dashboard and verifying the ownership, clicking on the tab “Index status” would show the numbers of pages indexed by Google.

2) One can also perform a manual search on Google by typing on Google search bar

Example – site:http://www.seorankone1.com/, and the number of pages indexed would reflect on the SERP.

83. What is Directory Submission?
Ans. Directory submission in SEO relates to the listing of any web blog or site with the relevant details over various web directories under a specific category. Directory submission performs the same function as phone directory and increases the popularity of websites with greater online exposure. Directory submission can be both free of cost and paid

84. What is Article submission?

Ans. Article submission is considered a part of Off Page SEO techniques. Article submission, which involves the presentation of articles to online article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, Sooperarticles etc. with proper anchor text for link building, is performed for the promotion of any website.

85. What is Press Release submission?
Ans. Press release submission involves writing press releases and submitting them to effective and popular PR sites for building incoming links to any specific website. Online press-releases remain in the database forever, which means that they could be used anytime by anyone in need. It also enhances the online visibility of websites in the future.

86. What are Classified ads?
Ans. A classified ad is a form of advertising which is particularly common in newspapers, online and other periodicals which may be sold or distributed free of charge. Classified advertisements are much cheaper than larger display advertisements used by businesses, although display advertising is more widespread.

87. 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 particular 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.

88. 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.

89. 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+.