Interview Questions and Answers

This is almost always the first SEO interview question you will need to answer. SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic in organic search results. This is done by increasing the visibility of a website or web page on a search engine without paying for it.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

Marketing had seen a paradigm shift, and every year something new has been available on the Internet for people to use and explore. With the increase in online behavior, the race to show up on the first page of search engines has become extremely competitive. For a business to succeed in the online world, it must implement SEO to stay on top.

Local SEO is targeted towards users and potential customers who are interested in local searches for a business’s products or services. These basically include location-based queries and results.

A search engine is a software system, which searches the world wide web for relevant information on a particular query raised by a user on the Internet.

• Google
• Bing
• Yahoo!
• DuckDuckGo
• Yandex
• YouTube
• Amazon
• Baidu

WWW stands for the World Wide Web. It is a collection of websites stored in web servers, which are connected to local computers.

Googlebot is Google’s web crawler. It finds, crawls, and indexes web pages.

On the Internet, a domain name (e.g. withoutbook.com) is an address where Internet users can access your website, and it includes web addresses, email addresses, and the addresses of the Internet protocols. It is basically a shortcut to the server that hosts your website.

Without a domain name, one would have to enter the full IP address to visit a website. IP addresses are numerical labels and are not very convenient for regular use.

A domain name has two main elements:

• The website’s name (e.g. withoutbook)
• The domain name extension (e.g. .com)

It is good to have three primary keywords and some secondary keywords, but it shouldn’t look unnatural within the content, and the number of keywords to be used depends on the content length, page flow, keyword difficulty, etc.

Web crawling is the process where a web crawler (spiderbot/spider/crawler), an internet bot, browses the World Wide Web for web indexing. It uses hyperlinks to visit pages and copies them for processing and indexing by the search engine so that users on the Internet can search more quickly and efficiently.

Search engine submission is the process of submitting your website to search engines to ensure that it gets crawled and indexed. Even though search engines are smart enough to find your website and index it easily, it is advisable to follow through with the search engine submission as you will get the opportunity to submit some useful information about your website from your end, and the search engines will alert you if potential errors are there on your site.

SERP stands for search engine results page. This is the page where users see all the results of their queries on search engines.

Both organic and paid results are types of search results on SERP shown on the basis of quality and relevance to the user query. Organic results are not paid to show up on SERP. It is very hard to rank high organically, and it requires SEO.

Paid results require bidding on keywords, and based on the Max CPC (cost per click) and quality score, they are positioned above the organic search results on SERP, and these are paid advertisements. The more you score, the less money you need to pay.

On-page SEO is used to ensure that the website performance is improving and better by optimizing the meta tags and descriptions, page title, URL structure, keyword density, body tags, internal linking, images, etc.

Off-page SEO involves activities such as guest blogging, reverse guest blogging, press releases, social networking, etc. These are done away from the website to promote and increase the visibility of the same.

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It is the complete address of a web page or a document on www. A URL contains the following parts:

• Protocol: A method used to process the URL (https, http, etc.)
• Domain: The domain name
• Path/File: The exact location of a page, file, other assets, etc.
• Query string: Parameters for dynamic data
• Hash: A specific section of a web page

URLs that are easily understandable by both search engines and users are SEO-friendly URLs. They will typically include keywords, and they are mostly self-explanatory and future-proof so that they will not become obsolete over the years).

Web hosting is the www equivalent of buying a property. Web hosting companies will provide you with space to build your website. The server will have to be connected to the Internet for this hosting purpose.

HTML header tags are used to highlight the headings (h1 level) and the subheadings (h2–h6 levels) within the content of a web page. These tags are also called header tags or heading tags. If you skip from h1 to h3, the hierarchy will be broken, and it is not advisable for on-page SEO. Every page should possess only one h1 tag unless it is using HTML5, which allows for more.

Meta titles (page titles) and meta descriptions are two different pieces of the HTML code, which are important when you are creating a web page. Much like the back-cover blurb of a book, these elements will tell users the title of the page they have landed on and will give them the summary of that page when it shows up on SERPs. This gives the users an idea of what your page is all about and whether it will be relevant for them to visit your website.

Internal links are hyperlinks that connect one web page to another web page in the same domain.

A well-planned internal linking structure can help users navigate the website without any confusion. It is a good practice to keep every important page within two–three clicks from the home page.

Inbound links are links coming from another domain to your domain.

Outbound links are links going out from your domain to another domain.

Keeping a few outbound links to high-authority sites may be helpful, but excessive outbound links could hurt your SEO.

Inbound links are also known as backlinks and are links coming from another domain to your domain.

Anchor texts are used by search engines to understand the context of the web page to which it is linking. The clickable text in a hyperlink is called anchor text. 

DA or domain authority (a metric developed by Moz) is a search engine ranking score, which ranges from 0 to 100. The score predicts how well a website will rank on SERP. The higher your DA, the better chances you have at ranking higher.

While DA (domain authority) explains the authority of your entire website, PA (page authority) describes the authority of a specific page based on quality backlinks, social sharing, etc.

The DA requires more time and effort than PA, but the former is more worthwhile in the long run. However, both are mutually beneficial.

Top-level domain (TLD) is the final extension of an Internet address, for example, .com, .net, .org, .co.in, etc.

In SEO, ccTLD, also known as the country code top-level domain, is a domain extension reserved for a country and has two characters. Here are a few examples for ccTLD: .it for Italy and .in for India.

PBN or private blog network is a network of websites, which is built to link these websites to a single website for SERP ranking purposes. 

SEO tools analyze the performance of web pages and give insights for high placement on the SERP.

• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics
• Moz
• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Screaming Frog
• Yoast SEO
• Ubersuggest
• Majestic SEO
• Serpstat
• SE Ranking
• Sprout Social
• SpyFu
• Buzzsumo
• Raven Tools
• KeywordTool.io

All hyperlinks are dofollow links by default unless specified as nofollow links. When search engine crawlers find a link, they crawl the page and pass the link juice as a vote of quality. The dofollow links from high-authority sites will help a site rank better in SERP by being quality backlinks.

Nofollow links are coded in a way that search engines do not crawl them or count them as votes of quality. You can use this when you want to link third-party sites on your website without passing the authority to those sites.

The usage of keywords and key phrases within a website’s content is known as SEO writing. This helps increase the organic visibility of the website on the SERP.

Keywords are words or phrases users on the Internet use to find relevant results to their queries. They are also known as search queries. Figuring out potential keywords and using them in your website content can help you get a better ranking by search engines.

The number of times a particular keyword appears in a web page content is called keyword frequency. While the appropriate keyword frequency can optimize your website, using them excessively can quickly become a case of keyword stuffing.

Keyword difficulty gives the measure of how difficult it is to get ranked for a particular keyword based on its high usage.

The distance or proximity between two keywords within a body of text on a web page is called keyword proximity. If the keywords are closer to each other in a phrase, the phrase will carry more weight.

Keyword density is the ratio or percentage of keywords used on a specific page. Around 3 to 4 percent is considered best practice.

Keyword stuffing is considered to be a form of the black-hat SEO method. Increasing the keyword frequency to rank for specific keywords is generally frowned upon and could get your website penalized.

Google algorithm’s ability to identify different word forms on the basis of a particular word in a search query is called keyword stemming. This is done by adding prefixes, suffixes, pluralization, etc.

Keyword prominence shows the prominent placement (on the header, in the opening paragraph, at the start of a sentence, in meta tags, etc.) of keywords within a web page.

Keywords can be made into a more specific combination of several words. These are called long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords can be very specific and, hence, can be good for attracting quality traffic from people who are interested in that specific search query, and they are more likely to transform this kind of traffic into conversions.

NAP (name, address, phone number) helps search engines to identify the list of businesses to be displayed for location-based searches.

Robots.txt is a text file that instructs web crawlers about the pages on your site to crawl or not to crawl.

Google Search Console (previously known as Webmaster Tool) is a free service by Google that allows users to monitor the health and visibility of their websites. It offers the following insights:

• A confirmation that Google can find and crawl a site
• Troubleshooting indexing issues
• Re-indexing the fresh or updated content
• Showing the backlinks to the site
• Fixing problems in mobile usability, AMP, and other search features
• Monitoring Google Search traffic data for the site: How often the site appears on SERP, which specific search queries show the site, how often users click through for those search queries, etc.
• Alerts and notifications about spam, indexing problems, or other issues

A search engine cannot understand an image or what it is about. So, to give it an idea, the image alt text helps. It is an HTML attribute. If for some reason, the image is unable to be displayed on a browser, one can read the alt tags and understand what the image is about.

Referral traffic is the visits that you get from uncrawlable websites like getting traffic from a link within an email or social media.

If a page is accessible by several URLs or several pages have similar content (e.g., pages with both mobile and desktop versions), Google will see these as duplicates and will pick one as the canonical version to crawl unless you specify the canonical URL.

It lists the web pages and the frequency of updates. It is also called an XML (extensible markup language) sitemap and is meant only for search engines. Through this, the search engines will know that they are supposed to crawl and index important pages frequently.

Google algorithm is a set of rules. These rules help the search engine to find on the web the relevant search results to a search query by a user. It uses several factors to rank a web page for specific keywords. They are updated every year.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offered that tracks and analyzes the performance of a website. The main purpose of GA is to help you make sound decisions to improve your site’s performance, drive traffic to it, and generate revenues for you.