SEO Interview Questions and Answers

Ques 1. What is DA?

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.

Ques 2. Explain the difference between DA and PA.

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.

Ques 3. What is TLD?

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

Ques 4. What is ccTLD?

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.

Ques 5. What is PBN?

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. 

Ques 6. What are SEO tools?

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

Ques 7. Name some popular SEO tools.

• 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

Ques 8. Distinguish between a dofollow link and a nofollow link.

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.

Ques 9. What is SEO writing?

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.

Ques 10. Explain keywords for SEO.

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.

Ques 11. What is keyword frequency?

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.

Ques 12. What is keyword difficulty?

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

Ques 13. What is keyword proximity?

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.

Ques 14. What is keyword density?

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

Ques 15. What is keyword stuffing?

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.

Ques 16. What is keyword stemming?

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.

Ques 17. What is keyword prominence?

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.

Ques 18. What are long-tail keywords?

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.

Ques 19. What is NAP?

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

Ques 20. What is robots.txt?

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

Ques 21. What is Google Search Console or the Webmaster tool?

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

Ques 22. What is image alt text?

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.

Ques 23. What is referral traffic?

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

Ques 24. What is a canonical URL?

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.

Ques 25. What is a sitemap in SEO?

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.

Ques 26. What is Google algorithm?

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.

Ques 27. What is Google Analytics?

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.