SEO(Search Engine Optimization)

1) Which is better — Meta Robot tags or robots.txt?

Ans) Meta Robot tags are better as it helps in forcing the search engine crawlers not to index and display hidden pages. It also ensures that the link equity is not being lost, with the use of the ‘follow’ command.


2). What are doorway pages?

Ans)Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing. 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.


3) What is the limit of a robot.txt file?

Ans) Googlebot reads only the first 500kb present in the robots.txt file.


4) What are the criteria for the uniqueness of a page?

Ans) Some of the criteria for the uniqueness of a page are code similarity, text similarity, page names, titles, headings, page titles and metatags.


5) Name some of the few black hat techniques that one should avoid

Ans) Link farming, doorway pages, cloaking, keyword stuffing and hidden text


6) How to remove toxic links to a site?

Ans) First use a link checker tool to find out the toxic links to the site, then use the ‘Google Disavow’ tool to remove the link.


7) What is XML Sitemap? How is it important?

Ans) XML or Extensible Markup Language is primarily created to facilitate the functionality of the search engines. A good XML sitemap informs the search engines about the number of pages present on a specific website, the frequency of their updates and the time of the last modifications performed on them, which helps in proper indexing of the website by the search engines.


8)What is DA?

Ans) Domain Authority (DA) is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERP).


9) What is Bounce Rate?

Ans) It is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.


10) What are organic results?

Ans) Organic results are those which are displayed on SERPs due to their relevancy, as opposed to those which are being advertised. These are some of the popular questions asked in SEO interviews. Always be prepared to answer all types of questions — technical skills, interpersonal, leadership or methodology. If you are someone who has recently started your career in SEO, you can always get certified to understand the industry-related terminology, skills and methodologies.


11) Are you aware of SEO techniques?

Ans) There are two SEO techniques: White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO or Negative SEO.


12)Best way of getting a natural backlink to your site.

Ans) Some of the best ways of getting a natural backlink to your site are blog commenting, article marketing, social networking site profile, link exchange, etc.


13) What will you do for the company website you are working for, decides to move all the contents to a new domain?

Ans) In that case, it would be important to update the previous site with a permanent redirect i.e 301 redirection to the new pages. After that, all the previous content should be taken down in order to avoid duplication of the content.


14) How many types of Meta Tags are there in SEO and what are their characters limits?

Ans) There are two types of Meta tags in SEO:

  • Description Meta tag: 150 characters limits
  • Keyword Meta tag: 200 characters limits


15) How you will start keyword research? Which tools would you use for doing it?

Ans) First of all, you have to decide your topic that might bring traffic to your website. For that, you can use Google Trends or leverage on Twitter’s trending topics (based on geographical locations) to find the best possible topic. Few of the tools to decide keywords are keyword.io, ubersuggest.io, and Google Keyword Planner to find related keywords as well as their search volume.


16) Differentiate between Dofollow and Nofollow.

Ans) Dofollow link
It is a kind of hyperlink which enhances the ranking of your site as it acts as a backlink that is counted by search engines.

Nofollow link

An HTML attribute value used to instruct search engine bots that a hyperlink should not influence the ranking of the link target in search engine’s index.


17) What is Canonical issue? How will you resolve them?

Ans) The Canonical issue relates to duplicate pages. For instance, if a site has 2 pages of same content but different URLs and you can’t redirect it then you use a canonical tag. It is to be used in the head section on your site. For fixing a canonical issue, you have to do a canonical redirect the visitors to a correct version when they try to go to the wrong URL.


18) Have you ever dealt with link penalties? How?

Ans) After identifying the link, try to remove them and disavow the one that can’t be deleted.

Dealing with link penalties includes the following steps:

  • Find all the backlinks: This can be done with the help of Google Webmaster Tools.
  • Identify the bad backlinks: One of the best tools to identify bad backlinks is Monitor backlinks.
  • Request removal of the bad links: All the requests must be sent from the email address of the website. After that, you have to keep track of your requests and see who has opened your emails.
  • Disavow the ones that can’t be removed: Before you create a disavow report, it is important to remove all the backlinks. Add tags to all of the links you could not delete by using “disavow” tag.

19) To increase rankings, what things should not be performed to avoid a penalty?

Ans) A person can use Google Disavow tool to remove low quality and spammy links. After getting rid of all the bad quality links, you will create authentic and good quality links from white hat SEO techniques which are approved by Google Penguin and Panda like the link from social media, forum posting, article submission, guest posting, and blog commenting.


20) Suppose a user gave us a negative feedback on our Facebook page, how would you handle that?

Ans) Positive feedbacks increase the motivation of the company and reflect the strengths of the company but tackling with negative feedbacks showcase the problem solving and online reputation management skills of the company. Acknowledging the negative feedback and going in details of the problem to find the root cause is the main motive. This will increase the retention of the existing customers and thereby, will help in customer satisfaction.


21) What are 404 errors?

Ans) 404 Error is an HTTP status code that means the webpage is no longer available or is not active on your website. If the search engine crawls such 404 web pages frequently, chances are you might see a rankings drop on your website.


22) What is a 301 redirect?

Ans) Google bots are unable to understand images that is why we use Image Alt Text to help Google understand the context of the image. It’s an On-Page SEO metric and if done correctly can boost your Image SEO rankings


23) What is Page Authority?

Ans) Page Authority is a Page Ranking factor again developed by Moz which calculates the overall authority of a page between 0-100. The higher the authority of the page the more it’s likely to rank better in SERPs.


24) What do you understand by Trust Flow?

Ans) Trust Flow (TF) is similar to Domain Authority (DA), but it’s developed by a different company named Majestic. It states the overall Trust of a domain that Google holds for that particular domain from 0-100.


25). What is Citation Flow?

Ans) Citation Flow (CF) measures the link equity or “power” the website or link carries. The score is measured between 0-100.


26). What is Google Analytics?

Ans) Google Analytics is a product by Google which was launched back in 2005 and is used to churn out a lot of data like tracking real-time visitors on your website, where the traffic is coming from, number of user sessions, bounce rate, etc.


27). What is Social Bookmarking?

Social Bookmarking is a form of an Off-Page SEO technique. It’s a simple and easy way to get highly relevant traffic.

In simple words, it’s similar to bookmarks you keep in your browser. Social Bookmarking websites are bookmarks which you keep on the web online publicly so that anyone can read it.

Examples of Social Bookmarking websites are:

  • – Digg
  • – StumbleUpon
  • – Scoop.it

28).What do you understand by the term Directory Submission?

Ans)Directory Submission are websites where you submit your website URL and acquire free backlinks back to your blog. There are several business directories and niche directories where you can submit the URL. However, in 2018 I don’t highly recommend you to go with Directory Submissions as they are no more effective


29).Does Blog Commenting still help? Yes or no. Justify your answer?

Ans)Yes, Blog Commenting still help to get highly relevant traffic only if it’s done right. Commenting just for the sake of acquiring backlinks won’t help. However, if you are genuinely commenting on a website with a clean intention than yes blog commenting will help get you targeted traffic.

Blog Commenting should be done with care and relevance to get the maximum out of it.


30).What is Hummingbird?

Ans) Google Hummingbird algorithm was launched to understand the context of a users search queries. Gone are the days when you can rank websites with just a single keyword. Now after the Hummingbird update, you need to use a variation of LSI Keywords to overcome the Google Hummingbird Algorithm.


31). What is Google My Business?

Ans) Google My Business is a free tool which helps you build your online presence. If you are into Local Business than a Google My Business page is a must. With GMB you can also give proper direction through maps and update your details so that your customers can find you quickly through GMB.


32).What is AMP?

Ans) MP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It helps to load your website pages super fast by slashing the heavy HTML and Javascript code thus making the pages load in a blink of an eye.


33).What are the advantages and disadvantages of having AMP?

Ans)

    Advantages:

  • Speeds up website load time.
  • Increases Mobile Ranking.
  • Improves server performance.

Disadvantages:

  • Ad is not properly displayed as the heavy code is slashed.
  • AMP supports Google Analytics but requires different tag which is time-consuming

34).What is Keyword Density?

Ans) Keyword Density is the number of occurrences your target keyword has per hundred words.

The perfect ratio of keyword density is 1-1.2%

Here’s how you calculate Keyword Density with this formula:

KD Density = (Number of total occurrences of a keyword/total words in the analyzed text)/100


35).How do you Fetch your website in Google?

Ans) Google Fetch is a feature available in Google Webmasters Tool which helps you check how Google is treating the URL.

With Google Fetch, you can test whether or not your page is indexed properly.


36).What do you understand by Google Disavow Tools?

Ans) Google Disavow Tool is a feature available in Google Webmasters Tools. It helps you get rid of the spammy links pointing to your domain. You need to submit a .txt file to get rid of all the domains which are spammy, and the disavow tool will detach those domains permanently


37).What is Google Trends?

Ans) Google Trends shows the latest trend for any particular keyword search. It also shows how many people are searching for that keyword in the past 12 months. Is it still trending or has no more relevance everything is shown in this tool. Google Trends is a goldmine for all the news/viral websites out there.


38). What is Pogo Sticking?

Ans) Pogo Sticking is going back and forth between different search results. For example, clicking on the first result than clicking the back button and entering the second website. If the user clicks back and forth from your website, it gives Google a red signal that this is not what the user is looking for and chances are your rankings might fall like a stone


39).What is an Alexa Rank in SEO?

Ans) Alexa is a website allotting the ranks based on the site quality, backlinks, visitors traffic and more. Alexa rank is an indicator of how your SEO campaign is doing. If you’re doing SEO right, you should get a better Alexa rank.


40).What is Paid traffic?

Ans) Paid Traffic lies under Search Engine Marketing (SEM). It is the traffic for which you pay for. Examples of Paid Traffic is Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, etc. Paid traffic is the best to get instant results. However, for long-run Organic traffic works the best.


41).What is TLD and types of TLDs?

Ans) TLD stands for Top Level Domain. TLD are the ones that follow after the full-stop in your domain name. Examples of famous TLDs are .com, .net, .org.


42).What do you mean by anchor text?

Ans) Click-able text written on a hyperlink is known as Anchor Text.


43).If the meta robots tag has a value of “no index, no follow” what does it mean? Does Google use keyword tags?

Ans) It means the search engine crawlers would not index the contents and would not follow the links present on the page.

No, Google does not make use of keyword tags.

44).What do you understand by Cloaking?

Ans) Cloaking involves using deceptive techniques which present the user with a different version of the webpage than that presented to the search engines.


45). Explain Unsubscribes?

Ans) Unsubscribes: how many people unsubscribed from your emails.


46).What methods would you apply for decreasing the loading time of a website?

Ans) I would use external style sheets, fewer images (unless necessary), optimize the images and decrease the file sizes of the image without reducing the quality of the image, use CSS sprites to reduce HTTP requests etc..


47).What are the Social Media channels you have used for marketing?

Ans) I have used blogs like blogger, word press, tumblr etc, social bookmarking sites like Digg, Jumptags, Scoop.it etc., social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn etc., Video Sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo etc.


48).What do you understand by Frames in HTML?

Ans) A frame is an HTML technique which divides the content of a page into several parts. Search engines see Frames as completely different pages and as such Frames have a negative impact on Seo. We should avoid the usage of Frames and use basic HTML instead.


49).Which is the most important area to include your keywords?

Ans) Page title and Body text are the most important areas where we can include keywords for the SEO purpose.


50). What is the main purpose of search engine spiders?

Ans) Index sites, because even though spiders visit sites, their main function is not only to visit them but to index their contents spiders do not monitor sites for unethical activities.