If you are going for an interview, these SEO interview questions and answers will be helpful for you. we have listed around 301 SEO interview questions for freshers and experienced ones. You can just cross-check these questions along with answers if you have any doubts and polishing your SEO knowledge.
We are frequently updating these SEO interview questions and answers and recently updated on July 01, 2020.
1. What is SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization. In simple words, it is the process of getting unpaid organic traffic for your website by ranking in search engines. SEO makes it easier for viewers to find your website online on Google or other search engines.
2. What is the importance of SEO?
A huge majority of people who have access to the internet search for services and products online before they go for it. So if your website ranks high in search engines like Google, you will definitely get more traffic, which can be converted into actual customers, paving your way to profit. Studies have shown us that people usually don’t click search results that are below the fifth ranking.
3. What are the beneifits of SEO?
The benefits of SEO are in multiple folds. But here are some that you can focus on.
SEO brings quality traffic
People who visit your site because of effective SEO marketing, are usually people who searched for the kind of service you offer. These are customers who are interested in what you do which means there is potential for conversion.
It builds credibility.
Customers associate top ranking websites to key players of the niche. This helps build credibility and makes visitors trust your brand more.
Unlike advertisements SEO is free.
You don’t have to pay to be in the top position. It is a more organic and long term process that you can benefit from.
SEO makes your website more user friendly.
SEO activities automatically better the quality of the website. This makes your website more user-friendly and mobile-friendly. It improves your website speed and gives your users more information about your work.
4. Which are the different search engines?
Google receives the majority of the searches online. Other popular search engines are Bing, Baidu, Yahoo, Ask and the list goes on.
5. Which was the first search engine? Which year was it created?
The very first search engine that was created was called Archie. It was made by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in 1990.
6. When was google introduced?
Google was launched in the year 1998.
7. Who invented search engines?
Alan Emtage was the man who created the very first search engine. He was the one who created the first search engine, Archie.
8. Who are the founders of Google?
Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They were both Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California at that time.
9. Which one is older? Yahoo or Google?
Yahoo is a search engine that was dominant after its launch in 1994 before Google was launched in 1998.
10. What are the different types of SEO?
There are 3 main types of SEO that is required for an efficient SEO strategy.
- On-page SEO
These are things you can control on your webpage like keyword-based contents etc.
- Off-page SEO
This refers to aspects such as backlinks from another site or promotions to your website from another website.
- Technical SEO
This refers to the aspect of your website you can change to make it more user friendly and easier for search engines to crawl your website. This is where the speed of the website or mobile-friendliness matters.
11. What is white hat and black hat SEO?
Black hat SEO is a technique or practice that goes against the guidelines of search engines. These are unethical tactics used for an instant ranking which can very often end in a penalty by search engines. It includes keyword stuffing, using private link networks, etc. White hat SEO or Ethical SEO refers to the usage of Google-approved SEO techniques. Here the focus is on providing the users the best results.
12. What is on-page SEO?
The SEO technique of optimizing your web page to rank higher in search engines. It includes better content for your page, keyword-based content writing, HTML tags, Meta tags, and so on.
13. What is off-page SEO?
This refers to all the activities done away from your website to rank it on search engines. This includes link building, promotions from other websites, writing a guest post, or leaving a comment.
14. What is link building?
Link building refers to having other websites link back to yours. More and better quality links are what SEO companies aim for. This shows search engines that your web page is relevant and increases brand awareness
15. What are the advantages of link building?
Link building helps your website rank higher on search engines. More people visit your page from other websites that are linked to you. Good quality links help increase the value of your site according to search engines. It helps in getting indexed on Google faster. Link building helps in increasing your domain authority which helps Google rank you.
16. What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to improving the technical part of the website. It is a broad field that includes the speed of the website, the overall user-friendliness of the website, the URL structure, etc. Basically, the search engine should be able to crawl easily so that it can acquire relevant information from your site every time you put something new in it.
18. What do you mean by page rank PR?
Pagerank is an algorithm used by Google to measure the importance and quality of a web page. This is one of the variables used by Google to rank the page. A website’s Pagerank is represented by numbers 1-10.
17. What is web crawling?
Crawling is when a search engine such as Google sends a bot to read the page and to follow your links. A crawler picks the entire content and link of the website and stores it in a databank. This is the first step to showing up in the Google results. This is why it is important to make your website technically efficient so that it is easy to crawl.
18. What do you mean by page rank PR?
Pagerank is an algorithm used by Google to measure the importance and quality of a web page. This is one of the variables used by Google to rank the page. A website’s Pagerank is represented by numbers 1-10.
What is a backlink and referring domain?
what is a do-follow link?
what is a no-follow link?
what is the difference between do-follow,no-follow & sponsored links?
What are contextual backlinks?
How to check if the backlink is no-follow, do-follow, or sponsored?
How can we assess the quality of a backlink to our website?
Is it helpful if you buy backlinks from other websites?
more backlinks or more content which one will be your first priority?
what is an inbound & outbound link in SEO?
What are the internal links? How to use it perfectly?
what is the significance of keyword in SEO?
what is keyword frequency?
What is keyword proximity? why it is important?
what is code to text ratio? how important is this?
whats is an anchor text in SEO?
what is ALT tag?
What is DA? How important it is?
What does www stand for? What is it?
Difference between DA and PA
What is a Domain?
What is a subdomain & subdirectory?
What is Web Hosting?
what is a web server?
which are the different types of hosting?
What is a URL?
what is TLD, ccTLD?
what are organic results?
What is a paid result?
what is SERP?
What is google autocomplete?
What is SERP?
what is a crawler?
What is indexing?
how do search engines works?
what are meta tags used for?
what is google sandbox
what is meta title?
what is a meta description?
what is a meta keyword?
what are the character limits of meta title & description?
what is a page title?
what is the difference between meta title and page title?
what is noindex tag?
what is W3C?
what is 301 redirect? how is it useful for SEO?
difference between 301 & 302 redirects?
What are the black hat SEO techniques?
what is keyword density? why is it important?
How much keyword density is good for SEO?
How do you rank keywords? explain
What is the use of using keyword prominence?
what are the important factors of a website?
What are webmaster tools?
what is robots.txt? how is it useful in SEO?
Noindex, Nofollow & Disallow: What are they? how to use these tags?
How do you stop Google from indexing a website?
What is Sitemap in SEO
what is the difference between HTML & XML sitemap?
How to submit a sitemap to google?
Which are the most popular SEO tools?
What is google analytics used for?
Why Google analytics important for SEO?
What is Canonical URL?
what is keyword cannibalization in SEO
What is keyword stuffing? is it good or bad?
what are LSI keywords?
what is a long-tail keyword? explain with example
What are the best ways of getting real backlinks to your site?
Why backlinks are important in SEO
differentiate SEO & SEM
What is Rankbrain in SEO
Can you pay a Search engine to boost your website rank?
What is keyword stemming? how it is beneficial for SEO?
What is Competition analysis? how is it done? what are the tools?
What is google algorithm?
What is negative SEO?
Which are the most common negative SEOs?
What is Cloaking?
What are Doorway Pages
What is google penalty?
What is google panda, penguin, hummingbird, Mobilegeddon, pigeon Bert, etc?
what are the most important google ranking factors
What is PBN? Why is it used?
What are all the popular SEO tools available in the market?
What is NAP?
How do you know if you are using the right number of keywords in a page?
What is bounce rate in SEO?
What are header tags?
What do you mean by SEO friendly URL?
What is Search Engine Submission?
What is Forum Posting?
What is RSS Feed? How is it useful?
What is Press Release Submission in SEO?
What is Blog Commenting?
What is social bookmarking?
What is directory submission? is it useful?
what is classifieds listing? is it useful?
What are the advantages of blog commenting?
What do you mean by website traffic?
What is referral traffic?
How can we track traffic to our website?
What is directory submission in SEO? Is it good practice?
What is PPC?
What is SEM?
What is CTR?
What is SMM?
What is the difference between SEO & SEM?
What is EMD?
What is a 404 error?
What is the difference between page rank and Search engine result page?
What are rich snippets?
What is Schema
How to improve the loading time of the website?
What are the crucial factors to improve the ranking?
How to check the list of pages indexed by Google?
What is Mobile-First Indexing?
What is the relevance of social media websites in SEO?
What are the social signals? how is it useful?
What is AMP?
Whats is a disavow tool? Why is it used?
What is local SEO?
What is google my business?
What is google business posts?
What is the google knowledge graph?
What are google sitelinks?
What you mean my HTTP & HTTPS?
Whats is SSL?
Why SSL is important for websites?
How do you check if a website URL is indexed by Google or not?
What will you do if too many automated backlinks are created to your website?
1.Explain the following codes
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”>
Explain Noindex, Disallow, Nofollow.
- Noindex: tells search engines bot not to include your page(s) in search results.
- Disallow: tells the search engines bot not to crawl your page(s).
- Nofollow: tells the search engines bot not to follow the links on your page. This is useful for traffic.
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
what does it mean ? 2 codes
Is Google not indexing your entire website? It could be due to a crawl block in something called a robots.txt file.
To check for this issue, go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
Both of these tell Googlebot that they’re not allowed to crawl any pages on your site. To fix the issue, remove them. It’s that simple.
What are orphan pages?
Orphan pages are those without internal links pointing to them