Clearing SEO Interview is the next big task for students and professionals who have successfully completed SEO Training in Bangalore. To make things easier for you, we have compiled a list of 107 interview questions that will help you to clear your SEO interview with confidence and get a high paying Job in SEO.

Browse through the list of top SEO interview questions asked by SEO Experts while shortlisting the right candidate for SEO Analyst role. You can also use these interview questions after completing Digital Marketing Training

1. What is a Search Engine?

A search engine is a program that searches for and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user, used especially for finding particular sites on the World Wide Web.

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

The process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by the search engine

The importance of SEO starts with the desire of the companies to gain more traffic for their websites. The ranking over search engines matters because users pay more heed to the first 5 searches on Google. Moreover, the users tend to trust Google’s refined search results because they consider these searches to be more authentic and specific.

3. Name Some search engines used across the world.

The names are as follows – Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, DuckDuckGo and Yandex.

4. Who are the Founders of Google?

The founders of Google are Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

5. In which year was Google Established?

Google was established on 4th September 1998.

6. What is World Wide Web?

The World Wide Web (WWW) or the Web is an information system on the Internet which allows documents to be connected to other documents by hypertext links, enabling the user to search for information by moving from one document to another.

7. What is a Domain?

A domain is a distinct subset of the Internet with addresses sharing a common suffix or under the control of a particular organization or individual.

For example, in www.idigitalacademy.com, idigitalacademy is the domain.

8. What is a website?

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.

9. What is a Web server?

A Web server is a program that uses HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) to serve the files that form Web pages to users, in response to their requests, which are forwarded by their computers’ HTTP clients. Dedicated computers and appliances may be referred to as Web servers as well.

10. What is Web Hosting?

Web hosting is a service that allows organizations and individuals to post a website or web page onto the Internet. A web host, or web hosting service provider, is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for the website or webpage to be viewed on the Internet. Web sites are hosted or stored, on special computers called servers.

11. What is Web Crawler?

A web crawler (also known as a web spider or web robot) is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. This process is called Web crawling or spidering. Many legitimate sites, in particular, search engines, use spidering as a means of providing up-to-date data.

12. What is Indexing?

Indexing starts when the crawling process gets over during a search. Google uses crawling to collect pages relevant to the search queries and creates an index that includes specific words or searchterms and their locations.

13. What is SERP?

Search Engine Result Page or SERP refers to the page that is displayed when a specific search query is entered over the search engine. Apart from showing a list of results, SERP might also include advertisements.

14. What do you mean by Inbound Link?

The incoming links to your website or webpage from the different page of the same website are called as Backlink. It is also called as an inbound link.

15. What are outbound Links?

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

16. Describe Googlebot?

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

17. What is Cross-linking and what is the function of Crosslinking?

1. Cross-linking is used to refer the process of linking one site to another site.
2. It provides the users with reference sites that contain the content related to the search.
3. The 2 websites cross-linking do not be owned by the same person.
4. In other words, cross-linking is a barter wherein I link to you and you link to me.
5. It could be a 2-way link ie 3-way link. In a 2-way link site A links to site B and site B links to site A. In a 3-way link, site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links to site A.

18. What is the Benefit of using the keyword in SEO?

A keyword is a single word, and while a combination of those keywords makes phrases. These are used in the search engines to populate the subjects over the internet. Search engine stores keywords in the database, and when a search is done, it will come up with the best possible match.

19. What are Robots and Crawlers and what are their functions?

Robot and crawler are all same and referred by different names. It is referred to be as the 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.

20. What does it mean if nothing appears while searching the Domain in Search Engine?

On searching your domain if nothing appears, then there are three possibilities.

1. The site may be banned by search engines
2. The site is not indexed by search engines
3. Some canonical issues

21. What is keyword stemming?

The process of finding out new keywords from the root keyword from the search query is referred as keywords stemming.

22. Which are the SEO blogs that can be referred?

1. Google Webmaster Central
2. Search Engine Land
3. SEOSmarty
4. MOZ
5. Search Engine Journal
6. BacklinkO

23. What do you mean by Cloaking?

Cloaking is a deceptive way of optimizing your website for search. In this technique, a different content will be shown to the search engine crawler than what is presented to the end users.

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

There are mainly types of Meta tags in SEO.

1. Meta Description tag with 320 words limits
2. Meta Keyword tag
3. Title Tag with 60 Words limits
4. Meta Robots

25. What are the characters limits in Meta Title Tag & Meta Description tag?

We can add 60 characters in the title tag and 320 characters in Meta Description tag.

26. What is Google Sandbox?

Google sandbox is an imaginary area where new websites and their search rating are put on hold until they prove worthy for ranking. In other words, it checks the standard of the website.

27. What is Black Hat SEO?

In order to get a high ranking in search engine result page, websites go for various methods and techniques which are characterized by two categories. One method that is acceptable by search engine guidelines is known as White Hat SEO, while the other method which is not acceptable by search engine guidelines is known as Black Hat SEO.

28. Name few Black Hat SEO techniques?

1. Link Farming
2. Hidden text, etc.
3. Gateway or Doorway pages
4. Cloaking
5. Keyword Stuffing

29. 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.

30. What is the difference between PR (page rank) and SERP (Search engine result page)?

Page rank is calculated on the basis of quality inbound links from other website or WebPages to our webpage or a website.

SERP (Search Engine Result page) is the placement of the website or web-pages which is returned by the search engine after a search query or attribute.

31. What is organic result?

Organic search is a method for entering one or a plurality of search items in a single data string into a search engine. Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being advertisements.

32. What are paid results?

Paid search marketing means you advertise within the sponsored listings of asearch engine or a partner site by paying either each time your ad is clicked (pay-per-click – PPC) or less commonly, when your ad is displayed (cost-per-impression – CPM).

33. What is “Google Suggest” or “Auto complete”?

Ans. Google Suggest is a part of the auto-complete function of Google search engine. When any user enters a word or some letters over the search field, Google shows many associated terms to him/her in a drop down menu. Such suggestions are collections of the most frequently search terms over the Google search engine.

34. Why is the Title Tag in website valuable?

Title tags are very essential in SEO, as it tells about the contents on that web page. Through title tags only the search engine will tell the user, what is there in the page.

35. What is considered as more significant, creating content or building backlinks?

Both are necessary, creating quality content is equally important to building backlinks. Although building backlinks are useful in building authority to a site and for ranking as well, quality content is the first element that is considered to be more responsible for ranking.

36. Can you explain the difference between SEO and SEM?

The difference between SEO and SEM is simply that Search Engine Optimization is part of Search engine marketing or Search marketing as it is widely known. Both processes aim in increasing visibility in search engines. It involves other methods that can get you more search engine visitors like PPC advertising.

37. What do you know about LSI?

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. This technique is established to obtain the data by relating the word to its closest counterparts or to its similar context.

38. How will you cross-check whether your SEO campaign is working or not?

To check whether your SEO campaign is working or not, the first approach is to check the websites statistics, which tells you about the origin of traffic.  The other way of checking is to make a search based on the relevant keywords and key phrases and look for the search result. The number of search result will tell you whether your SEO campaign is working or not.

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39. What is On Page SEO?

On page SEO refers to all the activities performed within the websites to get higher ranking and more relevant traffic from the search engines.

40. What is Off Page SEO?

Off page SEO relates to the other aspects that influence the search ranking of websites on the Search Engine Result Page.

41. What is long tail keyword?

Long tail keywords are phrases containing over 4+ words that make search results highly specific.These long phrases are used by smart SEO experts when they attempt to draw quality traffic to their websites rather than having random traffic, and increase their lead conversion rates.

42. What are Heading tags?

In SEO, heading or header tags are used to separate the heading and sub-heading of any content from the rest of the web page. There are 6 heading tags used in SEO in a top down hierarchy. Ranging from h1 to h6, header tags bring coherence in content along with relevancy and keyword consistency in the search results displayed on SERPs.

43. What is Canonical URL?

Canonical URLs relate to the concept of selecting the best URL for the web pages that the visitors want to see. Also, known as canonical tags, these URLs help in content syndication when multiple versions of a same page become available over the Internet. Thus, it is used to resolve issues related to content duplication.

For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different.

44. What is Page Title?

Page title, also known as title tag, is a phrase used for describing a web page content. The title tag appears on the search result pages just above the URL (see below) and also appears at the top of a browser.

45. What is the definition of URL?

URLs provide users with ways to identify and locate resources and documents on the web. URLs contain internet protocols, IP address of the host and the domain name along with other information.

46. What is SEO friendly URL?

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 becomes 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.

47. What are meta descriptions?

Meta descriptions are also called HTML attributes which should provide an accurate description of any web page content. These descriptions act as preview snippets of the web pages over the SERP page.

48. What are backlinks?

Backlinks are also called incoming links that help users to shift from one web page to the other web pages. These links play an important part in SEO.

When Google search engine views multiple quality backlinks to a page, it considers the page to be more relevant to the search query, which helps in its indexing process and improves its organic ranking on SERPs.

49. What are Do-Follow links?

A Do-Follow Link, as the name suggests, allows Google link calculator called Page Rank to count all the inbound links from other web pages and websites as link points. The higher the link juice or link points are, the greater would be the search ranking of that web page, as these links make the web page appear very relevant and popular to the Google search engines.

50. What are No-Follow links?

A No-Follow link is exactly the opposite of a Do-Follow link as such the link attributes do not allow the Google bots to follow them. These links cannot be followed by robots; only humans can do it.

No-follow link attributes are structured in the following manner:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Link text</a>

51. What is internal linking?

Internal Linking is a process of providing hyperlinks on the web pages that connect to the same domain. It is another way of directing the visitors from one web page to another of the same website. They help search engine spiders to crawl and index all the inner pages of a website/blog easily and such links help in building information hierarchy while pushing up the link juice level in any given website and allowing the visitors to navigate the website pages properly.

52. What are incoming links?

Inbound Links, also known as incoming links or backlinks, refer to the hyperlinks present on a third-party web page that directs users to your web page only.

Inbound links can be based on both text and graphics. However, textual inbound links are more useful in drawing greater traffic and improving the PageRank level of any webpage.

53. What is an outgoing link?

An outbound link is a hyperlink that points at a targeted or external domain and is different from the links present on the Source domain. For example, if you provide links of other third-party web pages on your website, those would be external links to your site.

54. Why are backlinks very important and useful in SEO?

From the perspective of SEO, there is a difference between backlinks and quality backlinks.

For Google search, random backlinks do not offer any help. Google assesses the quality of the backlinks present on a webpage with the relevancy found in the content of both the web pages.

The higher is the relevance between the original content and backlink content, the greater becomes the quality of the backlinks.

55. What are the most important Google ranking factors?

The top 3 ranking factors affecting the search engine algorithm of Google are:

1. Content
2. Backlinks
3. RankBrain

56. What do you mean by robots.txt?

Robots.txt is one way of telling the Search Engine Bots about the web pages on your website which you do not want them to visit. Robots.txt is useful for preventing the indexation of the parts of any online content that website owners do not want to display.

57. What is HTML Sitemap?

An HTML sitemap comprises of one single HTML page that bears the links of all the web pages of any specific website. This sitemap holds the foundation of all web pages of any website.

HTML sitemap contains all formatted text files and linking tags of any website. It is particularly useful when you have a large website with multiple web pages, because it helps you to improve the navigation of your website by listing all the web pages in one place in a user-friendly manner.

58. What is XML Sitemap?

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.

Example: https://mytasker.com/sitemap.xml

59. What are doorway pages?

Doorway Pages refers to web pages or websites that are developed for higher ranking when specific search queries are entered.

60. What are 404 errors?

404 errors are considered one of the most potential impediments in the way to successful SEO. When a specific URL is renamed or becomes non-existent, any links connecting to that URL would result in 404 errors.

61. What is anchor text?

Anchor text denotes to a visible hyperlinked text that can be clicked through. Such hyperlinked texts link to different documents or locations available on the web.

62. What will be your next steps if your SEO technique does not work?

Analyse the problem and resolve them step by step:

1. Check the keywords Again
2. Check out for relevant key-words that can be helpful.
3. Even though the webpage and website has been indexed well and still not appearing on the first 10 pages of search engine result page, then I would make some changes in page text, titles and description.
4. If website is not indexed well or dropped from the index, than it might comprises serious issues and re-work might be required.

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63. What is PPC?

PPC stands for Pay Per Click and is an advertisement campaign hosted by Google.

64. What are Webmaster tools?

Webmaster tool is a service provided by Google from where you can get backlink information, crawl errors, search queries, Indexing data, CTR etc.

65. What do you mean by keyword Density?

Keyword density will help to stand out your content from others. The formula is: (Total number of keyword/ total number of words in your article) multiply by 100.

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

The first step would be to update the previous site with a permanent redirect to a new page for all the pages. After that, I will remove the previous content from a search engine in order to avoid duplicate content issues.

67. Can you optimize the website which has pages in millions?

From SEO point of view few SEO stuff have to be implemented:

1. A good Internal link structure
2. Generation of dynamic title and description
3. Dynamic XML sitemap generation

68. How will you neutralize a toxic link to your site?

Toxic Link are the links which are said to be as the harmful links which affect your website. If there is any link in ‘Toxic link report’ that matches with the link on your website, then you can remove it by using ‘Google Disallow tool’.

68. Mention how can you check if someone is not building or re-directing a low-quality backlink to your site?

There are several tools which can help you to check all these low quality backlinks and the paid tools which can be used is Ahrefs

69. How backlink tools work?

Backlink tools runs a series of tests to tell you how many backlinks are pointing to the weblink you entered.

70. Mention how often should you perform a link audit?

If you have just started on building links you can do audit quite often.  But a complete link audit should be done approximately once a year.

71. Mention what do you understand by Frames in HTML?

A Frame in HTML is a technique that divides the content of a page onto several parts.  Search engines consider Frames as completely different pages and may have a negative impact on SEO. We should avoid the usage of Frames and use basic HTML instead.

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

The most important area to include your keywords are,

• Page title

• Body text

• Meta Description

73. What if your website is banned by the search engines for black hat practices?

If your website is banned by the search engines for black hat practices, you can apply for re-inclusion after correcting your wrongdoings.

74. What if your SEO approach method doesn’t work?

If the SEO method doesn’t work, perform the following activity:

1. First, see whether it is a new project then re-check the keywords
2. Then look for relevant keywords that can be helpful
3. Make changes in page text, title and description
4. If still not ranked then there may be some other serious issues like bad links, penguin/panda or other Google penalty, crawl ability issues, UI issue etc.

75. What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is one of the most empowering analytical tool in SEO, launched in 2005, which helps an individual to track and monitor the traffic on their websites.

It is a fermium web service, which means that it provides certain basic services free of charge while the premium services demand investment.

76. What do you mean by Google Page Rank?

Google PageRank is the software which the Google runs which are determined by the relevancy of one web page based on the number of quality backlinks it contains.

77. What is Search Engine Submission?

Search engine submission is the submissions in which a website is directly submitted to the search engine so that its online recognition and visibility is increased.

In other words, it is one way of informing the search engines about the existence of any website, which is then indexed by the search engines and reflected on the SERP page.

78. What is Directory Submission?

Directory submission in SEO relates to the listing of any web address or site with the relevant details over various web directories under a specific category.

79.
What is Article submission?

Article submission is considered a part of Off-Page SEO optimization which can add up more an more Article submission, which involves the presentation of articles to online article directories like EzineArticles, Go Articles, ArticleTrader etc.

80. What is Press Release submission?

Press release submission involves writing press releases and submitting them to effective and popular PR sites for building incoming links to any specific website which will again add up the information to the website.

81. What are Classified ads?

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 ads are much cheaper than any other ads.

82. What is Forum Posting?

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. This would ensure your back link is present over there and help you to improve in link building.

83. What is a Business directory?

A business directory is a website or printed listing of information which lists all businesses within some category. Businesses can be categorized by business, location, activity, or size.

84. What is Social Bookmarking?

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.

85. What is Social Networking?

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+.

86. What is RSS Feed?

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. RSS feeds enable publishers to syndicate data automatically. A standard XML file format ensures compatibility with many different machines/programs.

87. What is Guest posting?

Guest posting is the process of creating content and publishing it on another person’s website. Guest posting blogs allow showing author bio (writer) at the top or bottom of an guest post.

88. What is Blog commenting?

Blog commenting is a popular online marketing strategy of leaving thoughtful comments on a blog post, where an individual or a business should be able to gain online presence and can submit their own links with the comment which will help them to increase their presence online.

89. What is Google Algorithm?

Google’s algorithm does the work for you by searching out Web pages that contain the keywords you used to search, then assigning a rank to each page based on several factors, including how many times the keywords appear on the page, quality of the page etc.

90. What is HTTPS/SSL Update?

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is the protocol which is used to secure the communication on the World Wide Web. It prevents unauthorized person from seeing information that visitors send or receive over the Internet

91. What are Google Sitelinks?

Google Sitelinks are the sub-listings that will sometimes show under the first listing on the first page of Google search results. These are hyperlinks to website sub-pages that appear under specific Google listings to help users navigate the site.

92. What is Google Knowledge Graph?

Google Knowledge Graph ensures a visually appealing and intuitive graphical presentation of information related to queries. The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base utilized by Google to improve its search engine’s results with semantic-search information gathered from a wide variety of sources.

93. What is Google My Business?

Google My Business is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses, brands, artists, and organizations to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps. By verifying and editing your business information, you can both help customers find you and tell them the story of your business.

94. Definition of SEO Audit

An SEO Audit is a detailed check-up for your website which involves looking at the technical infrastructure of your website to optimize Search Engine visibility, usability and conversion. You can identify problematic areas that need improvement to create an action plan while a good SEO audit keeps your website up-to-date with the latest developments in search marketing.

95. Popular SEO Blogs to follow

Some of the popular blogs can be found in Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, Content Marketing Institute, Moz, KISSmetrics, HubSpot etc.

96. What is AMP?

AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source coding standard for publishers to be able to load their sites quickly on mobile since mobile responsiveness could be unimpressive and slow compared to the desktop resources which are heavy and plenty.

97. Name of a few Popular SEO Tools

The names of a few SEO tools are Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Keyword Planner, Buzzsumo, Bing Webmaster Tools, Moz, SEMRush, Check My Links etc.

98. What is cloaking?

Cloaking is a technique used to deliver the content on a Web page to a search engine in a way that is different to what the user was looking for.

The purpose of cloaking is to boost a website’s search engine rank on certain keywords.

99. What is keyword density?

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page. Keyword density can be used as for determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. The percentage is always in comparison to the total number of words on the webpage.

100. What is keyword frequency?

Keyword frequency is the number of times a keyword or phrase appears on a single Web page.

101. What is Google sandbox?

Google Sandbox is a filter placed on new websites as a result of which, a site does not receive good rankings for its most important keywords or phrases. Even with good content, a site is may still significantly affected by the Sandbox effect.

102. What is the meaning of competitive analysis?

A competitive analysis is a critical part of your company marketing plan. This analysis in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the current and potential competitors.

103. What is CTR and how to boost it?

The click through rate is measured by dividing the number of times a link appears on a search engine results page by the number of times it is actually clicked on by a visitor. A high organic CTR in Google or any search engine means you get more traffic.

104. What is bounce rate?

Bounce rate is the number of visitors which a site receives only for them to leave the site after viewing only one page.