SEO Interview Questions and Answers:
Question 1: What is SEO?
Answer: Search Engine Optimization is a process of improving the website organic
ranks by providing unique content and implementing techniques as per guidelines of
search engines.
Question 2: What is the purpose of the keyword research?
Answer: Keyword research is useful for understanding the keyword search volumes
and predict the user demand for a product or service.
Question 3: What is important on page techniques?
Answer: Relevant keyword, meta description tag, friendly URLs, etc.
Question 4: What is the use of link building in SEO?
Answer: Links are one of the crucial elements of SEO. With high-quality links, we
can improve the ranking of the site.
Question 5: What is the optimal length of the Title Tag?
Answer: 55-60 characters is the optimal length of the title.
Question 6: What are steps involved in implementing SEO?
Answer: Keyword Research, Implementing on page changes in website, Competition
Analysis, Unique content creation,
Question 7: What is NoFollow Backlink?
Answer: Any link which has the attribute rel=”Nofollow” is called as No Follow
backlink. NoFollow backlinks do not pass any PR value, but still helpful for link
diversity.
Question 8: What are the SEO Techniques available?
Answer: Two SEO Techniques are: White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO which is also
called as Negative SEO.
Question 9: What is Google Webmasters Tools, Why do you use it?
Answer: Google Webmasters Tool is used for managing our site properties and
settings on Google search engine.
Question 10: What is Panda Update?
Answer: Panda update was first released in Feb 2011 and a major purpose of this
update is to penalized the website with low-quality content or duplicate or thin
content which was created only for SEO purpose. In May 2014 Panda 4 was release
which has hit many major brand sites like eBay, ask.com, biography.com and many
other sites.
Question 11: What is Penguin Update?
Answer: Penguin update was first released in April 2012. This update targeted the
websites using black hat SEO techniques and using over optimization by violating the
search guidelines. Later releases of Penguin update has targeted the websites
generating links from low-quality sources with keyword reach anchor text
Question 12: What is Hummingbird update?
Answer: This update was released in August 2013. The purpose of this update was to
understand the intent of the user in the query and provide the results best suitable for a
user. Instead of ranking a page because of keyword density, this update understands
the semantics of query, relevancy of content and provide the suitable results.
Question 13: What is the Algorithm Update, What is the best source to know
updates?
Answer: Google makes changes to the search algorithm to improve the quality of
results. Sometimes Google implements some minor tweaks and sometimes some
major updates like Penguin, Panda, Humming Bird and Payday loan update etc.
Question 14: What is Mobile Friendly Update and when was it launched?
Answer: Mobile Friendly update was released on 21st April 2015. The major target
of the update was to make the websites mobile friendly. The site which didn’t follow
the guidelines of Mobile SEO were affected with the update.
Question 15: What is EMD update?
Answer: This update was released by Google in Sep 2012 to target low-quality
websites which used exact match domain name sites. The major sites which hit with
the update the long tail domains with keywords. Sites like www.buy-best-laptops-
online.com were hit with the update. Even some good sites were hit with this update.
Example www.pooltables.com has lost the 1st position after EMD Update.
Question 16: What is Pigeon Update?
Answer: Google have released this algorithm to provide more relevant results in
Google Local Results. The algorithm considers other traditional web search signals as
crucial factors for local ranking. This algorithm name was coined by “Search Engine
Land”.
Question 17: How many times does Google release the algorithms and updates
visible to users?
Answer: According to industry sources, Google updates their search algorithm 500 –
600 times yearly. These updates are classified as minor updates and major updates.
Most of the time we get information about the major updates, which has a very
significant impact on SERP’s.
Question 18: What is Off Page Optimization?
Answer: Off Page Optimization is a type of SEO which is not regulated by your page
coding. Link building, Image Sharing, Blog posting, Document Sharing, Info graphics
submission, Video Sharing, Increasing Page Authority or Page Rank, Getting high
quality links from relevant sites and Article submission are the few examples of Off-
page optimization.
Question 19: What is robots.txt?
Answer: It is a kind of text file utilized to provide the instructions to the crawlers
about the caching and indexing of a website, directory, domain or a file of a webpage.
Question 20: What is Cross Linking?
Answer: It is considered as one of the best strategy that can come in handy to yield
high search engine rankings, by leveraging several domains owned by you.
Question 21: What are the SEO tools do you use?
Answer: Some of the SEO tools that you can use are Google analytic, keyword
search, Alexa, open site explorer, Google Webmaster.
Question 22: Why is SEO so important?
Answer: Most of the user’s majority of search engines is more likely to click on one
of the top 5 suggestions on the results pages (SERPS), so to take advantage of this and
gain visitors to your website or customers to your online store you need to in the top
positions.
Question 23: What is a Do-Follow link?
Answer: According to the name Do-Follow Link suggest and allows Google link
calculator called Page Rank to count all the incoming link from other web pages and
websites as link points.
Question 24: What is XML Sitemap?
Answer: The term XML stands for Extensible Markup Language which was initially
created to t accelerate the functionality of the search engines. Basically, a good XML
sitemap provides you the information about the number of pages present on any
specific website, along with the total number of updates which even includes the last
time modification details which help in proper indexing of the website by the search
engines.
Question 25: What is Mobile addon?
Answer: The Mobile addon is a Google’s algorithm that was updated on April 21,
2015, and even name given by webmasters and web-developers. In this, the main
effect of the update is to give priority to the web sites that display well on
smartphones and other mobile devices
