BEST SEO Interview Questions & Answers A Beginner's guide to seo

SEO Interview Questions & Answers

SEO has been the ultimate buzzword in the digital media for quite a long time.

From content marketing to attracting heavy traffic to any websites and ensuring the success of any social media campaign, SEO is the key to success

SEO has a world in itself; it contains a vocabulary and language of its own with a highly evolving history.

The functionality of SEO is quite difficult to interpret, yet so unique!

Yet, our search on the Google trends show how consistently SEO has been in demand among global corporations.

It means you can have lucrative career in SEO if you know how to make it work!

Interested to know more about SEO?

Ask any corporation about it, and after a few hours, you will find yourself completely baffled!

Ask any SEO expert about it, and they will try to educate you with its tough technicalities!

That’s why I have shared some basic SEO interview questions and answers in a lucid manner which are sure to help you understand it better.

I have enlisted here 103 useful SEO interview questions asked by top employers.

So, you do not need to go around compiling information about SEO before your interview.

Discover all you need to know with these latest SEO questions and answers and embark on a successful SEO journey!

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

Ans. In simple words, SEO or Search Engine Optimization denotes to any activity performed for the improvement of Search Engine rankings of websites, products, services or other content. It shows unpaid results which is also referred to as “free”, “organic”, “natural” or “earned” results.

The importance of SEO starts with the desire of the companies to gain more traffic for their websites. The ranking over search engines matter 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.

2. What is a Search Engine?

Ans. A search engine is a web-based software system which is developed to search and locate relevant information on the World Wide Web. Search engines generally answer the queries entered by the users and give them a list of search results.

3. Name of a few search engines.

Ans. The names of some search engines are- Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, DuckDuckGo and Yandex.

4. Who are the Founders of Google?

Ans. The founders of Google are Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

5. In which year was Google founded?

Ans. Google was founded on 4th September, 1998.

6. What is World Wide Web?

Ans. The World Wide Web (WWW) or the Web, which was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in the year 1989, is an information system of internet servers containing webpages where specially formatted documents and resources, supported by Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP, can be located by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) with other hypertext links.

7. What is a Domain?

Ans. On the internet, the domain is simply a part of the network address and acts as a descriptor for websites. It includes email addresses, website addresses and addresses of Internet Protocols such as SSH, IRC and FTP.

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

8. What is domain extension?

Ans. Domain extension refers to the notation found at the end of web addresses. The extension is used to specify a country code or any web category. For example, .edu is a domain extension to specify educational institution as the web category.

9. What is a website?

Ans. A website contains a collection of web pages or formatted documents that can be accessed over the Internet. Websites are generally identified with domain names or web addresses.

For example, if you type the web address www.mytasker.com over the internet, it would take you to the home page of the actual website.

10. What is a Web server?

Ans. A web server is a computer program with an IP address and domain names that display web pages to users when requested. Web server accepts and processes requests sent via HTTP.

For example, when you enter the URL ‘mytasker.com/blog’ over the web browser, request is sent to the web servers which bear ‘mytasker.com’ as the domain name.

11. What is Web Hosting?

Ans. Web hosting refers to any service providing space for websites over the Internet. Web host enables your website to be viewed by others via modem or network by making space over its server.

There are different kinds of web hosting services available today which are used as per the needs and requirements of the web developers.

12. What is Crawling?

Ans. Crawling or web crawling refers to an automated process through which search engines filtrate web pages for proper indexing.

Web crawlers go through web pages, look for relevant keywords, hyperlinks and content, and bring information back to the web servers for indexing.

As crawlers like Google Bots also go through other linked pages on websites, companies build sitemaps for better accessibility and navigation.

13. What is Indexing?

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

Search engines answer queries of the users by looking up to the index and showing the most appropriate pages.

14. What is SERP?

Ans. 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.

15. What is organic result?

Ans. Organic result in SEO denotes to the listing of the web pages that are most relevant to the search query entered by the user. It is also referred to as “free” or “natural” result. Getting a higher ranking in the organic result over the search engines is the very purpose of SEO.

16. What are paid results?

Ans. Paid results in SEO mean the exact opposite of organic results. It generally denotes to advertisements that are displayed above the organic results.

Several website owners make payments to Google to display their websites for certain search terms or keywords. Paid results show up when some user enters a search query with those keywords.

17. “Google Suggest” or “Autocomplete”

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 a collection of the most frequently search terms over the Google search engine.

For example, as you start to type Photoshop tutorial for, you might see other popular Photoshop tutorial related searches like “Photoshop tutorial for beginners” or “Photoshop tutorial for photographers.”

18. What is On Page SEO?

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

On page SEO is related to the optimization of the content as well as the HTML source code of any web page. Some of its aspects include meta tags, title tags, meta description and heading tags.

19. What is Off Page SEO?

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

It refers to the promotional activities, such as content marketing, social media and link building performed outside the boundaries of any web page to improve its search ranking.

20. What is the definition of keyword?

Ans. Keyword means any word serving as a key. Keyword in SEO refers to the key phrases and words included in the web content which helps the users to find the specific website by entering relevant search queries over the search engines.

21. What is long tail keyword?

Ans. 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.

Also, long tail keywords are easy to rank compare to single word keyword.

22. What are LSI keywords?

Ans. LSI keywords or Latent Semantic Indexing are semantically associated with the main keyword that users enter over the search engines.

How to find LSI keywords?

Lets say, you are writing about On Page SEO. Now, search for your keyword (On page SEO) in Google and scroll down to the “Searches Related to…” area at the bottom of the page:

With the use of LSI keywords, that are linked with the main keywords in terms of relevancy, search engines can identify the semantic structure of the keywords and extract the hidden meaning of the text to bring the most appropriate results on SERPs.

23. What are Heading tags?

Ans. 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.

24. What is Canonical URL?

Ans. 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.

25. What is Page Title?

Ans. 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.

It is one of the main components of SEO as it sums up the content of any page accurately, and is generally optimized with keywords and other relevant information for drawing higher traffic.