Top 50 SEO Interview Questions and Answers

We have curated top SEO interview questions and answers to help aspiring candidates gain knowledge. These questions and answers were created by Techstack Academy to give the confidence to students to handle interviews with the right knowledge and confidence.

These questions will help you improve your search engine optimization skills with all the latest trends and techniques. SEO is an important part of digital marketing strategies. These questions collected are based on the latest trends and questions asked during SEO interview sessions with multinational companies.

In the present time, Search Engine Optimization is an essential part of any digital marketing strategy. Every business needs to be visible, have better branding, increase web traffic, and gain detailed insights into customer behavior. The best digital marketing course in Delhi helps to be prepared for an interview in order to find a job or advancement in the SEO field. 

This article lists frequently asked SEO interview questions and their answers. It will assist both students as well as professionals to fully grasping the concepts of SEO.

Digital Marketing is the field that is grasped by almost all companies, businesses in today’s time. SEO is the most sought-after skill in digital marketing. Search Engine Optimization has a lot of potentials when it comes to skills that are required by companies and in creating job opportunities.

These SEO interview questions and answers are for anyone looking to get a job in SEO. If you want to become an expert in the field of SEO, you should learn first with one of the top SEO institutes in India.

Techstack Academy covers everything in their SEO courses and provides you with the latest fundamentals and tools of the field. We have the best SEO experts as our trainers who will teach you as per the industry standards.

When it comes to job aspects, SEO is one of the most lucrative fields in India and there is a huge potential for SEO experts. Techstack Academy is a top institute that specializes in SEO courses in Delhi. 

Our goal is to cover everything related to SEO and its related tools and techniques. With these SEO interview questions and answers, you are able to tackle any kind of advanced interview related SEO.

SEO experts and specialists are some of the in-demand positions that businesses today embrace.

If you’re interested in applying for these types of jobs, it is important that you know what questions recruiters and hiring managers may ask about search engine optimization.

At our institute, the SEO courses will be taught under the supervision of top SEO experts who have a lot of industry working experience in the field. They will teach you and provide you with different case scenarios related to the concepts of this field.

Our trainers will assist you in preparing for interviews and certification exams. To prove your qualifications for employment, we will give you all the information you need to create a CV.

Techstack Academy is the most favored institute because it offers 100% support for students in any field to find lucrative career opportunities. This article will keep on adding valuable SEO related questions in the future that we feel others would get value from in any way.

Top SEO Interview Questions And Answers

Q1. What is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is an organic process of increasing website visitors. SEO is one of the most popular techniques of Digital Marketing which improves visibility and traffic to a site, allowing it to appear on the top search engine results pages. 

It refers to the process of getting visitors from search engines. This technique will largely help to increase your website’s visibility in search result pages. It is important to remember that the more popular a website is, the more people who will be able to see it.

SEO can easily optimize websites for search engines, helping them to rank higher on search engine result pages. Users can use keywords that are related to their products and services to find them. It increases the overall quality and the quantity of users to your website by having your website on top search engine results organically.

Q2. What are keywords? Explain the role of keywords in SEO.

Keywords, also known as SEO keywords or focus keywords, are words and phrases that describe your page’s content. Keywords are the search terms you want to rank on a page for. They allow people to search for a site using search engines.

These key phrases are important to tell the search engines what your article is about and on what phrases it should be promoted on. Google and SEO professionals are very interested in keywords. They give an accurate picture of who people are and what their wants are, which allows businesses to better meet their needs. Businesses can also use keywords to target their content.

Q3. Explain the importance of SEO in businesses?

If you are related to the digital marketing field, you all have heard a common joke related to google rankings is that ‘you can hide a dead body by hiding it on the second page of Google. On the second Google Page, only a little traffic will visit or search for the queries.

In digital time, you should have your website on Google’s first page otherwise your competitors will cover all your target audience.

SEO is important for all kinds of online businesses as it increases the visibility of your website by organic methods. A well-optimized, connected and regularly updated website is essential if you want your company to succeed in the online marketplace. 

SEO is a far better option than PPC when you want to make a profit for a long time with your organic activities. If you stopped working on your SEO activities, your results will be there for a long time.

Businesses need to invest in SEO strategies and techniques if they wish to increase sales for their products or brand services with reduced marketing costs. People in the web industry joke that you should place it on Google’s second-page results page if you want to hide a corpse. 

Your competitors will steal your clients if you aren’t on Google’s first page. Only a small number of people ever go beyond that page. CTR drops with each position. SEO is a better option than PPC because your results won’t stop if you stop doing SEO today. If a company wants to increase sales, SEO is essential.

Q4. What do you mean by Local SEO?

Local SEO targets potential customers and users who are interested in doing local searches about a business’s products and services. These include results and queries that are location-based.

Local SEO makes your business stand out, even if it doesn’t have one. It also helps drive more visitors to your premises via online leads. These leads will likely give you a high conversion rate because they are specific searches for the products and services your business offers.

There are many advantages of listing your businesses in Local SEO:

• Increase your online visibility Google’s first five results receive 67.6% user clicks.
• Create a community.
• Get More Relevant Traffic.
• Local Return Customers.
• Build trust and authority among your customers.
• Lower Ad Costs.
• Sales increase.

Q5. What are Backlinks?

A backlink is the term for incoming links to your webpage or website. This is also known as an inbound hyperlink. Backlink is a link that links to another website. You can call backlinks by other names like inbound links or incoming links. 

SEO is dependent on backlinks as it is very important to increase the authority of your websites. Backlinks are when one website links with another. 

Backlinks are also known as incoming links or inbound hyperlinks. They connect to other websites. These links point to pages within your domain from domains other than yours.

Backlinks are still one of the best SEO tools available, even in 2021. It’s an excellent way to increase your search rankings and to increase your conversions.

Q6. Explain the types of SEO.

There are three types of Search engine optimization. These are:

On page SEO

Onpage SEO refers to optimizing your web pages’ content as you will optimize meta tags and keywords of the website. On-page techniques are essential for the search engine to tell about the type of your website. It will then reward you by showing your website when it understands it.

Off Page SEO

Off Page SEO is very important to build the authority of your website and it is all about trust, visibility, and exposure for your company. 

The main focus of this technique is link-building, which is the process of getting other companies back to your site. Another popular technique for off-page optimization is Quora marketing.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to checking that your website has been properly compressed and cached. This has a direct impact on page speed and is also part of technical SEO. This category also includes purchasing an SSL certificate to protect payments on your website.

Q7. What are the important tools used in SEO?

Google webmaster tools and Google Analytics are just a few of the basic tools that are used to do SEO. There are many paid tools, such as spydermate, bulkdachecker, and Seo Moz.

Google Webmaster Tools

This is one of the most important SEO tools. It was created for webmasters. It allows webmasters to communicate with Google, evaluate and maintain their website’s performance in search engine result pages. 

Webmaster allows you to identify issues with a website, such as crawling issues or malware. Anyone can use webmaster, which is a Google service that anyone can use.

Google Analytics Tool

It is a free web analytics service provided by Google. It provides statistical and analytical tools for SEO and digital advertising. This tool allows you to analyze website traffic and other activities on your website. This service is available to anyone who has a Google Account.

Open Site Explorer

This Mozscape index-powered tool is used to search backlinks, discover link-building opportunities, and identify links that could have a negative impact on rank.

Alexa is a global ranking system. It compiles a list based on web traffic data and then assigns an Alexa Rank to a site. A website with a rank of 150 will receive more visitors than one with a rank of 160.

Website Grader

It is an online tool that grades websites against a variety of critical metrics, including performance, security, and mobile readiness.

Some Paid SEO Tools

SEOMoz

It is a premium SEO web app that’s specifically designed for SEO. It gives you insights and analytics to help improve your search engine rankings. This collection includes many SEO tools that cover all important areas of SEO.

Spyder Mate

This software can improve your website’s ranking and offer many ways to promote it. This software allows you to manage your website portal and drive more visitors to your site.

Bulkdachecker

It is used to verify the Domain Authority of Multiple Websites at once.

Q8. Explain the importance of SEO.

This is one of the most relevant and asked interview questions for the post of SEO executive.

Nearly everyone uses Google to find products and services. Google searches are trusted by searchers. Less than 5% of search results users bother to look at page 2.

Your business will be at the top of search engine ranking so people can find you if they are interested in your products or services.

This means you can make more sales with less search engine marketing.

Q9. What are organic and paid results?

Organic Results

Search results that are based on relevancy, quality, or other ranking variables provide organic results.

They are one of two types of search results available in SERP. 

Unpaid organic results are sometimes called free results and natural outcomes. 

Organic results are arranged according to several criteria.

The sponsored results are listed below the organic results. Google cannot influence organic results, but they can be enhanced by providing superior data and allowing users the opportunity to interact with it.

Paid Results

Advertisers who pay to have their ads displayed alongside better organic SERP results. 

Paid results are instantaneous and advertisers do not have to improve their website or content in order to rank. Your position will be determined by your Max CPC and your quality score. 

Your quality score will improve the more you save money.

Q10. What are Search Engines? Name some. What is the importance of search engines?

Search engines are mainly computer programs that are used to provide searches by identifying items according to the search queries with matching them through the database to the user. 

Search engines were first used to only search specific websites on the internet or worldwide web. In the present time, search engines becomes smart and provide results on the basis of queries and give you other relevant results lists based on different factors.

The most popular search engine is Google and everybody uses it once in their lifetime to search for any query or service. Other search engines that are more popular than Google include Bing, Yahoo! and DuckDuckGo. 

Yandex is another. There are many kinds of Search engines. YouTube, for example, is a search engine that only returns video results. YouTube is second in traffic and the most popular search engine worldwide.

Search engines are the backbone of the internet. Search engines allow users to search for relevant information without the need to be a search engine market specialist or technical expert.

Q11. Explain Page Speed and what is its importance?

Page speed refers to how quickly your website loads for users. This is crucial because pages that load quickly are more efficient and provide a better user experience. Search engines like Google always consider page speed before ranking websites as it is one of the important factors.

There are many factors that can affect page speed.

• Page size
• Images, videos, and large files
• Javascript and excess code
• Load time
• Time to First Byte
• Round Trip Time (RTT)
• Last Contentful Paint

Q12. Explain web crawling

Web crawling is the process where a web crawler or spider bot or spider or crawler, an internet bot, browses the World Wide Web for web indexing. It visits pages using hyperlinks and copies them to be processed and indexed by the search engine, so users can search faster and more efficiently.

A computer program that searches web pages automatically for specific keywords Each search engine uses its own algorithm to rank websites for each keyword combination.

Google, for example, has its main crawler, Googlebot. This covers both desktop and mobile crawling. There are many other Googlebots, such as Googlebot Images and Googlebot Videos, Googlebot News and AdsBot. You may also come across DuckDuckBot or DuckDuckGo web crawlers.

Q13. What are Outbound and Inbound Links?

Outbound Links

These links point from your website towards another. These links are used in content to provide context and link to other sources that can add important information.

It is obvious that professional reviews of the best-quality articles always include a reference to their source.

Outbound Links help you achieve authority in the exact same way that you refer to the sources used in creating your content.

Inbound Links

These are links that originate from another website or a domain name. 

Google considers inbound links to be a sign that your site contains high-quality content. This makes them one the most important elements of search engine optimization (SEO).

Inbound links were not important in the beginning of SEO. The sites with the most links were the ones that were first ranked in search results.

Q14. What are the factors involved in a fully optimized website?

A website can be optimized to rank on search engines by many factors. You can ensure that your title tags, meta tags and alt tags are correct for on-page optimization. 

You can obtain quality backlinks from websites with high DA for off-page optimization. Technical optimization requires that your website speed is high and that the SSL certificate is not expired.

Q15. What are On-page and Off-Page SEO techniques?

On-page SEO

It is the process of optimizing your website and making changes to the title, meta tags or structure. This involves optimizing specific web pages to improve their ranking and bring more relevant traffic. This type of SEO can be used to optimize both the page’s content and its HTML source code.

The main aspects of On-Page SEO are:

• Title: Title is a must to tell in short about the thoughts of your web page or website. Your main keywords should be included.
• Meta Descriptions: Each web page should have a Meta description as it tells the main summary of the web page and it should include focus keywords for the search engines.
• Meta tags: Each page can have a set of keywords added to its Meta tags.
• URL Structure: You can add search-engine-friendly URLs to your webpage, which improves crawling. Shorter URLs with targeted keywords perform better in SEO.
• Body Tags (B, P, H1, H2, H3, H4, etc. ): To make your content easier to read, you can use body tags.
• Keyword Density: You should use relevant keywords in your content, but you shouldn’t repeat or overuse keywords.
• Image: You can include relevant images in your content to visually enhance your page and improve your SEO.
• Internal Linking: To enhance your website, you can add links to other pages. This improves crawling and navigation.

Off-page SEO

This refers to optimizing websites via backlinks, social promotion, blog submission, press release submission, and so on.

The important and relevant techniques of Off-page SEO are:

• Social Networking Websites: You can create a business page on many social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other such sites, and do similar tasks to increase your website’s SEO.
• Blog: Create a blog about your website, product, or service, and submit it niche blog directories and search engines.
• Forum Marketing: You can search for forums that are related to your website and interact with them by responding to threads, answering queries, and offering advice.
• Social Bookmarking: You can submit your pages and blog posts to popular bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious, and Reddit.
• Link building: You can create external links to your website to bypass your competitors and increase your rank.
• Press release submission: Your press release can be distributed across multiple media platforms to gain authority backlinks, and to convey information to the general public. This can help you rank on the first page of search results for your keywords.

Q16. What is domain and domain extension?

Domain

Each website has an IP address. This is the site’s location. Instead of having to remember multiple numbers for each website, we assign a name to each domain. This makes it easier to remember.

Domain Extension

A domain extension can be described as another name for Top Level Domain. The last segment of a domain name is called the top-level domain (TLD). Most often,  .com is used. They can be either generic like .com or  .net, or they can be location-specific such as .in (India), .co.uk (UK), or .es (Spain).

Q17. Explain Google Sandbox.

Google Sandbox Effect states that new websites are often in probation and cannot rank for the most important keywords. Google must consider the location before it leaves. This could be due to a tendency to create too many connections in a short time.

Although it was not officially announced, it was discussed by Google while they were discussing other things.

Q18. What do you mean by search engine submission?

Submitting your website to search engines is the process of making sure it gets crawled, indexed, and ranked. Although search engines can find your website easily and index it quickly, it is best to continue with search engine submission. 

You will have the chance to submit useful information about your website, and search engines will notify you if there are any errors.

Q19. What does www stand for and why do we use it?

WWW stands for World Wide Web. WWW is like a book which is used to collect different and unique websites that are stored on different web servers all over the world which are connected to local computers.

These websites are made of text, images, audio, videos or animations to make it more creative. Some websites are just informational and do not use more graphics.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and it helps to access websites from any server from all around the world. If you want to go from one website to another website or one page to another page, hyperlinks help you in that. These hyperlinks allow users to find specific URLs with the help of hypertexts.

Q20. Explain do-follow and no-follow links.

Do-follow links

Do-follow links enable search engines to follow them and reach websites. These links act as backlinks and are counted by search engines. They also help improve a site’s ranking. All hyperlinks are default dofollow.

No-follow links

Search engines will ignore links that are no-follow. It doesn’t transfer any value between sites. It can, however, influence the visibility or ranking in search engine index. No-follow links contain a rel=”nofollow” attribute within their HTML code.

Q21. What is cross-linking and explain its functions.

Cross-linking generally refers to linking from one site to another. It allows users to find reference sites that have the same content as their search.

Two websites that cross-link should not be owned by one person. Cross-linking, in other words, is a form of barter, where I link to you and you link back to me. It can be either a 2-way or 3-way link. 

Site A links to site C and site B links back to site A in a 2-way hyperlink. Site A links to siteB, site B links from site C, and site C links back to site A.

Q22. What is white hat SEO and Black Hat SEO?

White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO refers to a process that improves your search engine rank by following the guidelines set out by search engines. It does not compromise your methods. 

White Hat SEO does not involve manipulating search engines using shady techniques, but rather building search engine friendly websites and improving the user experience. 

This SEO is used to create high quality content which provides worth to its visitors and seems authoritative. 

High quality content can easily help you in earning backlinks from different high authority websites. White Hat SEO is a list of methods that follow Google’s guidelines.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO refers to the manipulation of search engine algorithms in order to increase search engine ranking. It is against search engine guidelines. 

Black Hat SEOs use methods that get instant results, rather than building websites with users in mind. Search engines can identify Black Hat methods and penalize those who are caught. 

These SEO techniques are useful only for a short time period and will not help you for long time promotion and these techniques are not recommended by search engines too. It takes so much effort and time to get your site penalized. 

This SEO type has a list of methods that do not follow Google’s guidelines. Here are some black-hat SEO techniques to avoid: Cloaking, keyword stuffing and link exchange.

Q23. What is Google and who invented it?

It is an American multinational company that specializes in Internet-based services and products. It offers services such as a search engine and cloud computing.

It was co-founded by Larry Page, an American computer scientist, internet entrepreneur, and computer scientist, and Sergey Brin, who is also an American computer scientist, internet entrepreneur, and computer scientist.

Q24. What is Google Suggest or Autocomplete?

Google Suggest and Autocomplete are two functions Google offers to help you with your search. When you begin typing in the search field, a box appears that gives you options to complete your search. 

Google wants you to save time by completing your search request. It’s also an SEO resource that shows you the top searches using a base keyword. This function can be used when you conduct keyword research because Google adds a search phrase to Google Suggest because they consider it a popular search.

Q25. What do you mean by these terms keyword frequency, keyword difficulty, keyword proximity and keyword difficulty?

• Keyword Frequency: It is the number of times a keyword phrase appears on a webpage. Optimizing a website requires that we not overuse the term to the point where keyword stuffing is possible.
• Keyword Difficulty: This metric is used to determine how difficult it is to rank for a particular term, based on its prominence or competitors. The more complex a keyword is, the more backlinks and time required.
• Keyword Density: It is simply the number of times a phrase or term appears on a webpage. Keyword frequency can be mistaken for keyword stuffing by search engines if it is significantly higher than the optimal level. We must ensure that there is no excessive keyword density for important or secondary search keywords. If a term appears five times in 200 words, then the density is 2.5%. While there is no ideal keyword density, a recommendation for SEO is 3-4%.
• Keyword Proximity: It is the distance between two terms on a webpage.

Q26. What are meta tags and explain the importance of Title Tag.

HTML Meta tags are short summaries of the page’s content. These meta tags are not displayed on a web page. These are page data tags and they lie between the HTML code’s closing and open head tags. 

These tags tell search engines about the content of a webpage. This information is known as metadata. Although the information isn’t displayed on the webpage, search engines and web crawlers can access it.

SEO title tags are crucial as they provide preview snippets of a page’s contents. They provide a good idea of the content on a page and are essential for SEO and social sharing. The title tag gives a clear and concise picture of the page.

These are the most important Meta tags for SEO:

• Google Title Tag: Google displays 55-64 characters. It is better to keep it below 60 characters.
• Meta Description tag: 160 characters long.
• Robots Meta tag: It contains four main values: index, nofollow and noindex.

Q27. What do you mean by URL and SEO friendly URLs?

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It is the URL of a web page or document that you find on www. These are the parts of a URL:

• Protocol: A method to process URLs (https, HTTP, etc.).
• Domain: The domain name
• Path/File: This is the exact location of a file, page, or other assets.
• Query string Parameters for dynamic information
• Hash: A section of a website.

Search engines and users can understand URLs that are easy to understand by both search engines as well as users. These URLs are SEO-friendly. 

These URLs will often include keywords and are usually self-explanatory. They can also be future-proofed to ensure that they don’t become outdated over time.

Q28. What is body content relevance?

The term body content relevance, or non-image text, is used to refer to text that doesn’t have images. This helps with site optimization and improves your search engine ranking.

Q29. What is alt text in images?

Alt text, also known as alt tag or alt description, is a written copy that describes the image and appears on a website. It’s useful in times when the image is not loading. You can also rank images under the “Image” tab of search engines.

Q30. What do you mean by SERP?

The search engine results page displays the results of a search query. When users type their search queries into the search field of a search engine page, it is displayed in a browser. A list of links to web sites is usually included in the list of results. 

These links are ranked in order of popularity. The links include the title and a brief description of the pages. Additionally, SERP may include advertisements in addition to the list of search results.

Q31. Why are keywords important in SEO?

Keywords can be words or phrases searchers may use to find your website’s content. Also called search queries. Search engine spiders will examine the web page’s image, metadata, and content and attempt to identify specific keywords that are used frequently on the page.

Keywords connect people to your website by connecting what they are looking for. Your website pages won’t reach the right searchers if they don’t have the right keywords.

Search engines like Google can help you find the most relevant keywords by using synonyms in the right places on the web page for example, the headers or the first paragraph. The most important thing is that searchers who are most likely to purchase will be found.

Many SEO tools allow you to track which keywords are being used and how often. There are many SEO tools that allow you to see which keywords searchers use and how often.

Q32. What do you mean by bounce rate?

This question is essentially asked by every SEO professional during SEO Interview Questions and Answers. The bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors that leave the landing page without visiting any other pages or taking any action.

According to Google, bounce rate is the sum of single-page visits divided with all sessions. It’s the percentage of sessions on your site where people only saw one page and made one request to the Analytics server.

To decrease bounce rates, increase page engagement through internal linking, CTAs etc. Improve page performance and ensure consistent user interaction among other things.

Q33. Explain Internal Links

Internal links are the links or hyperlinks which are used to link one web page or website to another web page or website or domain.

These internal links are very important to connect websites and they are very useful for users and search engines both as they help in navigating from one website to another without any confusion. 

To go on the homepage again all the websites use an internal link strategy to make it easy. 

Link depth is the number of clicks needed to reach a page. On the homepage, for user convenience and SEO effectiveness, all key pages links should be kept on the home page.

Search engines use internal links to index web pages and help link juice flow from one page to the next. The bounce rate of a web page can be reduced if it is properly optimized.

Q34. What are important ranking factors for Google?

These are the major Google Ranking Factors:

• Structure and quality of the content
• High Quality Backlinks that are relevant and of high quality
• Page Speed
• Image alt-text
• Mobile Friendliness
• User experience
• Content Freshness
• Domain Age, URL and Authority

Q35. What is DA and PA?

Domain authority, or DA. a Moz tool metric, is a search engine ranking score that ranges between 0 and 100.

This score is used to predict how high a website will rank in search engine results pages or SERP.

Higher DA means a better chance of ranking higher.

Moz has created a page authority or PA that predicts the rank of a particular page on search engine result pages. Page Authority scores can range from 1 to 100. Higher scores indicate a higher rank. Tools: Use Link Explorer to check your PA.

Q36. What are the main differences between SEO and SEM?

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a method of promoting websites through paid advertising. This allows them to be more visible on the Search Engine Result Page or SERP, in the Ads section. SEO refers to optimizing a website for a higher organic rank.

Both SEO and SEM heavily rely upon keywords to drive traffic toward business websites and pages. Although each marketing technique is different, they both focus on traffic flows and how they relate to marketing activities.

Search engines will be used by people to search for the product or service they are looking for. They can either search organically (SEO) or pay for the results (SEM).

Most people search online for information before purchasing anything. Having a strong presence on search engines is essential. Using a combination of both search and social media can increase your visibility over time.

SEO is for organic traffic. Both can be complementary, but only if your website is SEO-friendly before you use SEM. Then SEM will have a better chance of success.

SEO is essential for good SEM. If you set everything up correctly, you will have better chances of getting quality traffic and increasing conversion rates. 

You have a better chance of appearing at the top of paid search results if you have a well-designed website and targeted sponsored ads using the correct keywords. Google will consider you a trustworthy website if you have a good SEO.

If your website is older, you can prioritize your PPC campaigns first. It can take some time for SEO rankings to establish but don’t neglect your SEO.

Q37. How can you make a URL seo-friendly?

Both the search engine and the user experience are greatly impacted by enhanced URLs. They should be concise, simple to remember, straight to the point, and well-structured.

Description of your content is essential. The URL must clearly indicate what the page is about. In the URL, include your keywords. Google recommends using hyphens instead of underscores to separate words. 

Use lowercase only for URLs that are short and well-structured. Use static URLs to avoid dynamic URLs. However, dynamic URLs can be used for social media to track data. 

Make sure to only add value to the folders you use. They shouldn’t be added in unnecessarily – keep your site structure simple and flat.

Q38. What is the working of a search engine?

We can understand how search engines work by dividing the crawling, indexing and retrieval stages into three distinct stages.

Crawling

It is done by software robots known as web spiders or web crawlers. Every search engine has its own web spiders that perform crawling. The spiders then visit web pages or websites and scan them for links. 

They can then search the World Wide Web for information by crawling. After visiting a page, the crawler makes a copy and adds the URL to the index.

Web spiders usually start crawling with popular websites and servers that are frequently used. The web spider follows the link structure to find new interconnected documents via new links.

 It also visits the sites it has previously visited to verify for any changes or updates. It copies the changes it finds to update the index.

Indexing

This involves crawling all web pages or websites found on the World Wide Web and building an index. A huge database is used to store an index of crawled websites.

It is based on what type and how much information they provide. It’s like a book with a copy of every webpage that the spider has crawled. It collects information from all the web and organizes it.

Search Engine Retrieval

This step responds to users’ search queries by providing a list containing relevant information or answers in a specific order. It places the most relevant websites that provide unique and original information at the top of search engine results pages. 

When a user conducts an internet search, the search engine searches the database for websites and web pages that contain relevant information. It then creates a list of sites based upon their relevancy and presents this list to users on search engine result pages.

Q39. What do you mean by long tail and short tail keywords?

Long tail keywords

These keywords are longer and more specific phrases are what searchers most likely will use in a search. Long tail keywords are less popular than larger root keywords. They are more specific and easy to rank for, and generate better conversions.

Short tail Keywords

Search terms with short tail keywords consist of search terms that contain no more than three words. These keywords are used to refer to broad topics, rather than specific ones. A short tail keyword might be ‘party dresses’, while a long tail keyword could be ‘best dresses for a new year office party.

Q40. What is the robot.txt file?

It is a text file named robots.txt. This file contains everything. It teaches search engine crawlers how to index and cache websites, webpages, directory’s files, and domains.

Q41. What do you mean by 301 redirect?

These SEO interview questions and answers are designed to assess your technical knowledge. A 301 redirect is a permanent method which is mainly used to redirect search engines and users from an old URL to a new URL. 

If a webmaster needs to redirect from one URL into another, 301 works best because it passes the most link juice from the old to the new pages.

301 is more effective for SEO than 302 or other JS-related redirects in terms of passing authority and value.

Q42. Explain Google Penalty and how to avoid it?

Google Penalty is similar in nature to other types of penalties in any field. Google penalties are used to penalize websites for violating Google’s rules. 

According to Wikipedia, a Google Penalty refers to a negative effect on a website’s search rankings due to changes in Google’s search algorithm or manual review. 

A penalty could be an accidental result of an algorithm update or an intentional penalty for using black-hat SEO techniques.

Google penalties can be avoided by making sure that:

• The website is clean, simple and performs well.
• This website is user-friendly and mobile-friendly
• Broken links are not possible
• It is forbidden to duplicate content
• Smart keywords and tags can be used

Q43. Explain the terms: LSI keywords, rich snippets, schema markup, cloaking, doorway pages, and E-A-T.

Rich Snippets

Rich results are also known as rich snippets. These are the regular Google search results, but they have additional information that is displayed on the SERP. This information is pulled directly from the HTML page’s structured data. Rich snippets may include reviews, events, and recipes.

Schema markup

It can be a code you add to your website to allow search engines to display additional information to users in SERPs.

Cloaking

It is an SEO black-hat technique that displays content to users that is different from what search engine crawlers present to them in order to manipulate search engine rankings.

Another way to implement black-hat SEO is to use a portal page/gateway page/entry page. This allows you to create low-quality pages for specific phrases and send visitors to another page.

Cloaking and redirecting are two types of doorway pages.

E-A-T

It stands for expertise and authority and is mentioned in Google’s Quality Raters’ Guidelines to make sure that every website takes E-A–T into consideration when attempting to achieve a high ranking.

LSI keywords

They also known as Latent Semantic Indexing keywords, are keywords that are semantically associated with the keyword entered by users in search engines.

Example: How will a search engine identify whether Apple is a brand, or a fruit if it finds a page that contains the word Apple?

For this process, the search engine uses LSI keyword technique. The search engine will now use LSI keywords if it finds words such as flavor, taste, or fruit in an article. 

This would make it easy to identify that the article is about the Apple fruit. The keywords for the keyword ‘Apple’ are fruit, flavor, and/or taste.

Q44. What are Panda and Penguin Updates?

The Google Panda update, which was introduced in 2011, was intended to punish poor or thin content. Updated in 2011, the filter was designed to stop poor content from ranking highly for specific queries, even though it had little to offer readers. Panda is designed to improve Google search. This latest version focuses on quality content and proper design.

Google’s Penguin update launched in 2012. It’s a ranking algorithm that monitors sites that are in violation of Google Webmaster guidelines. It’s designed to reduce webspam.

Websites that rank highly with low-quality content or use ingenuine methods that are not beneficial to the user will be subject to a penalty.

Google recently announced that it can now nullify rather than penalize your practices. It aims to lower the rank of websites that violate the Google Webmaster guidelines. These guidelines are broken by black-hat tactics like Cloaking or stuffing.

Q45. What are the techniques you should use to decrease the load time of a website?

To speed up the loading of websites, you should follow these instructions:

• Optimize images: You can optimize images to reduce file size, but not affect the image’s quality. External picture tools such as picresize.com, Photoshop, and others can be used to resize images. Also, avoid using too many images.
• Use browser cache: This is the temporary storage of web pages that reduces bandwidth and improves performance. The cached version of your website is displayed to visitors when they visit. This saves server time and speeds up page loading. Browser caching can make it easier for repeat visitors to your site.
• Content delivery network: It allows you to distribute your website across multiple servers located in different areas. Visitors will request information from your server when they visit your site. The faster a server loads, the closer it is to you.
• Do not upload self-hosted videos. Video files can be large so it is a good idea to avoid them. Other video services such as Youtube and Vimeo are also available.
• CSS sprites can reduce HTTP requests. It allows you to combine multiple images into one image file. This allows you to reduce the server bandwidth, which will result in a decrease in loading time.

Q46. What is Anchor Text and why is it important in SEO? 

Anchor text is the clickable text or clickable link with the url address for the specific page. Common SEO best practices require that anchor text be relevant to the page to which you are linking. 

While exact match anchor text including keywords is more valuable, Google will penalize over-optimized distributions. You should have a natural distribution that includes brand, partial match and naked URLs.

As you would expect of sites linking to your site naturally.

Google and other search engines will use anchors to indicate the topic of the web page a page is linking to. This will help determine the keywords that they rank the site for, and thus determine the quality/relevancy of the traffic a site receives. 

Google must be informed of your keywords. However, it is important to make the site look natural. Google will penalize websites with unnatural anchor profiles. This will indicate that not all links were organically earned.

Q47. What are HTML and XML sitemaps?

HTML sitemap allows users to quickly view a list page structure to help them understand the site. If your website only has a handful of user-accessible websites, an HTML sitemap may not be necessary. HTML sitemaps can be very helpful if your website is large.

XML stands for “Extensible markup language.” An XML sitemap provides search engines with information about recent changes to websites. It includes a list of websites as well as the frequency at which they are updated. 

We may ask search engines to regularly index and scan our most important pages using an XML sitemap. A sitemap is one of the first things a search engine looks for when it discovers a website.

Q48. What is Forum Posting, RSS Feed, and Blog Commenting in SEO?

Forum posting

It is an off page technique that allows you to create a profile and create a thread. With forum posting, you can connect with other people or engage with other forum users. This will help you get backlinks for your site.

Although this could have been an excellent way to engage potential users, spammers made it less trustable.

Forum posting is still a great way to connect with other forum users to educate them and to clear doubts about specific subjects.

RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The feed submission is a process of submitting your feeds to RSS submission directories. With these directories, users can get easy updates from different websites, blogs, news all from one place. RSS’s usability is limited and people have changed the way they consume content.

Blog Commenting

Blog commenting refers to the act of commenting on several blog posts, especially from the same niche, and linking back to your website.

There are two types of blog commenting: Automated and manual.

Automated blog comments are usually scammy. You don’t have to read the blog post and then comment on a large scale. It does not add value to either the publisher or reader. 

Manual commenting is the process to go on different blogs of different users with good niches and after reading blogs comment. It is a great way to connect with the author with engaging topics. 

You can share the relevant blog post/page that may be useful to others.

Q49. What are the biggest SEO trends of 2021 that will stay relevant in the year 2022?

The recruiter will want to know your current knowledge of SEO tactics for 2021. You will need to answer the question about SEO tactics in 2021 by describing your past experience. 

These are some of the most important trends that you can discuss:

1. Google’s Core Web Vitals
2. Voice Search
3. Video SEO
4. Google’s SMITH algorithm (Siamese Multidepth Transformer-based Hierarchical).
5. High-quality backlinks
6. Featured Snippets
7. Keywords searched semantically
8. Image Optimization

Q50. What do you know about Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a web analytics service that Google offers for free. It provides detailed statistics about website traffic. It was launched in November 2005 to monitor and report website traffic. It provides free tools that allow you to analyze and understand your customers and businesses in one place.

It mostly contains statistics and basic analytical tools that can be used to monitor the performance of your website. It provides information about your website such as your visitors, their activity, and dwell time metrics.

It allows you to take the necessary steps in order to improve your website’s SEO and online marketing strategies. This tool is available to anyone with a Google account.

Google Analytics can produce reports that can be broken down into four types of analysis.

• Audience Analysis
• Acquisition Analysis
• Behavior Analysis
• Conversion Analysis

Audience Analysis – This gives you a view of your visitors. These are some of the main benefits of this analysis:

• It gives you information about the gender, age, and race of your visitors.
• It is possible to find the language and location of visitors.
• It is possible to identify returning and new visitors.
• It is possible to identify the browsers, operating systems and network of visitors.
• You can view the activity of visitors and see their path on your site.

Acquisition Analysis – This analysis helps to identify where your website traffic is coming from. These are some of the key benefits to this analysis:

• Traffic can be tracked from paid searches such as AdWords.
• Traffic can be captured from any channel, even referrals.
• You can monitor social media traffic and hub activity, as well as follow-up bookmarking websites.
• It is possible to identify which plug-ins are driving traffic.
• You can analyze and manage your campaigns.

Behavior Analysis – It allows you to monitor users’ behaviors. These are some of the benefits it offers:

• A content drilldown report can be generated which will provide you with valuable insight into site usage as well as information about exit and landing pages.
• It is possible to measure the page timings as well as user timings, which will help you determine the site’s optimal speed.
• This will allow you to see how users navigate your site and what they search for before landing on a landing page.

Conversion Analysis – Website conversion analysis is an essential part of the SEO process. Each website has a specific goal. For example, a website may want to generate leads or sell products or services. Conversion is when the goal has been achieved. These are some of the major benefits of this analysis:

• It allows you to track conversions like download, checkout, buy, etc.
• This will allow you to determine which products are most popular.
• Multi-channel funnel reports can be generated from conversion paths.
• It is possible to identify the best platform, module, or strategy for your business.

Some Additional tips for Search Engine Optimization Interviews

Digital Marketing jobs and SEO jobs are expected to be in high demand as the digital world is expanding and welcomed by all kinds of industries. 

Candidates who are skilled in SEO techniques and have the knowledge about all related SEO tools will find many job opportunities. 

Are you interested in a career as a SEO professional, Techstack Academy offers digital marketing courses in India. Get certified today!

Interviewers during the SEO interview want to know about the skills and knowledge you have about the trends and techniques and it is the opportunity for you to answer properly to make your career. 

How you tackle your interview and give the answer with confidence depends on your level of experience and knowledge. 

Questions and answers complexity depends upon the role you’re applying for in the company. 

These questions and answers on SEO will help to pass your interview the first time.

If you have interest in Google marketing techniques, trends, promotion, you should learn SEO courses and digital marketing courses as per your interest. 

Techstack Academy will provide you with in-depth training to help you develop the skills you need to work in the SEO industry. 

We will teach you with a practical approach by giving you access to the most used SEO tools to enhance your knowledge. 

Techstack Academy’s digital marketing courses will help you understand the concepts of SEO fully with the right modules.

These are SEO interview questions and answers to help you get the right job for you as this field is advancing at a rapid pace, which is why there will be new concepts every day.

SEO is a field which needs regular updates as it is based on new trends and algos by search engines.

Although the work of SEO professionals isn’t always easy, it’s rewarding. You have to identify new strategies, techniques with the right tactics to build the audience base for a website to get high ranking of your business or work websites in the search engines.

By generating more leads to your website or business, you can find new opportunities for your organization and drive good growth and profit. Prepare for SEO interview questions. Concentrate on the basics of SEO and digital marketing.

You will be able to stand out among other applicants if you are prepared for the interview and have practiced it before going in. 

Techstack Academy’s most popular online class for interview preparations teaches you how to make a CV, improve your skills, and prepare yourself for interviews. You will benefit from training that is based upon projects.

Your passions, interests, and strengths should be highlighted in your resume. You should also list any previous experience. 

In addition, you should mention what data science skills are your strongest. You must ensure that your Linkedin profile is updated with accurate information.

We hope that this article can help you to approach the interview for SEO and digital marketing with confidence and knowledge. We wish you all the best for the future!