Did you know that Google made 4,500 changes to search in 2020? That would mean 12 changes almost every single day! Well, that’s where SEO comes in. It helps you cope with the changes and stay on top of the algorithm and your audience.
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These 18 SEO interview questions are an excellent (and comprehensive) list that will help with any interview. If you can master this set, we can assure you that your interview will be in good shape.
1. What are the types of SEO?
Before we move ahead with the SEO questions and answers, here’s something you should keep in mind. If an interviewer asks easy SEO interview questions, they are trying to test your ability to think about the main idea. When you answer, don’t get off track. Stick to the main idea and make sure you provide value.
source: seokenya.com
There are three main types of SEO for websites.
On-page SEO (also known as on-site SEO)
It is the practice of optimizing your website and its content to increase visibility (i.e., get a high rank) in search engine results for relevant searches.
Off-page SEO
This uses various techniques to improve your site’s authority and relevance, which ultimately helps it rank higher in search results.
Technical SEO
This ensures your website meets specific technical standards so that search engines can crawl and index it with ease. As a result, it loads quickly and effectively for visitors.
2. What are some ways to improve SEO?
Firstly remember that such SEO interview questions and answers are always open-ended. There can not be one correct answer.
The main objective of SEO is to reach out to people looking for products and services similar to what you offer. To do so, you have to ensure that your website is optimized according to the latest trends in SEO. There are certain ways by which you can enhance its performance and improve your rankings on search engines:
- Understand how search engines work
- Know your audience
- Make your site accessible to search engines.
- Make it mobile-friendly
- Create fresh content that is informative and relevant
- Write unique title tags for each page.
- Give each image a descriptive filename and alt tag
- Use heading tags effectively
- Create a sitemap and submit it to search engines like Google and Bing (Bing Webmaster Tools)
- Get other sites to link to yours.
3. Why Is Link Building Important?
Questions related to link building are the most common SEO interview questions.
Link building is one of the many essential tactics used in search engine optimization (SEO). Since Google uses links to discover new web pages and websites, links are essential for SEO. They are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, and they help both users and search engines navigate the internet.
Acquiring backlinks is an essential part of off-site SEO, and it can significantly improve your search engine rankings. However, it’s important to note that not all backlinks are created equal. Some are considered higher quality than others, and some strategies are considered safer than others.
4. What does it mean to index or deindex a page?
Indexing is adding a page to Google’s list of pages. Deindexing is the opposite. When Google has indexed a page, we know about that page and have added it to our list of carriers we might show in search results.
When you deindex a page, Google removes that page from our list of pages to consider for showing in search results. You could make your site unavailable for indexing by setting your robots.txt file or using the noindex directive, which tells us not to index specific URLs or all pages on your site (see controlling crawling and indexing).
5. How can link equity impact search?
Link equity is the value that a hyperlink passes to a webpage. It is one of the most critical factors in search engine ranking algorithms. The more link equity a webpage has, the more influence it has on search engine rankings for relevant queries.
It has an exponential value in SEO, meaning that a link from one page will have more value than a link from another carrier if it has more links pointing to it. In other words, the total link equity from all of the pages on a site is shared among all pages on the site. Homepages typically have more link equity than internal pages unless they are linked to more often.
Link equity can be categorized as either internal or external. Internal link equity is all links that point to pages within a website’s domain and subdomains, while external link equity is all links that point to pages outside of those domains and subdomains. External links are often considered more valuable than internal links because they are seen as endorsements from other sites that are not part of your site.
External links can also be categorized as either dofollow or nofollow, depending on whether they pass link equity or not, respectively. A nofollow link does not give any value from one page to another but allows visitors to visit the page.
6. What is a canonical tag?
A canonical tag is a meta-HTML tag that tells search engines which version of a page should be considered the “master copy.” In other words, it tells search engines where to find the original, or canonical, version of any given page.
The canonical tag is important because it helps search engines avoid duplicate content penalties. When Google and Bing see multiple versions of the same content on your site, they’re forced to pick one to show in their search results (and one to pass PageRank to). If they pick the wrong version, you could be showing up in search results twice for the same thing and losing traffic — or worse.
source: www.bulutinteraktif.com.tr
The canonical tag tells search engines which version of a page is the right to use in their index and shows in search results. For example, if you have ten different versions of a single product listed on your website, you can use a canonical tag to tell search engines which page should be considered the original source.
7. What is 301 redirect?
The concept of a 301 redirect is simple: When someone types in a URL for one page of your site, you want to send them to a different page. There are lots of reasons why you might want to do this:
- You’re migrating content or changing the URLs for existing content
- You’ve moved the content to another domain
- You’re consolidating multiple websites and want to send users to the main site
- You have duplicate pages on your site that you want to consolidate into a single page
source: www.wpblog.com
301 redirects are very useful and easy to implement in WordPress — even if you don’t know much about coding. They can be helpful for anyone who moves content around their website, uses custom permalinks or changes their domain name.
8. What is the difference between white hat, gray hat, and black hat strategies?
source: www.vixendigital.com
White hat refers to those strategies that are acceptable to search engines. They focus on improving your website’s content, usability, and relevance of inbound links. The focus is on the human audience instead of manipulative methods designed to trick search engines.
Black hat refers to practices that go against the search engines’ guidelines. This is also known as spamdexing, a term derived from “spam” and “indexing.” These tactics are often used by those trying to gain a higher ranking with little regard for the quality of their content and its usefulness to the user.
Gray hat refers to strategies that may be borderline acceptable by search engines. While gray hat SEOs won’t break any rules, they may bend them when it’s appropriate for their clients (and advantageous for their SEO strategies).
9. What is a 404 error?
The 404 Page Not Found error is the most common HTTP error, meaning that the page you are trying to reach could not be found on the server. In addition, it is a “client-side” error, which means either the webpage has been removed or moved, and the URL has not been changed accordingly, or that you typed in the URL incorrectly.
- There are many reasons why your 404 error occurs. It can occur if:
- The page was deleted
- The page was moved, and the URL wasn’t changed
- The web address is typed incorrectly
- The link that brought you to the page is incorrect
- The page never existed
10. What is the crawl budget?
In search engine optimization (SEO) terms, crawl budget is the number of pages on your website that search engine crawlers can and will crawl. It’s an essential part of technical SEO because if search engines aren’t crawling your site, they can’t index it properly. Therefore, to rank well in search results, you need to optimize your crawl budget.
Imagine yourself as a Google bot crawling website. You have a limited time frame per day to scan new and updated web pages. You want to get the most bang for your buck, so you want to ensure that every webpage you crawl is worth the effort. If a website has a lot of low-quality pages, or if it’s just not relevant to what people are searching for, you’ll spend less time on it.
If you don’t optimize your crawl budget, some of the pages on your website won’t get crawled as often as they should be. This can lead to issues such as out-of-date content remaining indexed or new content not getting indexed.
11. How do you find the right keywords for SEO?
For such SEO interview questions, you should be able to describe the problem you are trying to fix and how your solution is going to fix it. Make sure you know this really well because you may get asked this at a job interview.
Keyword research is the first step in any successful SEO campaign. First, you need to identify which keywords your site already ranks for and which it does not rank well. Then, you can find out how difficult it will be to rank for those keywords.
But, how do you find the right keywords for SEO? How can you tell what the competition will look like? And how can you determine if those new keywords are a good fit for your site and should be included in your SEO strategy?
Here are eight steps to help you pick the best possible keywords:
Step 1: Run a keyword analysis to see which terms your site already ranks for
Step 2: Find out which keywords get searched most often.
Step 3: Check out the competition for each of these potential keywords.
Step 4: Analyze the volume of searches on each keyword over time.
Step 5: Determine whether people who search for these terms are looking to buy or browse and research.
12. What are the top three ranking factors in SEO?
There are hundreds of different ranking factors in SEO, some more important than others. However, the top three ranking factors have remained the same since the dawn of search engines. They are
- Content
- Keywords
- Links
You have probably heard of these before but let’s look at them and understand which one is most important for your website.
Content has always been king in SEO, and it remains so today. Without good content, you will not be able to rank no matter how many links you have pointing back to your website. You need unique content that is keyword-rich and contains the right keywords in the right proportion (keyword density). The bots that crawl your site need to understand what your content is about to correctly categorize it and present it to users searching for information on specific topics. To satisfy search engine bots, you also need to follow good SEO practices such as having an XML sitemap, correct use of title tags, meta description tags, and image ALT tags.
Keywords are essential for optimizing your content for search engines and users alike. When users enter a query in search engines, they look for answers to their questions or solutions to their problems – basically, something that provides value to them.
Links from other sites are significant in how high your site ranks in Google’s search results. When other quality sites link to yours, it suggests that your site is worth recommending to their readers and improves your chances of ranking well for relevant keywords.
13. Which Google tools do you use for SEO?
source: www.neowin.net
Google is known for its search engine, and you’d be crazy not to use it for your SEO purposes. However, there are a lot of other tools that Google offers that can help you improve your SEO. Here are the three main ones:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most popular website analytics services available, and with good reason. You can track where your website visitors are coming from (including search engines or social media sites like Facebook), what they’re doing once they get to your site, and how often they’re returning. All of this information is invaluable when it comes to improving your site’s performance.
Google Keyword Planner
If you’re going to improve your SEO, you need to know what keywords people are searching for to find sites like yours. The Google Keyword Planner helps you precisely analyze search data from Google itself and other search engines such as YouTube and Amazon. It’s also helpful in finding keyword ideas based on phrases you already know about.
Google Search Console
The Google Search Console gives website owners an easy way to keep an eye on their site’s search performance, including how many pages have been indexed by Google and whether or not there have been any crawl errors.
14. How do you optimize content for Google Rankbrain algorithm?
Google Rankbrain is a machine-learning algorithm that helps Google process search results by understanding user queries and what they mean. It’s not a new ranking factor but a way to interpret existing signals. Here are some tips for optimizing your content for Rankbrain.
Focus on What Matters Most
Think about this, somebody making the third-highest salary in the company is relatively more potent than somebody making the tenth highest salary. The person at rank three has just one person to report to, whereas the person at rank ten has six people to write to.
Similarly, Google Rankbrain can process one or two things much better than six or seven things. In other words, focusing on a single keyword and building content around it will be much better than targeting multiple keywords and trying to fit them all in one post.
Quality Over Quantity
Don’t try to game Rankbrain by writing posts with little value just because you’re targeting keywords with low competition. If you do, you’ll end up with posts optimized for search engines rather than for people. And eventually, Google will catch up with you and penalize you for your trickery.
The most crucial step in optimizing your website for Google’s Rankbrain algorithm is to make sure that you are adding value to your content. So first, let’s look at the list of items that you can use to optimize your content:
- Create relevant and valuable content
- Write naturally
- Pay attention to your audience
- Make sure that your articles are easy to read and understand
- Write longer content. There is no specific length for an article, but longer articles are better for SEO purposes
- Add visuals such as videos or graphics
- Manage your internal linking structure so that it is clear and consistent
15. How do you optimize for voice search on a website?
source: www.bluecorona.com
Voice search was rarely used in the past because it was only available on a few devices. Now, everyone has access to it through their smartphone or virtual assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home. Because of this new accessibility, voice search is becoming more popular and should be considered when doing SEO.
Here are a couple of strategies you can use to optimize your site for voice search:
- Optimize For Featured Snippets
- Use Long-Tail Keywords
- Improve Site Speed And Mobile-Friendliness
- Include Question Keywords
16. How Does HTTP Work?
source: developer.mozilla.org
When you type a URL into your browser’s address bar, an HTTP command is sent to a web server (for example, http://example.com/index.html). A web server processes that request by looking for the requested document (for example, index.html) and then sends it back to your computer’s browser as an HTTP response message.
HTTP is designed for communication between clients and servers – each computer involved in the transfer of data has a client or server program installed. So, for example, when you install a web browser like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox on your computer, you establish a client program that allows you to connect to web servers on the internet (like Google’s servers) and retrieve documents from those servers and display them on your screen.
17. What is SSL?
As a website owner, you want traffic on your site to improve. If you’re going to increase your SEO efforts, you need to know about SSL in SEO and how it can help your site.
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. It’s a protocol that allows secure data transfer between servers and browsers. You may recognize the acronym HTTPS, which means Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure. This protocol is used on certain websites and has SSL certificates installed.
The SSL encryption improves security for visitors to your site. For example, if someone is sending credit card information through an SSL-protected site, it will be encrypted so no one can steal the data from the browser or server.
Because SSL improves security for visitors and search engines like Google, it also helps with SEO efforts.
18. How would you track/measure ROI for an SEO campaign?
source: abzcreativepartners.com
One of the biggest challenges for marketers is determining the return on investment (ROI) from their marketing efforts. This is true even for those who have been in the field for years. Because of this, it’s not surprising that many young marketers are wondering how to measure ROI for SEO campaigns.
While it might seem like a daunting task, there are some simple ways to measure your SEO campaign’s success, as we’ll outline below.
First off, let’s define a few terms related to SEO:
Keyword
A word or phrase that relates to your website and business. It should be used throughout your content so that search engines know what your site is about; this tells them which users you want to reach.
Traffic
The number of people visiting your website or landing page.
Conversion rate
The percentage of people who take action on your website or landing page (like filling out a form). Conversion rates can be calculated by dividing total conversions over total visitors multiplied by 100%.
Return on Investment (ROI) – The amount of money earned divided by the initial investment cost, expressed as a percentage. For example, if you spend $500 on an ad campaign and earn $2,000 in sales from that.
Conclusion:
It’s impossible to list all SEO interview questions and answers. But these SEO questions and answers will help you prepare for your big interview.
Don’t worry if you can’t remember everything. And, if you’re ever in doubt, never hesitate to ask the hiring manager what they are looking for.
The bonus tip is – it isn’t important to get all the SEO interview questions and answers right; instead, your focus should be on how you can provide a solution no matter what the situation is.
People work on projects to solve problems. If an employer hears that you have worked on something that not only solved a problem but you are also passionate about it, they will be more interested in hiring you.
Make sure to go through these 18 SEO interview questions for freshers to be confident. Some employers like to throw in some curveballs during the interview process, so be as thorough as possible, and don’t forget to have fun!
