I am going to share with you some special SEO questions and answers, which are asked in an SEO interview. If you have 2 years and above experience in SEO then the interviewer does not ask an easy question to experienced SEO guys. He always asks technical questions which we always read but do not remember. So if you wish to switch your job and looking for a new job then you must study these types of questions which I have explained here. If you face any difficult questions during the interview then you must share them with me. I will publish your question and answer with your name. Here I am sharing questions and answers which I have faced sometimes in the interview. So read and revise these. I write Continually in this section so visit again and again and read new updates. Thanks for staying here. .With best wishes!!!
1. What is Google Webmaster? Why do you use the webmaster tool? Tell me something about the Google webmaster tool.
Google Webmaster is a web tool that is provided by Google for analysis of the website and provides all information about occurred in any type of events such as any robots regarding the error, sitemap regarding the error, Indexing regarding information and many more. It tells about what's going on the site this time, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month and 1 year; structured data of all information on the website. If any problems are on-site then Google sends a message on the webmaster tool. we can know the problem on the site and remove the occurred errors. so it plays a vital part for all websites. For more Information Visit the webmaster tool website here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and log in your the email id which you create for the website.
2. What is cloaking in SEO?
Clocking is a method that has two different content for a separate URL. It is done for instance ranking of the site. it means, we get different content on-site but search robots get different content on site. For example. if anybody wants to tell about the adult information or any illegal information on the website, then they write content for visitors about adult or Illegal but tell the robots through good Keyword phrases or good anchor tag, title tag or meta tag; because robots search the content through these. but visitors get wrong information about wishing result. Now you understand well with this example.
3. What is Google Bombing?
Google bombing is the practice of creating a thousand links for a website that help to page ranking. it contains the low-quality link through the subdomain, low page rank link, and other adult links, it is done for the comical and satirical purpose by some special group or organization. but it is not good for the website. After some time Google banned these links. it is also a black hat SEO; because the links come from unrelated keyword phrases or different themes of websites.
4. What is link farming in SEO?
Link farming is a technique that is done by a special group of websites that is developed for link providing purpose to another website. it means it is a collection of links only, not any detailed content on the website.it is done by some automatically generated link (javascript) that occurs automatically if any visitor visits the site. it is done by hand to hand by a group. it is done for instance ranking of the site but is not good for organic search. Search engine penalizes these links. so avoid this type of technique.
5. What is Keyword Stuffing in SEO?
Keyword stuffing means there are many keywords that are used on website content for ranking purposes. it is not good for Seo organic search results. After some time we were penalized by the search engine. So we should use fewer keywords phrases compare to content. it is also an example of black hat SEO.
6. How many kinds of SEO Techniques? Explain.
There are 3 types of SEO techniques as follows:
1. White hat SEO:- It is a good practice of SEO. In this technique, we follow all terms and conditions of Search engine guidelines. First of all, we read the rules and conditions of the related website and post content on a specific website. we follow the general rules that are made for all people. we do all activities true as our business and provide legal information that is related to our services. If we do white hat SEO then it is best for our website, it takes a long time but is perfect for organic searches. So do more white hat SEO for your business website and enjoy your services.
2. Black Hat SEO: It is not a good practice of SEO. it is called unethical SEO too. In this technique, we do not follow the term and conditions of search engine guidelines and do the opposite of rules. For example, give a link with white text as page colour,(hidden text) give a lot of keywords on the site, link with the adult site and other subdomain links. Here is some example of black hat SEO, keyword stuffing, link farming, Google bombing, hidden text, poor content, link with low page rank website, etc.
3. Gray hat SEO: it is not bad nor too good from SEO point of view. Because we can say that it is the method between white hat SEO and black hat SEO, Sometimes we follow the rules and sometimes not. it does not harm us too much for our website. Some examples of grey hat SEO- are purchase paid links, PPC services; these are done only for traffic and business purpose. It does not help in organic searches. Some other grey hat examples - Facebook likes and comments on a blog etc.
7. What is different between Domain Authority And Page Authority?
Domain authority is measured by MozRank, MozTrust, It calculates how much quality the link of your website has? What is page popularity, how much is domain strength overall time from hosted on the server? How much quality content on your website? which type of domain you have etc. It is calculated by 0 to 100, You can check the domain authority of your website by this tool: http://moz.com/researchtools/ose it is easy to achieve 30 to 50, if you have 30 to 50 DA then your site is good condition. Domain authority between 50 to 80 is excellent and 80 to 100 is super excellent. Facebook and Google page authority is 100/100. Now you would understand well.
Whereas page Authority is the same term and condition as Domain Authority but is measured only 1 page of your website; not the whole website. it is also measured in 0 to 100. you can check the same tool. http://moz.com/researchtools/ose
You can visit here for Some general SEO question And Answer here
8. What is keyword stemming?
SEO point of view keyword stemming is the process of using the main keyword many times to add some prefix and suffix. Suppose the main keyword is SEO services but you can use it best SEO services (prefix) SEO services provider (Suffix) you can make many keywords to add like this word. It is useful to use in articles and blogs but takes care of the number of keywords. If you use many times keywords to add this suffix and prefix then it is harmful to an SEO point of view. So too many keywords used in the website to add like words in the main keywords are called keyword stemming and it may be harmful to SEO ranking. But if you use it 1 or 2 times in an article or blog then it's OK. Now I think you are clear about keywords stemming.
9. What is keyword density?
Answer - It is most frequently asked a question in SEO Interview. It is generally asked to fresher and expert too. So here I am going to clear properly here- Keyword Density is the percentage of keywords (phrase) compare to all words that are used on a single page (Webpage). It means how many times of keywords are used compared to all words on a single web page.
If anybody asks you the calculate the keyword density then simply follow this mathematics formula as told above in the definition - Total Number of Keywords / Total Number of words in Single webpage *100 ( Take an Example - Total Number of Keywords =5, Total Number of Words in Single Web page is = 500 then Keyword Density = (5/500)*100 = 1% ) So here called Keywords density is 1% Now I think you are very clear about it.
Keyword Frequency: Keyword frequency is the number of times a particular keyword appears on a website. Common sense may indicate the more times a keyword, or keyword phrase is found on a web page, the better the site will rank in Google.
For example use keywords in title, description, head tag and text but take care of keyword spamming
Keyword Proximity: Keyword proximity refers to how close two or more keywords are to each other. You will achieve higher rankings if you place your keywords close together.
Note - We should keep keywords closer to each other
Keyword Prominence: Keyword prominence refers to how prominent your keywords are on your web page. In simple English, this means how close to the beginning of the web page, sentence, title, h tag, or Meta description your keywords are placed.
10. What is the difference between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?
Answer - Yes it is a very technical question in an interview and it is generally asked if you have more than 1 or 2 years of experience in SEO. Many guys are confused about it and they told sometimes that both are the same But it is not good and the interviewer understands that you are not an expert; so don't be confused about it. Let's see the difference -
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to organic search and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) refers to paid search results.
Now in detail - If you do the activity for a website like ON page and Off-Page and follow the search engine guidelines and make the website user-friendly and search engine friendly so that your website ranks in a search result on keywords then it is search engine optimization. For website ranking; we all know that we do many SEO activities like- updating meta tag, content optimization, checking broken links, URL structure, submitting a sitemap and so on and promoting it by article, blog, press release, classified, business listing and many others. These all are SEO.
Search Engine Marketing - It means doing extra activities for business sales and traffic on the website directly or indirectly. For example for business conversion we send direct mail to the client, call by phone, Skype or chat online and other major activities that are online advertising called PPC. It means we advertise our business directly on a popular search engine like Google, Bing, AOL, Facebook, and other sites. These all come in search engine marketing (SEM). You can say that search engine marketing is for business conversion. You can say that SEM is paid service for web traffic.
Now I hope you are clear about it and you will give the answer in an interview with confidence and your interviewer impressed by you and hired you. And maybe it will last question for you and you can be selected; if you reply very confidently to this question because all are included in this one question.
11. How will you solve the Canonical issue or what is a .htaccess file?
Answer - If the website opens with more than one URL address like-
http://www.abc.com/
http://abc.com/
http://www.abc.com/index
http://abc.com/dnd? etc
Then it is called canonical issues. It is not good from SEO point of view because Google Robots understand these all URLs different web addresses. It means Google confuses the real address of your website. So we can fix it by two methods - By canonical meta or .htaccess file.
Fix Canonical by Meta tag -
<head>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://m.example.com/” media=”only screen and (max-width: 640px)”>
</head>
Note - Write the URL in canonical which you want to index in Google. For example, Google robots understand your website only http://abc.com/ and ignore other URLs,--- take care of your website still open with all addresses but you have given the instruction of Google robots only one URL. So Google now takes care of one URL. In this way, you can fix the canonical issues.
Very Important - If you have more than one page then you will have to write a canonical meta tag for every page in the head tag. Example - If your website opens more than one URL as I said above then you should write a canonical tag on the about page also like
<head>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/about/” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://m.example.com/about/” media=”only screen and (max-width: 640px)”>
</head>
Note - Many CMS platform has a setting option to fix canonical issues like - WordPress, Magento, Wix, Joomla. So you don't need to write the above code on these types of websites. Just you have to set your wising URL with www or without www.
If you want to open your website with only one URL then the best way to redirect the website is with the .htaccess file. But remember .htaccess file might differ on the basis of hosting or developing the platform. So you should write the code carefully. If you don't know properly about the .htaccess file then leave it. You should take help from developers in this case.
But Generally, we can redirect by the following code
It is also called 301 (Permanent Redirect)
redirect 301 /old/oldURL.com http://www.newURL.com
How to create a .htaccess file and how to use it?
Answer - Just you have to copy the above code in notepad and save it .htaccess extension (. dot) and upload it on root file on your website. like a robots.txt file.
We can also redirect by meta tag (Just below head tag)
<META http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.news
Hope you are now clear about canonical issues if you have any issues comment below.
Answer - If the website opens with more than one URL address like-
http://www.abc.com/
http://abc.com/
http://www.abc.com/index
http://abc.com/dnd? etc
Then it is called canonical issues. It is not good from SEO point of view because Google Robots understand these all URLs different web addresses. It means Google confuses the real address of your website. So we can fix it by two methods - By canonical meta or .htaccess file.
Fix Canonical by Meta tag -
<head>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://m.example.com/” media=”only screen and (max-width: 640px)”>
</head>
Note - Write the URL in canonical which you want to index in Google. For example, Google robots understand your website only http://abc.com/ and ignore other URLs,--- take care of your website still open with all addresses but you have given the instruction of Google robots only one URL. So Google now takes care of one URL. In this way, you can fix the canonical issues.
Very Important - If you have more than one page then you will have to write a canonical meta tag for every page in the head tag. Example - If your website opens more than one URL as I said above then you should write a canonical tag on the about page also like
<head>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/about/” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://m.example.com/about/” media=”only screen and (max-width: 640px)”>
</head>
Note - Many CMS platform has a setting option to fix canonical issues like - WordPress, Magento, Wix, Joomla. So you don't need to write the above code on these types of websites. Just you have to set your wising URL with www or without www.
If you want to open your website with only one URL then the best way to redirect the website is with the .htaccess file. But remember .htaccess file might differ on the basis of hosting or developing the platform. So you should write the code carefully. If you don't know properly about the .htaccess file then leave it. You should take help from developers in this case.
But Generally, we can redirect by the following code
It is also called 301 (Permanent Redirect)
redirect 301 /old/oldURL.com http://www.newURL.com
How to create a .htaccess file and how to use it?
Answer - Just you have to copy the above code in notepad and save it .htaccess extension (. dot) and upload it on root file on your website. like a robots.txt file.
We can also redirect by meta tag (Just below head tag)
<META http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.news
Hope you are now clear about canonical issues if you have any issues comment below.
12. What is the difference between Crawling and Indexing?
Answer - When we develop a website and make it live online and allow Google Robots to visit the site then Google Robots reach our website and read all the code and text which we have written. This process is called crawling and when Google or other search engines Crawl websites and keep your website URL and content in their database then it is called indexing. Google gives the result only after indexing your site. If your URL is not indexed in the Google search engine then it never shows in the search result. You can check your website index or not by the following search operator -
site:www.abc.com
If your website is indexed then it shows with title and description in the search result and if your website is not indexed then it shows no fund result page.
Answer - When we develop a website and make it live online and allow Google Robots to visit the site then Google Robots reach our website and read all the code and text which we have written. This process is called crawling and when Google or other search engines Crawl websites and keep your website URL and content in their database then it is called indexing. Google gives the result only after indexing your site. If your URL is not indexed in the Google search engine then it never shows in the search result. You can check your website index or not by the following search operator -
site:www.abc.com
If your website is indexed then it shows with title and description in the search result and if your website is not indexed then it shows no fund result page.
Now I am going to share some extra advance and technical questions and answers which are asked by SEO analysts or Sr, SEO Analysts when you have more than 4 years of experience - For better and best results you need to just click on the related link and read in-depth.
13. how to fix pagination URL through robots.txt
If you have possible duplicate content with your pagination, the idea is not to block pagination URLs with robots.txt but just define the rel="canonical" tag for your different URLs.For your four URLs, define this tag in your <head> section:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/category/sub-category/product/"/>
If you wanted to block just the page's listed, this is what you would need to add to your robots.txt:
Disallow: /category/sub-category/product/1$
Disallow: /category/sub-category/product/2$
Disallow: /category/sub-category/product/3$
Source - https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/54107/how-to-block-pagination-when-the-url-is-just-one-number
Or We can use -
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">
Read more here - http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html
How to Use Wildcards in Robots.txt
Very easy way to manage duplicate content by URL Parameter Read here how to block
14. what is the difference between session and page-view
15. What is Link Juice and how it is important for SEO Ranking
16. How to Deal with the 404 Error for Search Engine Optimization
17. What is different Between Fetch and Fetch and Render in Google Webmaster
18. How to handle Multiple Languages and Multiple Country-based websites to get a better ranking in Google
You can read it also - What is an international SEO?
19. What is the best SEO practice for E-Commerce Website
You should read these tips too for SEO best guide for an E-commerce website
20. What is the Referrer Meta Tag? How and when it is used?
21. Why show direct traffic in the Google Analytics tool?
What is the Google Analytics tool, Explain.
What is different between Classified listing and Business Listing?
How do you analyse the website?
What's the technique you apply for SEO Ranking?
what can you do for our ( give website URL) so that our website Ranking in Google First Page?
Tell me something Google New Updates?
Why do we hire you for this SEO post?
If you know some extra in SEO; tell me?
What is a data structure in Google webmaster?
What is a Data highlighter in Google webmaster?
What is a goal in Google analytics?
What are AMP updates?
Tell me the latest update of SEO and explain it
ETC........... Friend if you have any new questions then ask me. I will try to give you a proper answer with my best. So please comment with your Question.
You might like to read - Secrets of Top 10 Ranking in Google Search Engine