31 Useful SEO Interview Questions & Answers: A Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Useful SEO Interview Questions & Answers: A Beginner’s Guide to SEO - See more at: https://mytasker.com/blog/seo-interview-questions-and-answers/#sthash.Yp1lmZuz.dpuf

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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. “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.

17. 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.
18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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

22. What is the definition of URL?

Ans. Uniform Resource Locator or URL acts as a generic term used to specify all kinds of web addresses found on the web.

URLs provide users with ways to identify and locate resources and documents on the web. URLs contain internet protocols, IP address of the host and the domain name along with other information.

23. What are backlinks?

Ans. Backlinks are also called incoming links that help users to shift from one web page to the other web pages. These links play an important part in SEO.

When Google search engine views multiple quality backlinks to a page, it considers the page to be more relevant to the search query, which helps in its indexing process and improves its organic ranking on SERPs.

34. What is a Do-Follow link?

Ans. A Do-Follow Link, as the name suggests, allows Google link calculator called PageRank to count all the inbound links from other web pages and websites as link points.

The higher the link juice or link points are, the greater would be the search ranking of that web page, as these links make the web page appear very relevant and popular to the Google search engines.

25. What is a No-Follow link?

Ans. A No-Follow link is exactly the opposite of a Do-Follow link as such the link attributes do not allow the Google bots to follow them. These links cannot be followed by robots; only humans can do it.

No-follow link attributes are structured in the following manner:

<a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Link text</a>

26. What are incoming links?

Ans. Inbound Links, also known as incoming links or backlinks, refer to the hyperlinks present on a third-party web page that directs users to your web page only.

Inbound links can be based on both text and graphics. However, textual inbound links are more useful in drawing greater traffic and improving the PageRank level of any webpage.

27. What is an outgoing link?

Ans. An outbound link is a hyperlink that points at a targeted or external domain and is different from the links present on the Source domain. For example, if you provide links of other third-party web pages on your website, those would be external links to your site.

Outbound links bear great importance in SEO as they provide your web pages with more quality and value for the search engine ranking. Google search engine counts outbound links as third-party votes which improve the ranking of your web page.

28. What are the most important Google ranking factors?

Ans. According to Andrey Lipattsev, the Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, the top 3 ranking factors affecting the search engine algorithm of Google are:

#1 Content

#2 Backlinks

#3 RankBrain

29. What is robots.txt?

Ans. Robots.txt is one way of telling the Search Engine Bots about the web pages on your website which you do not want them to visit.

Robots.txt is useful for preventing the indexation of the parts of any online content that website owners do not want to display.

IF you  want to block all search engine robots from crawling your website, just put the follow code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

IF you  want to block Google from crawling your website, just put the follow code:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

It is important to decide the location of Robots.txt very carefully, or else errors might occur while displaying the website.

30. What is HTML Sitemap?

Ans. An HTML sitemap comprises of one single HTML page that bears the links of all the web pages of any specific website. This sitemap holds the foundation of all web pages of any website.

HTML sitemap contains all formatted text files and linking tags of any website. It is particularly useful when you have a large website with multiple web pages, because it helps you to improve the navigation of your website by listing all the web pages in one place in a user-friendly manner.

31. What is XML Sitemap

Ans. XML or Extensible Markup Language is primarily created to facilitate the functionality of the search engines.

A good XML sitemap informs the search engines about the number of pages present on a specific website, the frequency of their updates and the time of the last modifications performed on them, which helps in proper indexing of the website by the search engines.

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