101 SEO Interview Questions To Fetch You An SEO Job

The 101 important SEO interview questions and answers have been formulated to help you prepare for an SEO role interview and land yourself a fresher/beginner level job as an SEO Analyst or an SEO Associate. These SEO interview questions and answers will surely make you interview ready.

Basic SEO Interview Questions

2. What is On-Page SEO?

On-Page SEO refers to the SEO activities you do on your website to rank higher on search results. It includes optimizing keywords in the content, URL structure, HTML code, Title and Meta Tags, Image Alt Text, etc.

4. What is White Hat SEO? Give examples.

White Hat SEO refers to building links in ways that are aligned with the terms and conditions of Google. It is basically the ethical way of performing SEO activities.

6. What are the steps in an SEO process?

The important steps in the SEO process are:

7. Name a few basic/free SEO tools
8. What is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic refers to the number of visitors to a site coming from search engine results. No monetary investment made to generate organic traffic.

10. What is Referral Traffic?

Referral traffic refers to the number of visitors who came to your site from sources outside of the search engine.

Search Engine related SEO Interview Questions

12. What is indexing?

Indexing is the process followed by the search engines. It involves fetching data from webpages and storing it into its databases. This is done to process data and display the most relevant results to their users. Indexing is important for websites to get displayed in search engine result pages.

14. How does a search engine work?

A search engine performs 3 main functions. They are crawling, indexing, and retrieval.

Indexing is the process of storing the crawled data in the index which is a database of a search engine. Indexing collects data from all over the internet and organizes them based on their type and quality of the information.

16. What do you understand by Keyword Research?

Keyword Research means finding out which words people enter into the search engines while looking for a similar subject. Using those keywords in the web content helps draw traffic to a particular website or web page.

18. What are the different types of keywords?

Keywords used for targeting

Primary keywords

Secondary keywords

LSI keywords

Geo-Targeted Keywords

On the basis of length:

Short tail keywords

Medium tail keywords

Long tail keywords

20. What is keyword Difficulty?

Keyword difficulty determines the competitiveness of the keyword. It is the score given to a keyword that signifies how easy or difficult it is to rank for this keyword.

22. What is the difference between Keyword Density, Keyword Stuffing, and keyword proximity?

Keyword density is the percentage of the number of times a keyword appears on a web page divided by the total number of words on the page.

Keyword Stuffing is considered as a black hat SEO practice in which keywords are overused to get an unfair rank advantage in Google rankings.

Keyword Proximity refers to the distance between two or more keywords within the body of the text.

24 Which are the most important places to include your focus keyword for better SEO?

The best places to include focus keywords are page title, H1, body of the content, meta title, meta description, anchor links, and Image Alt Tags.

26. What is Domain Authority?

Domain Authority or DA is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A DA score ranges from one to 100. Higher the score, the greater the website’s ability to rank.

28. What is a spam score?

A spam score is a score developed by Moz which tells you what is the percentage of penalized/banned sites that have content similar to your website.

30. What causes bounce rate and how to reduce it?

1. Slow loading page
2. User is satisfied with the content on that page
3. Misleading title tag/meta description
4. Blank page or technical error
5. Low-quality content
6. Bounce rate can be reduced by
7. Improving the readability of the content
8. Avoiding Popups
9. Creating a strong Call-to-Action
10. Having valuable and relevant content

Off Page SEO Interview Questions

32. What is meant by Directory Submission?

Directory Submissions are websites that act as a web directory where you submit your website URL and acquire free backlinks back to your blog or web page.

34. Which social media channels are generally used for SEO activities?

Some of the most used social media channels are:

Blogging Platforms: WordPress, Tumblr, Medium, etc.

Social bookmarking sites: Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, etc.,

Social networking sites: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.

Video Sharing sites: YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe, Dailymotion, etc.

35. What are backlinks/inbound links?

Backlinks are the incoming links to your website from other websites. If a page has good authority backlinks from several established websites, Google will give more importance to your page compared to pages with low authority backlinks.

37. What is a No-follow link?

No-follow links are the links that restrict search engine crawlers from crawling through the page.

39. What is the ideal Do-Follow Vs No-Follow Vs No-Index ratio?

There is no particular fixed ratio that a website operator needs to follow.

However, an ideal ratio for Do follow Do Index : No follow no index : No follow do index is 50:25:25

41. What is Link Velocity?

Link Velocity indicates how frequently other websites are linking back to your site. Basically, it’s the rate at which your backlink profile is growing over a period of time.

43. What is link cloaking?

Link Cloaking is a Black Hat SEO Technique to mislead the Search Engine Bots into thinking the content on the page is different than what it actually is. Basically, in Link Cloaking the content is displayed differently to users and search engines bots (crawlers/spiders) based on IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user.

45. What is web 2.0 submissions?

Web 2.0 submission refers to the technique of posting content with a link to your website on interactive platforms/blogging sites. These submissions are done for SEO purposes as it lets you publish the content and create backlinks on it.

Note: Web 2.0 refers to the second generation of the world wide web, where static HTML pages that made one-way conversation moved to a more interactive and dynamic web experience between users and web publishers.

47. What is a snippet?

A snippet is a structured data generally consisting of a title, a URL and a description of the page. Adding snippets to an existing HTML helps search engines to better understand what information is contained on each web page.

49. What are the character limitations of the Title and Meta Tags?

The Title tag should comprise of 65-70 characters, and the ideal length for Meta Description tag should be between 150 to 160 characters.

50. What are rich snippets?

In case of a normal snippet, Google shows the title, the URL and a description of what the page is about. A rich snippet shows extra information between the URL and the description such an image, star ratings and other information that could be useful for the searcher.

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