SEO Interview Questions and Answers 2021

seo interview questions answers

Learn more about SEO from basic to advanced level from these SEO interview questions and answers of 2021. These questions were asked by top companies and industry professionals.  First of all we always try to help bloggers and SEO community by covering different topics around digital marketing and SEO. Read below extensive list of basic and advanced SEO questions and answers in detail. These questions are perfect solution for freshers and experienced SEO professionals.

SEO industry is like an ocean of knowledge. Being an SEO expert you should always learn new things in SEO and digital marketing industry. Search engines like Google update its algorithms on regular basis. because Search engine business model works on two major objectives. 1. Relevant search results. 2. Fast search results.

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List of Best SEO Interview Questions and Answers

These questions are perfect for fresher as well experienced professionals. Question No. 1 to Question No. 20 for suitable for freshers to 1 year experience. Question no. 20 to End perfect for experienced SEOs.

Question No. 1. What is SEO , also define its types?

Answer No. 1. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is an optimisation process to increase and maintain position rank of a website page or document link in a SERPs, search engine result pages by using related keywords and search queries or phrases.

There are 2 Types of Search engine optimization (SEO)
1. On Page SEO
2. Off Page SEO

Question No. 2. Which SEO software and tools are you using for search engine optimization work?

Answer No. 2. I use SEO tools for example Google’s search console, google’s keyword planner, google analytics, Alexa, SEMRush, Open Site Explorer, XENU broken Link checker, Google Page Speed Tool, Bing Webmaster Tools etc.

Question No. 3. Do you still use directory submission? Which website you refer for directory submission list?

Answer No. 3. Yes, directory submission is white hat SEO technique and it is very useful to get better ranking. I use Soniseo directory submission list to submit my client’s websites.

Question No. 4. How you define a Backlink?

Answer No. 4. Any webpage or website linking to your webpage or website are called as backlink. You can also call it as an incoming or inbound link.

Question No. 5. How you define outbound or outgoing or external Links?

Answer No. 5. The outbound/Outgoing or External are the links pointing from web-page to another’s website page.

Question No. 6. What is Googlebot, provide more details about it?

Answer No. 6. Google’s system uses a computer program called GoogleBot Web Spider to crawl, index and also update web-page in Search Engine Index. In addition Googlebot Collect the content and details from a webpage by crawling and indexing of that webpage.

Question No. 7. How would you define cross links and how it works?

Answer No. 7. Cross links is a method of linking a webpage or website to another webpage. It provides reference to another webpage or website in terms of hyperlinks. Example – website A links to website B and website B link to C and D and Site D Link to B and A and so on. It is as much hard as it seems.

Question No. 8. What is Keyword and the significance of keywords in SEO?

Answer No. 8. User enter certain text or query in search box of search engines. These words/phrases are called keywords. Keywords are the main thing in SEO for which website are optimized.

Question No. 9. What is Canonical URL?

Answer No. 9. Canonical URL is one of the URLs as your preferred (canonical) destination for indexing and ranking. Therefore a server-side 301 redirect is best way to ensure search engines directed to correct URL for indexing and ranking.

Question No. 10. How H1, H2 and Alt Text are important in SEO?

Answer No. 10. Quality content plays and important role in SEO. Quality of content is and on page optimisation described by content headings and alt text of images in the content.

Question No. 11. What is Page Title? and What are SEO meta tags?

Answer No. 11. Page title is HTML tag that displays title of the page in the browser tab. It is the most relevant thing for search engines. Therefore SEO meta tags are the HTML tags that are important for SEO such as meta description, keywords, language etc.

Question No.12. Tell me some of the useful on Page SEO factors?

Answer No. 12. Few on page SEO factors are such as
Title Tag and meta description
Quality Content
H1, H2 and Alt Tags
Internal Links and keyword density
Bold, Italic, Underline Words
Qualitative External Links
Images, Videos, Infographics

Question No. 13. Which factors are important for Off Page SEO?

Answer No. 13. Few off page factors are such as
Incoming links from quality websites
Social score
Incoming links from goverment and educational websites
Links from business directories and blogs

Question No.14. What are latest Link Building Strategies?

Answer No. 14. Link bait, Content Marketing and Brand Citations are the latest link building strategies.

Question No. 15. How content is important for SEO?

Answer No. 15. Content is the only thing which is related to keywords which user enters in search engines. Hence content and only quality content is the most important thing for SEO.

Question No. 16. What are Search engine Robots, spiders and Crawlers? How it works in SEO?

Answer No. 16. All these terms are  same. It is type of bot program that crawl and follows some or all links all over the web then fetch the content of web-pages for indexing in search engines’ data centers.

Question No. 17. What do you do if nothing comes up after searching exact domain of website in Google?

Answer No. 17. It means as following

website is new and yet not indexed by search engine crawler
website is banned for indexing
website has canonical issue
site has not allowed for indexing by robots.txt or nofollow, noindex meta tags

Question No. 18. Do you know keyword cluster?

Answer No. 18. SEO finds out best keywords with the help of keyword tools and search. It is called as keywords cluster. Adding a suffix, prefix, or these keyword searches are  keywords.

Question No. 19. Name some leading search engine optimization blogs you follow?

Answer No. 19.
Google’s Webmaster Central blog
SearchEngineLand.com
MOZ.com
SearchEngineJournal.com
SEroundtable.com
SoniSEO

Question No. 20. What is URL Cloaking?

Answer No. 20. Cloaking is a black hat SEO technique used for promoting webpage for search. This black hat practice is kind of  practice different content is displayed for search engines spiders than what user see on page.

Question No. 21. Define some Meta Tags which are used for SEO purpose?

Answer No. 21. There are top four main Meta tags for SEO

Meta Description with 200 to 220 character limits. Right now it is increased in latest updates in Google. Most of the time it is picked from content snippets related to user’s search query.
Keyword tag with 300 character limits. Most of the SEOs are not using it for SEO in Google
Title Tag with 65 to 70 character limits
Meta Robots to define crawlers should index /follow the page or not

Question No. 22. Is there any limitation for meta description tag?

Answer No. 22. We should add max 220 characters in this tag.  Nowdays Google use pixel limits. This limit is increased in Google. So there are regular changes in Google. It is better you update yourself with latest updates in SEO.

Question No. 23. What is Google’s Index of Sandbox?

Answer No. 23. Google sandbox index is an assumption based index where few web-pages and search rankings. Google push bad or irrelevant websites in it’s sandbox index.

Question No. 24. Describe Black Hat SEO practices?

Answer No. 24. Some SEO and webmasters use negative SEO activities which are not recommended by search engines. These techniques are called as Black Hat SEO techniques.

Question No. 25. Name some Black Hat SEO practices?

Answer No. 25. Some of the Black hat SEO things are as following

  • Link Farming
  • Link injection
  • Hidden text and links, etc.
  • Doorway/Gateway pages
  • Cloaking
  • Keyword Stuffing

Question No. 26. How you define  nofollow links vs dofollow links?

Answer No. 26. Nofollow links have no affect on search engine ranking algorithm. While the dofollow link promote SEO score and link value. Dofollow links affect te search engine rank.

Question No. 27. Differentiate PR (Page Rank) and SERPs?

Answer No. 27. Page rank is google’s core search algorithm. PR is calculated by quality internal links from  web-pages, blogs, online documents and webpages to your webpage or website. SERP is the ranking of the webpage position on search result page  for a search query entered by user.

Question No. 28. Which is great SEO technique sub pages or subdomains

Answer No. 28. Both techinques are as good but subpages has great impact. Subdomains has their own individual identity. If marketer choose subdomains good interlinking will help in SEO.

Question No. 29. Is title tag valuable for SEO?

Answer No. 29. Title tag is most important in SEO. It describes the page content on the web-page. Title tags and description are the things that search engine tell its users.

Question No. 30. Which is more important, content creation and building backlinks?

Answer No. 30. Both are very important things. Quality content is also very important to backlinks in SEO.

Question No. 31. Describe the SEO vs search engine marketing?

Answer No. 31. SEM is used for promoting website or web-pages through paid ads such as PPC. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is all about optimising the website/webpage to increase ranking in search engine pages.

Question No. 32. What is LSI?

Answer No. 32. LSI means Latent Semantic Indexing. It is one of the search engine indexing techinques by which search engines find relation of keywords and content.

Question No. 33. How you can find your SEO techinques are working as expected?

Answer No. 33. We can check Google analytics and Google’s search console data metrics. We can identify which keywords are ranking on top positions and have good CTR (Click Through Rate).

Question No. 34. What is competitive analysis in SEO?

Answer No. 34. Competitive analysis is one the best SEO techniques. It compares websites, for which you are doing SEO and the webpage that is ranked higher in search results for same search query.

Question No. 35. What will you do if your SEO tips or methods does not work?

Answer No. 35. First I will analyse technical aspects of website like crawlability and Indexing. Then I will analyse content, on page factors, off page factors and other related factors. Then I will do competitive analysis with the help of google search console and google analytics. I will find out way to position different and appropriate strategies to rank better.

Question No. 36. What do you know about PPC?

Answer No. 36. PPC is an pay per click advertisement model adopted by Google. PPC is further divided into two parts CPC and CPM.  CPC means cost per click. CPM is known as cost per thousand impressions. If user clicks on the advertisement then advertiser is charged for clicks.

Question No. 37. What is 301 redirection?

Answer No. 37. 301 redirection is a web redirect type that redirect user to new page to old url. 302 is a permanent redirection type. Search engines suggest this method if webmaster change the URL of any web page. This redirection type passes link value to new webpage url from old  webpage url .

Question No. 38. What is Google’s search console?

Answer No. 38. Webmaster tool/google’s search console is a service for webmasters/website owners provided by Google. Webmasters/SEO and website users get relevant information about website such as search analytics, server errors, crawling, indexing stats and much more. User can also submit new URLs and website to search engine for indexing with the help of this tool.

Question No. 39. How you define keyword density and how search engines calculate keyword density?

Answer No. 39. Keyword density is the occurrence of relevant words in content of webpage/website related to search query. Keyword density helps a lot to make different content from competitor websites. This formula which is used to define the keyword density is = (Number of keywords/ sum of words in the content)  X 100.

Question No. 40. What is robots.txt?

Answer No. 40. Robots.txt is a file hosted on web server. Webmaster control crawling and indexing of website with the help of robots.txt file. User can allow or disallow search engines from indexing certain directories, webpages and URL parameters in robots.txt file.

Question No. 41. How to move content of your website to new domain-name?

Answer No. 41. First of all I will setup google search console account. Then I will update old website domain with permanent redirection to new pages for all the web-pages. Then I will submit new website to search engines.

Question No. 42. How do you SEO of the big websites or portals which has millions of pages?

Answer No. 42. Yes, mostly dynamic websites have many pages. We can promote these websites with dynamic SEO implementations.

Good Internal links and URL structure
Create dynamic site titles and description
XML sitemap creation with software and tools
Uniform structure and canonical URL meta tag implementation

Question No. 43. What are the new updates in Google’ SEO?

Answer No. 43. The new updates of search engine optimization are as follows

Google’s Rank Brain
Google Penguin and Google Panda are now part of Google’s search algorithm
Google Voice Search