Are you going for an SEO interview and wondering what type of questions will be asked? Then, this article is all you need to read today. This blog comprises the most popular SEO interview questions often asked by interviewers. Make sure to stick to this SEO interview question and answer 2024 guide to understand the real-intend and the depth of SEO interview questions.
Let’s get started.
SEO Interview Questions And Answers For Beginners 2024
If you are going for a fresher job SEO interview, you might get asked the following questions. Go through these SEO interview questions and answers to prepare yourself.
What Is SEO?
This is the most common and the first question you may get asked during an SEO interview in 2024. Here is the answer.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, a process or technique that helps you create and optimize your website according to search engines. Also, it helps improve the quality of your website, increase its visibility on SERP for relevant searches, and attract more customers to your business.
The main goal of performing Search Engine Optimization is organically increasing page rankings. You do not have to pay a single penny to get your website ranked on the first page of the search engine. It is all possible because of search engine optimization and entirely depends on your SEO efforts and how much you follow SEO ranking factors.
Note to remember: Most people believe that SEO helps to rank our website, but the truth is that with the help of SEO, we rank our keywords, not our website.
Also Read:
SEO Advanced Question and Answer
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Why is SEO so important to businesses in 2024?
In the online industry, there is a popular joke that if you want to hide a dead body, you should hide it on the second page of Google. Because very few people go to the second page of SERP, and if your business is not on the first page of Google, your competitors will take over and take all your customers.
CTR slowly decreases with each position. If you want to create an online presence for your business and want it to be successful in the online world, it is essential to have a good search-engine-optimized website. Another significant advantage of SEO against PPC is that even if you stop doing SEO activities today, your results won’t stop the next day, unlike PPC.
SEO is important for businesses if you want to find more potential customers and make more sales without high marketing costs.
So, you can answer the most commonly asked question like this. We live in the digital world, and today businesses are also moving towards creating an online presence. Even businesses that started before the digital time are switching to an online presence. The main reason is that SEO brings more visibility.
What is a search engine?
Google says a search engine is “a program that searches for and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user, used especially for finding particular sites on the World Wide Web.”
Search engines give answers to the queries entered by the users in the search bar by giving them a list of relevant results based on multiple factors.
Search engines are the software that conducts a search and represents the relevant results. It allows users to search for content on the World Wide Web (www). Once the user has searched, the search engine looks for and finds the nearest response according to the search query by searching on the other web pages and finally represents the relevant results options.
Multiple search engines exist, such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
Name a few search engines other than Google.
This is one of the most common questions you may get during an SEO interview in 2024.
Popular search engines other than Google are Yahoo!, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, and DuckDuckGO. Also, there are actually many kinds of search engines. For example, YouTube is a video search engine that only results in video results. If you consider search engines based on traffic, then YouTube is the world’s second most popular search engine.
Who are the founders of Google?
Sergey Brin and Larry Page are the founders of Google. They found Google while pursuing a Ph.D. at Stanford University, California.
In which year was Google founded?
Google was founded in 1998.
What does Google stand for?
The letters GOOGLE don’t stand for anything as it is not an abbreviation. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company, they named it Backrub.
Later on, they realized they needed a new name, and they wanted to name it Googol. When they registered, the name was misspelled as Google, and the rest is history.
What are the most important Google ranking factors?
There is no definite and solid answer to this. Everything we know is based on our SEO experiments and industry best practices.
Still, the following can make for the Google ranking factors:
- Content Quality
- Keywords
- Organic Clicks
- Backlinks
- Page Loading Speed
The Most Important Google Ranking Factors Are:
- Quality Content
- Quality & Relevant Backlinks
- Mobile First
- Page Speed
- Brand Strength
- Domain Strength
- User experience
- Technical SEO
- Social Signals
- Content Freshness
- Schema Code
- HTTPS
- Domain Authority
- Content-Type
- Content Depth
What is web crawling?
Web crawling is the process where the bots of search engines crawl websites for indexing. Those are called spiders or spider bots. Crawlers use hyperlinks to visit other documents and pages and bring information back to the web servers for indexing.
The more fresh content you publish on your website, the more often the search engine crawlers will crawl your website.
When asked this question in your SEO interview questions and answers session, you may also add why crawling is essential. The additional information in your answer could bring bonus points during the interview. And crawling is essential because of indexing because the website pages or content does not appear in the search results if they are not indexed.
What is SERP?
SERP stands for search engine result page. When you search for a query on search engines, the page that shows all the results is known as the Search Engine Result Page. SERP includes both PPC and organic listings. These listings are available in multiple formats based on the keywords.
SERPs are the individual results for the users, even though the keyword could be the same for the search. It happens because there are other contributing factors such as browsing history, location, etc.
What is an organic result?
Among the two types of search results in SERP, search engines display organic results based on content quality, relevancy and other ranking factors. Organic results are also known as “free results” or “natural results”, as these are unpaid results. There are many factors responsible for ranking organic results. You can see organic results under the paid results.
Also, you can not manipulate organic results by paying Google, but you can improve them by publishing high-quality content and improving the user experience.
What is a paid result?
Paid results are the results for which advertisers pay to get their ads shown above the organic results on SERP. Advertisers do not need to optimize their content and website to rank; these are quick results. The position on SERP will be based on your ad quality score and max CPC. The more the quality score you have, the less money you are required to pay.
Paid results show a little green box that says Ad, which displays that the company has paid to make their website or page placed at the top.
What is Google Sandbox?
Google Sandbox effect is an SEO theory that says that new websites are typically inside a box or probation period and cannot rank for their most important keywords. This theory states that Google requires some time to observe before taking a website out of that imaginary area. It may happen by building too many links within a short span of time.
It was never announced officially but was mentioned several times when Google talked about other topics.
Basically, Google Sandbox is the name given to the ranking process of Google and how it makes the websites appear in its index. You may also say that it is like an imaginary filter that Google puts. The new websites do not become visible until their probation period. You can prevent the Sandbox effect by indexing the website, improving the content, using keywords, getting traffic from social media, etc.
What is Google Autocomplete?
Google autocomplete, also known as Google suggestions, is a function in Google when a user starts typing in the search box; this function provides a list of options to complete your search.
Google suggestions or Google autocomplete help users finish the search in less time with little effort, especially when searching from a mobile device. The suggestions in the search section are based on popular searches and your search history.
What is Googlebot?
Googlebot is special automated software, commonly referred to as a crawler or spider, designed to crawl its way through the web pages of public websites. These web crawlers find, crawl, and then index the web pages.
There are two types of crawlers:
- Desktop Crawler – Simulate over the desktop
- Mobile Crawler – Simulate over the mobile device
What is DA?
This question is often asked during any SEO Interview. DA stands for domain authority, a metric developed by MOZ. It ranges from 0 to 100. The higher the DA, the better it is for the website. The possibility and chances for ranking increase with a higher DA.
The websites with a DA score between 40 and 50 are considered average, DA scores between 50 and 60 are considered reasonable, and DA scores above 60 are considered excellent.
How important is DA?
DA is an important metric for SEO. They use it to identify and understand the quality of websites quickly. This metric helps to compare multiple websites and understand their authority.
Difference between DA and PA.
DA is a domain authority. It simply explains the authority of a complete website. The higher the DA, the more possibility of ranking. DA is one of the 200+ SEO ranking factors.
PA is page authority. It explains the jurisdiction of a particular page based on social sharing, backlinks, etc. PA determines how well a specific page would rank on SERP. A score near 100 is considered good.
What is a domain?
A domain or a domain name is the address people type into a browser to reach a website. Like a fingerprint, each domain name is unique to a website and can not be shared or duplicated with other web pages.
What is a TLD?
TLD stands for Top Level Domain, the final part of an internet address. There are different kinds of TLDs available such as .com, .org, .net, .co.in, etc.
What is ccTLD?
ccTLD is a country code top-level domain. Each country has its domain extension. All country code top-level domains are just two characters. For example, .in for India, .us for the USA, etc.
What is web hosting?
If you consider buying a website like a home, then web hosting is like the land(space) you buy. Web hosting is access to a space provided by web hosting companies where you can build your website. The server has to have an internet connection. When the users type a domain name, their device connects to the server, and the pages get delivered.
What does URL stand for?
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It is the address of a document or web page on www. The URL has multiple parts. It begins with protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, etc.
The following are the multiple components of a URL:
Protocol: the method used to process the URL(HTTP, HTTPS, etc.)
Domain: the domain name (ex: hsdm.in)
Path: the folder and page of the website
Query string: parameters for dynamic data
Hash: finds the specific section of a webpage.
What is White Hat SEO?
White Hat SEO refers to such SEO strategies and techniques that provide better search results to users without breaking the guidelines and the rules of search engines. This SEO technique mainly prioritizes the audience over the search engines. The best way to accomplish a website successfully and ethically is by using White-Hat SEO. Also, this technique has advantages such as good quality service, mobile-friendliness, and easy navigation to your website.
What is Black Hat SEO?
In Black-Hat SEO, the main focus is to find algorithmic loopholes and achieve the desired results. It includes tactics and strategies that follow the proper guidelines of search engines such as Google. This technique is used for getting good rankings in an unethical way by doing activities that are against the guidelines, such as hacking into other websites or getting backlinks in those loopholes.
Difference between White Hat and Black Hat SEO.
The difference between white hat and black hat SEO is:
The list of SEO methods and strategies that follow Google’s guidelines is known as white hat SEO. On the other hand, the list of SEO methods and strategies that do not follow Google guidelines is known as black hat SEO.
Name some Black Hat SEO practices to avoid.
Here is the list of black hat SEO practices that should be avoided:
- Cloaking
- Keyword Stuffing
- Buying links
- PBN
- Link framing
- Link Hiding
- Doorway or gateway pages
What is a PBN?
A private blog network(PBN) is a network of websites created with the sole purpose of linking to other websites and improving their organic search visibility.
Google is against this practice as it can uplift spammy websites, which are most often hidden from search engines.
What are all the popular SEO tools available in the market?
The interviewer asks this question during an SEO interview to understand your expertise in tools. The most popular and essential SEO tools are Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Keyword Planner, Bing Webmaster tools, SEMRush, Ahrefs, Moz, Alexa, Buzzsumo, and more.
Google Search Console
If you want a job in SEO, you need to master Google Search Console. It helps you to analyze your website’s performance and optimize it better. You can also find the list of errors on the website and solve them. It is a completely free tool from Google.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics helps you to understand the performance of your website, understand the behavior of the visitors, and also helps you perform better in terms of conversions and so on. If your website is mid-level, then a free version of Google Analytics is enough.
Apart from these free tools, some remarkable paid tools are:
Moz
This tool helps businesses analyze and gain insights about their websites and competitors.
SEMRush
SEMRush helps you check the position of your keywords, the health of your backlinks, and errors in your website.
Ahrefs
It is one of the eBay tools if you want to analyze your or your competitor’s backlinks.
Screaming Frog
Screaming frog crawls your entire website and lists all the essential elements such as external links, internal links, descriptions, titles, HTTP status codes and more.
What are the backlinks?
Any SEO Interview Questions and Answers guide is incomplete without this question. Backlinks are the heart of Off-Page SEO. Backlinks refer to those links provided by one website to another to show search engines that the other websites trust the content on your website. And having backlinks from highly authorized sites will have a positive impact on the rankings of your website.
What is a do-follow link?
A do-follow link is a link that helps in terms of SEO, bypassing the authority(also known as link juice) of the origin site to the destination site. More do-follow links from high authority websites mean the possibility of better rankings in Search Engine Result Pages as a backlink is a very important ranking factor.
What is a no-follow link?
A no-follow link is another type of backlink that does not count as a point in the page’s favour. It doesn’t boost PageRank and also doesn’t help a page’s placement in the SERPs.
What is On-Page SEO?
As the name suggests, On-Page SEO optimizes your website or web pages and makes them more search-engine friendly. On-Page SEO helps search engines to understand your content better and rank them higher for more visibility in relevant searches. You can optimize the title, headline, meta tags, internal linking, URL structure, page content, etc.
What is a keyword?
Keywords are the words or phrases that users type in the search bar of a search engine to find relevant content. They are also known as queries.
After figuring out the list of keywords your potential users use, you need to analyze and implement those keywords on relevant web pages and optimize them to rank higher on search engines.
What is keyword density?
Keyword density refers to the number of times a keyword phrase appears in a webpage or a piece of content as a ratio or percentage of overall word count. Another name for this term is keyword frequency. While optimizing a web page according to search engines, we need to ensure that we do not use the keyword so much that it becomes keyword stuffing.
What is keyword difficulty?
Keyword difficulty is a metric that defines how difficult it is to rank a particular keyword based on its competition and popularity. The higher the keyword difficulty, the more needed SEO efforts and backlinks are.
What is keyword proximity?
Keyword proximity defines the distance between two keywords on a web page.
What is keyword stuffing?
Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO technique that increases the number of keyword repetitions in your content to a far higher range than ideal keyword density to rank for potential keywords. It is highly not recommended to do keyword stuffing to manipulate search engines, and should be avoided at any cost.
What is keyword stemming?
Keyword stemming refers to the ability of Google to understand different forms of a keyword. Also, we can say that the process of identifying the root word of a keyword and creating new keywords by adding suffixes, prefixes, and pluralization.
What is keyword prominence?
Keyword prominence is one of the best SEO practices involving using a page’s target keyword early( in the first 100 words) to signal to Google about what the page should rank for.
What is NAP?
NAP stands for Name, Address, and Phone number.
NAP is one of the important aspects of Local SEO. The NAP for your business has to be correct and consistent when you optimize your website and online presence for local search because Google values correct information for its users.
How do you know if you are using the correct number of keywords on a page?
There is no suitable range and number for keywords. You must ensure that the keywords you put in the content look natural and not forced. It is one of the best practices to have one primary keyword and a few secondary keywords, and again it depends on the content length, competition, keyword difficulty, flow of the page, and more.
What is the bounce rate in SEO?
This is one of the most common questions that can be asked in SEO interview questions and answers. Bounce rate is the proportion of website users who leave the website from the landing page without visiting any other page or without taking any particular action on your website.
To decrease the bounce rate of your website, you are recommended to increase the engagement on your page with the help of internal links, CTA, etc., increase page speed, enhance user experience, and more.
What are header tags?
Header tags, also known as heading tags, are used to separate headings and subheadings on a web page. The header tags in order of importance range from <H1> to <H6>, with H1 being the highest and H6 being the lower heading tag. H1 and H2 tags are considered to be the most important header tags.
What are meta descriptions?
Meta descriptions are HTML attributes that convey what the web page is about. The meta description provides information about the webpage not only to the search engines but also to the users. You can see meta descriptions on search engine result pages below the URL and title in the result box below.
Meta descriptions are one of the most important SEO tags you should optimize according to the keywords. Also, it is essential to design a catchy meta description so that users get attracted and want to read more about your web page, thus improving your Click Through Rate(CTR).
What are internal links?
The hyperlinks that connect one web page to another webpage on your website are known as internal links. Creating an internal structure is crucial for search engines and user experience.
You should create an internal linking structure with proper planning considering the users so they can navigate the website without any confusion. Keep every important page within two to three clicks from the home page. The number of clicks required to reach a particular page from the home page. All the key important pages of your website should be kept on the home page.
What are outbound links?
Outbound links, also known as external links, are links that link your website to another website.
Too many external links might hurt your SEO as they transfer link juice from your domain to other domains. To avoid passing on the authority, it is recommended to have no-follow links to your outbound links.
If you keep a few outbound links to high authority websites, it might be helpful as you tell search engines more about your website’s content, creating a connection from your website to other relevant websites.
What are inbound links?
Inbound links are the links that come from another domain to your domain.
Difference between an inbound link and an outbound link.
Inbound links are incoming links from other websites to your website. Outbound links are links that link your website to other websites.
What is robots.txt?
The Robots.txt file tells the search engine crawlers which URLs they can access on your website.
What is anchor text?
Anchor text refers to the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display while linking to another document on the web. Usually, it appears as blue underlined text, but you can change the colors and styles of your website links using HTML or CSS.
Anchor text should be natural, and diversity in anchor texts is important, like longtail, branded image links, and partial and exact matches.
Why is anchor text important to SEO?
Search engines use anchor text to understand the context of the webpage it is linking to. It holds some value in understanding what the web page is about.
What is the Title tag?
A title tag is a piece of HTML code that indicates the title of a webpage that appears in the search engine results. Optimizing the title tag is an important On-page SEO practice where it is recommended to use your focus keyword. Also, the title tag should be attractive and click-worthy to make search engine visitors click on it and visit your web page.
What are SEO-friendly URLs?
Again, this is one of the important SEO interview questions.
SEO-friendly URLs refer to such URLs which are easy to understand for both users and search engines. URLs are not dynamic but static and should be keyword-optimized, user-friendly, and short.
What are Robots meta tags?
Robot meta tags indicate how search engines treat a specific web page with commands like FOLLOW, NO-FOLLOW, INDEX and NO-INDEX.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO includes anything that affects the visibility, performance, or how search engines access your website. It may include page speed, indexing, crawling, schema, site structure, etc.
What is 301-Redirection?
This question appears to understand your technical SEO knowledge.
301 redirection method is used to permanently redirect users and search engines from the old URL to the new URL. When 301 redirections are applied, it passes most of the link juices from the old URL to the new URL. Regarding passing authority and value, 301 redirections are better than 302 redirections.
What is an Alt Tag?
An alt tag, also known as ALT description or alt attribute, is an HTML attribute applied to images to provide an alternative text for search engines. If for any reason, the image is not displayed in the browser, users can read the alternative text and identify what the image is about, which ultimately helps them to understand more about the web page.
Alt tags can help you improve the rankings of your website’s images in search engines’ image sections.
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO refers to steps taken and efforts implemented outside the website to improve the rankings; that is why we also call it off-site SEO. The process includes taking steps to improve the end-user’s perception of the website and its popularity and trying to improve the trustworthiness of the website. All this can be done by having people support and promote the content on your website.
Have a look at some of the Off-Page SEO factors:
- Social Bookmarking
- Guest Blogging
- Article Submission
- PR (Press Release)
- Web 2.0
- Email Outreach
- Image/Video Submission
- Pdf Submission
The main goal of implementing Off-Page SEO on your site is to increase the trust and authority of your website for the search engines and users.
What are the backlinks in SEO?
Backlinks are the heart of Off-Page SEO. Backlinks refer to those links provided by one website to another to show search engines that the other websites trust the content on your website. And having backlinks from highly authorized sites will have a positive impact on the rankings of your website.
The number of backlinks is not always important, but the quality and relevance significantly impact.
How important are the backlinks?
Search engines like Google consider backlinks as a vote. The more backlinks a website has, the more critical and popular it is. But as mentioned in the answer above, that number is not the only factor. Many other factors are responsible for identifying how much value every backlink brings to your website. These factors include the authority of the website, the relevancy of the website, the value of the web page which you get a backlink from, the location of the web page you get the backlink from, and more.
Undoubtedly, a single backlink from a high-authority website is far better than ten low-quality backlinks. If you are into the digital marketing business, the backlinks you get from websites related to digital marketing are more valuable than non-digital marketing-related websites.
What is search engine submission?
Search Engine Submission is the process of submitting your website to popular search engines to ensure that it gets crawled and indexed.
But, this process is not necessarily necessary anymore because search engines are smarter to find your website and index easily without you needing to submit your website to them manually.
What is CTR?
CTR stands for Click Through Rate. It refers to the number of clicks that your website receives divided by the number of impressions your website receives on SERP. CTR = clicks ÷ impressions.
For example- If you receive ten clicks and 100 impressions, your CTR would be 10%.
Conclusion
Well, this blog is the ultimate guide for SEO Interview questions and answers in 2024 for the beginner level. It can be an ultimate savior for you to help crack an SEO interview. All the questions for the beginner level are included in this article.
Also, we are soon going to publish another article that will include SEO interview questions and answers in 2024 for the advanced level.
We hope that you have found this article valuable. You may comment below if you have any doubts or reviews about the article. We will be more than happy to respond.
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