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

SEO has been the ultimate buzzword in the digital media for quite a long time.
From content marketing to attracting heavy traffic to any websites and ensuring the success of any social media campaign, SEO is the key to success!
SEO has a world in itself; it contains a vocabulary and language of its own with a highly evolving history.
The functionality of SEO is quite difficult to interpret, yet so unique!
Yet, our search on the Google trends show how consistently SEO has been in demand among global corporations.
It means you can have lucrative career in SEO if you know how to make it work!

Interested to know more about SEO?
Ask any corporation about it, and after a few hours, you will find yourself completely baffled!
Ask any SEO expert about it, and they will try to educate you with its tough technicalities!
That’s why I have shared some basic SEO interview questions and answers in a lucid manner which are sure to help you understand it better.
I have enlisted here 104 useful SEO interview questions asked by top employers.
So, you do not need to go around compiling information about SEO before your interview.
Discover all you need to know with these latest SEO questions and answers and embark on a successful SEO journey!
Keep digging!

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.
Search engines answer queries of the users by looking up to the index and showing the most appropriate pages.

14. What is SERP?

Ans. Search Engine Result Page or SERP refers to the page that is displayed when a specific search query is entered over the search engine. Apart from showing a list of results, SERP might also include advertisements.

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. What is “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.
For example, as you start to type Photoshop tutorial for, you might see other popular Photoshop tutorial related searches like “Photoshop tutorial for beginners” or “Photoshop tutorial for photographers.”

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. What is long tail keyword?

Ans. Long tail keywords are phrases containing over 4+ words that make search results highly specific.

These long phrases are used by smart SEO experts when they attempt to draw quality traffic to their websites rather than having random traffic, and increase their lead conversion rates.
Also, long tail keywords are easy to rank compare to single word keyword.

22. What are LSI keywords?

Ans. LSI keywords or Latent Semantic Indexing are semantically associated with the main keyword that users enter over the search engines.
How to find LSI keywords?
Lets say, you are writing about On Page SEO. Now, search for your keyword (On page SEO) in Google and scroll down to the “Searches Related to…” area at the bottom of the page:

With the use of LSI keywords, that are linked with the main keywords in terms of relevancy, search engines can identify the semantic structure of the keywords and extract the hidden meaning of the text to bring the most appropriate results on SERPs.

23. 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.

24. 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
But technically all of these urls are different.

25. What is Page Title?

Ans. Page title, also known as title tag, is a phrase used for describing a web page content. The title tag appears on the search result pages just above the URL (see below) and also appears at the top of a browser.

It is one of the main components of SEO as it sums up the content of any page accurately, and is generally optimized with keywords and other relevant information for drawing higher traffic.

26. 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.

27. What is SEO friendly URL?

Ans. SEO friendly URLs are used to optimize the structure and word usage in URLs so that the process of indexing a website by search engines become improved.
SEO techniques, such as putting keywords and having proper length and file structure in the URLs, help in improving website ranking and enhancing website navigation.
Search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.) and users may have problems with complicated URLs. Clean and simple URL helps users and search engines to understand a page topic easily.
Google’s Matt Cutts has stated that the first 3-5 words in a URL are given more weight.
So try to make your URLs short and simple. And always include your target keyword in your URL.
For example, if your article is about Google Ranking Factors, your URL should be like this:

28. What are meta descriptions?

Ans. Meta descriptions are also called HTML attributes which should provide an accurate description of any web page content. These descriptions act as preview snippets of the web pages over the SERP page.

Meta descriptions, which should ideally be within 150 characters, enhance the promotional value of the web pages, and can gain greater user click-throughs, if performed correctly.

29. 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.

30. 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.

31. 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>

32. What is internal linking?

Ans. Internal Linking is a process of providing hyperlinks on the web pages that connect to the same domain. It is another way of directing the visitors from one web page to another of the same website.

They help search engine spiders to crawl and index all the inner pages of a website/blog easily and such links help in building information hierarchy while pushing up the link juice level in any given website and allowing the visitors to navigate the website pages properly.

33. 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.

34. 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.

35. Why are backlinks important in SEO?

Ans. From the perspective of SEO, there is a difference between backlinks and quality backlinks.
For Google search, random backlinks do not offer any help. Google assesses the quality of the backlinks present on a webpage with the relevancy found in the content of both the web pages.
The higher is the relevance between the original content and backlink content, the greater becomes the quality of the backlinks.

Quality backlinks bring more referral traffic to a website/blog, and most importantly will improve the ranking of a webpage.

36. 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

37. 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.

38. 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.

39. 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.
Here is an example: https://mytasker.com/sitemap.xml 

40. How can I see what pages are indexed in Google?

Ans. There are two ways to see if the webpages of any specific website are indexed by Google.
1) One can check the Google Index Status of any specific website through Google Webmaster tools. After adding the website on the dashboard and verifying the ownership, clicking on the tab “Index status” would show the numbers of pages indexed by Google.

2) One can also perform a manual search on Google by typing on Google search bar site:domainname.com, and the number of pages indexed would reflect on the SERP.
For example:

41. What are doorway pages?

Ans. Doorway Pages, also known as gateway pages, portal pages or entry pages, refer to web pages or websites that are developed for higher ranking when specific search queries are entered.
Such pages give way to multiple web pages on the SERP which lead users to the same web destination. These can also funnel the users to intermediate pages that does not hold as much importance as the final webpage. Two common forms of doorway pages are cloaking and redirecting pages.

42. What are 404 errors?

Ans. 404 errors are considered one of the most potential impediments in the way to successful SEO. When a specific URL is renamed or becomes non-existent, any links connecting to that URL would result in 404 errors.

Interesting thing is, Google does not penalize any website for 404 errors. However, if the search engines consistently fail to crawl the internal links of any website, the search ranking of that website is very likely to drop with low traffic.

43. What is anchor text?

Ans. Anchor text denotes to a visible hyperlinked text that can be clicked through. Such hyperlinked texts link to different documents or locations available on the web.
These texts are often underlined and blue in color, but different colors might be given with the changes in the HTML code.

Anchor text helps users to connect to diverse data that are relevant to the source page or content. Anchor texts can be of different types such as keyword rich anchor, generic anchors, branded anchors, image anchors etc.
SEO best practices dictate that anchor text should be relevant to the page you’re linking to, rather than generic text.

44. What is Image Alt Text?

Ans. Google Bots cannot process images on the web. Therefore, it makes use of the alt attributes to understand what an image is all about.
The Image Alt text is generally considered as an alternate text for an image, which provides a textual alternative to the web crawlers to index the web page bearing the image.

Properly phrased alt tags can increase the SEO ranking of your website’s images in Google images search results, as they tend to add more value to the user experience.

45. What is Google Webmaster Tools/Google Search Console?

Ans. It was on 20th May, 2015 that Google changed the name of Google Webmaster tools to Google Search Console.
Google Search Console provides free web services to the web masters by enabling them to monitor and sustain the online presence of their specific websites.

Google Search Console helps the business owners, SEO experts, site administrators and web developers to see the crawl errors, crawl stats, backlinks and malware with a click of a button.