Search Engine Land
SEOSmarty
MOZ
Search Engine Journal
BacklinkO

Cloaking is a deceptive way of optimizing your website for search. In this technique, different content will be shown to the search engine crawler than what is presented to the end users.

There are mainly for types of Meta tags in SEO.
Meta Description tag with 1200 pixels limits
Meta Keyword tag
Title Tag with 600 pixels limits
Meta Robots

We can add 70 characters in a title tag and 222 characters in the Meta Description tag. Though Google now places a pixel limit.

Google sandbox is an imaginary area where new websites and their search rating are put on hold until they prove worthy for ranking. In other words, it checks the standard of the website.

In order to get a high ranking in SEO search engine result page, websites go for various methods and techniques which are characterized by two categories. One method that is acceptable by search engine guidelines is known as White Hat SEO, while the other method which is not acceptable by search engine guidelines is known as Black Hat SEO.

Link Farming
Hidden text, etc.
Gateway or Doorway pages
Cloaking
Keyword Stuffing

No follow links do not pass Link juice and have no impact on Google Ranking Algorithm. Dofollow link passes link juice and has an impact on Google Ranking Algorithm.

Page rank is calculated on the basis of quality inbound links from other website or webpages to our webpage or a website.
SERP (Search Engine Result page) is the placement of the website or web-pages which is returned by the search engine after a search query or attribute.

Title tags are essential in SEO, as it tells about the contents on that web page. Through title tags only the search engine will notify the user, what is there in the page.

Both are necessary for creating quality content is equally important to building backlinks. Although link building is useful in building authority to a site and for ranking as well, quality content is the first element that is considered to be more responsible for ranking.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing), it is used for the promotion of website through paid advertising by increasing their visibility in Search Engine Result Page (SERP) in the Ads section. While SEO is optimizing the site to increase the organic ranking of a site.

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. This technique is established to obtain the data by relating the word to its closest counterparts or its similar context. For example, if you are searching for something with a keyword “CAR” it will show all the related things like classic cars, car auctions, Bentley car, car race, etc.

In order to check whether your SEO campaign is working or not, the first approach is to check the website’s statistics, which tells you about the origin of the traffic. The other way of checking is to make a search based on the relevant keywords and key phrases and look for the search result. The number of search result will tell you whether your SEO campaign is working or not.

Competitive analysis does the comparison, between the website I am optimizing, and the website that is ranked highly in search results.

My first attempt would to try analysis the problem and resolve them step by step
Firstly I would try to see whether it is a new project, and then like to re-check the keywords.
Also, I would look for relevant keywords that can be helpful.
Even though the webpage and website have been indexed well and still not appearing on the first 10 pages of search engine result page, then I would make some changes in page text, titles, and description.
If the website is not indexed well or dropped from the index, then it might comprise serious issues, and re-work might be required.

PPC stands for Pay Per Click and is an advertisement campaign hosted by Google. It is segmented into two modules CPC ( Cost per click) and CPM ( Cost per thousand impressions) through flat rate and bidding respectively. In CPC, if the user clicks on the advert, only then the advertiser will be charged.

It is a method by which the user is redirected to new page url to old page url. It is a permanent redirect, and it is also useful in directing link juice to new url from old url.

Webmaster tool is a service provided by Google from where you can get backlink information, crawl errors, search queries, Indexing data, CTR, etc.

SEO Questions for Interview : an SEO point of view, keyword density will definitely help to stand out your content from others. The formula to know the keyword density is ( Total number of keyword/ total number of words in your article) multiply by 100.

Robots.txt is a text file. It is through this file. It gives instruction to search engine crawlers about indexing and caching of a webpage, file of a website or directory, domain.

The first step would be to update the previous site with a permanent redirect to a new page for all the pages. After that, I will remove the previous content from the search engine in order to avoid duplicate content issues.

From an SEO point of view, for dynamic website, special additional SEO stuff has to be implemented.
Good Internal link structure
Generation of dynamic title and description
Dynamic XML sitemap generation

The latest updates in SEO are:
Panda
Penguin

Panda is to improve the search on Google. The latest version has focused on quality content, proper design, proper speed, proper use of images and many more.

Penguin is the code name for Google algorithm. Its main target is to decrease the ranking of that website that are violating the Google Webmaster guidelines. These guidelines are violated by using black hat techniques like Cloaking and stuffing.

Through Backlink Quality Checker you can know who links to your website. Now, you have to go to ‘Toxic link’ report, where you will find all the links, that are harmful to your websites. If there is any link in ‘Toxic link report’ that matches with the link on your website, then you can remove it by using ‘Google Disavov tool’.

To prevent someone from building or redirecting a low-quality link to your site, you can use tools like,
A hrefs
Open Site Explorer
On regular intervals. You can either request the webmaster to remove the bad link or disavow them.

Backlink tools run a series of tests to tell you how many backlinks are pointing to the web link you entered. Additional information is also being collected like anchor text used, Domain Authority & Trust of the backlink source, and any potential flags or warnings for each link.

A link audit may be a tedious and complicated process. If you have just started on building links, you can do an audit quite often. But a complete link audit should be done approximately once a year.

A-Frame in HTML is a technique that divides the content of a page onto several parts. Search engines consider Frames as completely different pages and may have a negative impact on SEO. We should avoid the usage of Frames and use basic HTML instead.

The most important area to include your keywords are,
Page title
Body text
Meta Description

If the search engines ban your website for black hat practices, you can apply for re-inclusion after correcting your wrongdoings.

If the SEO method doesn’t work then do the following,
First, see whether it is a new project then re-check the keywords
Then look for relevant keywords that can be helpful
Make changes in page text, title, and description
If still not ranked then there may be some other serious issues like bad links, penguin/panda or other Google penalty, crawlability issues, UI issue, etc.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn are some important platform which is used for online promotion.

Several factors make a website search engine friendly, including keywords, quality content, titles, metadata, etc. A website needs these factors to be ranked by a search engine and therefore found by a user.

You might want to answer this question based on the type of company you’re interviewing for, as goals might differ. In addition, there are a variety of ways to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) and, therefore, success. During an SEO interview, possible answers might include increasing traffic to a website or particular landing page, increasing conversions such as newsletter signups or sales, growing the number of inbound links, driving traffic for a particular keyword phrase, or increasing referral traffic. It’s critical that an SEO professional measures result to know if the tactics and strategy need to change to succeed.

Obviously, this answer will depend on your individual situation, but it matters because a potential employer wants to ensure that you are well-versed in SEO best practices. If you learned SEO by the seat of your pants at your last job because someone had to do it, an employer might doubt the quality of the skillset you offer. And, if that’s the case, you can always get certified before applying for that job to ensure you are well trained!

You will likely have tools you’re familiar with, and you’ll want to talk about those. If you don’t yet have much of a toolbox because you’re new to SEO, check out the multiple webmaster tools Google offers, as well as the tools offered by Moz.

As with the question above, your answer might vary. You’ll want to explain which keyword tools you use for research, as well as how you go about it. For example, if you use Google Keyword Planner to do your keyword research, then that’s your answer for the tool used. But you must also explain how you go about it. You must demonstrate you do more than simply guess at a keyword and type that into the tool before checking the results. For example, perhaps you use personas to consider potential problems a prospect faces, and you look for keywords around that. You should also explain that you consider longer keyword phrases, search volume, and the competitiveness of a keyword. Demonstrate that you know how to find the sweet spot in keyword research, where the keyword narrower so it’s targeted and has good search volume, but is not highly competitive.

Google exists to serve the searcher. That means Google is constantly trying to determine which results are most relevant to any given searcher and any given time. In addition to relevance, Google considers credibility too. So the search engine looks to see if other websites have linked to yours. If so, that means your content is worth linking to and is, therefore, more credible when compared to a website not linked to externally. In a nutshell, link building is what SEO professionals do to try and get links to their websites in order to improve search results.

A backlink is what we call the links into a website from an external source, as mentioned in link building.

Page speed refers to how fast your site loads for a user, something Google takes into account while ranking websites since a faster loading page directly translate to better user experience. If the interviewer asks what you would do to increase page speed, describe how you’ve achieved this in the past with examples such as reducing image sizes, enabling compression, reducing redirects, removing render-blocking JavaScript, leveraging browser caching, improve server response time, using a content distribution network to compress files, optimizing the code, etc.

In general, a 301 redirect is the best way to redirect a page so you don’t lose any SEO value that has been accumulated.

Videos are growing increasingly popular on the web, which can improve SEO if the videos produced get attention and therefore shares and backlinks. But to get the video seen can require SEO to get it found, and Google can’t watch a video. It needs the same types of information required for text-based pages to rank a video. Including the transcript as a text is an easy way to do SEO for a video because search engines can crawl the text. In addition, the same attention should be paid to keywords, page titles, and descriptions.

Meta tags have changed since SEO became a common practice, but two remain critical: the page title and the meta description. Stick to these when answering your interview question. The page title (sometimes called SEO title) plays an important role in ranking but it is also important because it is the title that shows on the Search Results Page (SERP). It must use a keyword to rank well with Google but it must also be compelling so a user will want to click on it. The meta description does not affect ranking, but it also plays a role in the SERP because it also must make the user want to click on the search result. You should also mention that Google recently increased the character length limit of meta descriptions to around 280 to 320 (no one is sure of the actual limit yet).

Nofollow links exist because we don’t want every single webpage or link to be something a search engine crawls and ranks. Therefore, nofollow link attributes tell search engine bots not to follow a certain link. The link is still clickable for a user, but not followed by a bot. On the other hand, all other links could be considered do-follow links, even though they don’t have to have special attributes to tell the search engines bots to follow them—the bots will by default.

The biggest SEO factor not in your control is Google! How exactly Google ranks websites is unknown. The company does not make public the search algorithms it uses, although SEO professionals have determined the best practices we adhere to in order to achieve results. However, Google doesn’t like young domains that aren’t yet tried-and-true, and you can’t control that if you’re launching a new site. Nor can you force people to link to your site, share your content, spend more time on your site, or come back to your site for another visit. Google looks favorably on all of these factors and ideally a marketing department is working hard to create content and user experiences that will make these happen, but these factors are beyond the control of the SEO person.

This gets back to the question about the factors that are outside of your control. On-page SEO includes the factors you can control, such as keywords, content, page structure, internal linking, load time, etc. Off-page SEO includes those factors you can’t control, such as backlinks.

Ideally, you won’t interview with an organization that condones any black hat SEO practices, but it might be a trick question to make sure you wouldn’t use them either. Cloaking, keyword stuffing, copying content from another site, exchanging or trading links, buying links, hiding text, and using a link farm are all underhanded techniques frowned upon—and penalized—by Google.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. The biggest difference between the two is that SEO is free and SEM is paid. SEM includes pay-per-click advertising and display ads that are purchased. Despite the major difference between the two, they work best in unison.

This is a question requiring a subjective answer, but you might want to think through all of the different skill sets required to be good at this kind of job. An SEO professional must have good research skills, for one thing, as well as strong analytical skills. An ability to spot trends and adapt to change is also important. As you think through the answer to this SEO interview question, consider your own strengths as an SEO professional.

This is a question only you can answer, but be prepared to answer it in a way that emphasizes your experience and any advanced SEO training you’ve done.

Because of the job you’re applying for, you might be asked several of these types of SEO analyst interview questions. Be ready. Talk about the tools you use for analytics, what you look for, and how you use those metrics to measure results and plan to make changes.

As per the question above, you’ll answer this based on your own experience. It might be that there are features of Google Analytics that many people don’t know how to use, or that people get caught up in the details and forget to look at the big picture, or perhaps they neglect to align analytics to the SEO strategy. Answer the question as you see fit, but do be prepared to answer it.

Keyword stemming is adding on to the stem of a word. For example, if the word interview was your stem, variations could be interviewing, interviewer, interviews. Using keyword stemming helps you to use more relevant keywords on a webpage without keyword stuffing or ending up with content that reads poorly.

This is a subjective question! People new to SEO tend to focus on popular keywords without considering the competitiveness of that keyword, so that’s something you could mention. Search volume and relevancy are other factors you might discus

A canonical issue happens when you seem to have duplicate content. (Google penalizes for duplicate content.) This might happen if you have different versions of a URL pointing to the same webpage, for example, http://exampleURL.com and http://www.exampleURL.com.

We hope you haven’t had any link penalties slapped on you by Google due to your SEO efforts, and you might want to make that clear to your interviewer! Then address the steps you’ve taken to find bad links, and either fix them if you can or to disavow those you can’t.

Google offers so many valuable tools! Demonstrate your knowledge of them and your proficiency with them when answering this question.

Google prefers that mobile websites are configured using responsive web design.

Rich snippets are the featured text that appears at the top of the organic search results, in a box and sometimes with an image. Webmasters can use structured data to mark up content so that search engines can easily identify the type of content and deliver it as a rich snippet. Rich snippets are not part of SEO, but if used, they can deliver better results on the SERPs.

Doing an analysis of a competitors’ websites is a useful way to execute a competitive analysis to basically see if you should be emulating anything that they are doing.

A link audit is basically an audit of the links that point to your website, the backlinks. SEO experts to link audits prior to doing a link building campaign, but also to make sure external links are of the quality you want to help with SEO.

Panda and Penguin were the two most significant Google updates, although the search giant is constantly making changes to its search algorithm. Panda was introduced in 2011 and targeted poor quality content. The Penguin update was released in 2012 and targeted spammy link building techniques. Both are regularly updated by Google.

Released in 2013, Hummingbird has helped to make search contextual, moving us away from the strict adherence to keywords toward understanding a searcher’s intent.

MP is a Google-back project to push for pages that load quickly on mobile devices.

You’ll want to answer this question based on the sources that you rely on for up-to-date SEO and Google news.

As with the answer above, this will be subjective, but be prepared to answer it by showing you understand SEO’s role in the bigger picture. Talk about aligning with business objectives, achieving goals and driving results, not just “winning more searches.”

If you’re an experienced SEO executive or manager, this should be an easy question for you to answer! You can talk about the obvious mistakes such as using the wrong keywords (which is possible in so many ways), not keeping up with changes made by Google, not optimizing for mobile, ignoring analytics, and so on, but mention others that are particular to your experience too.

As with so many things Google, no one can say exactly what it is. RankBrain is part of Google’s search algorithm. It’s an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system used to process billions of web pages to help determine which results are the most relevant, in particular, queries that are new and not necessarily related to specific keywords (to really dumb down the explanation). There isn’t a way to optimize websites for RankBrain other than to continue to focus on quality content because RankBrain is less about keywords.

PageRank is about credibility and it is used to help rank your pages. Credibility is determined in part by the age of the page, the amount and quality of the content, and the number of inbound links.

Content marketing is crucial to effective SEO because Google wants quality content, it gives you content to optimize for SEO, and it creates content other websites will link to (when done right). Content marketing is often done via a blog, but content can be created in many other forms as well, such as video, podcasts, infographics, ebooks and so on.

The degree to which social media influences search rankings is not known, but social media still matters. For example, it can help you get backlinks when you share website content via social media platforms, and it builds your brand, which makes your website more likely to get the clicks on the search results page.

This is another SEO interview question you’ll answer based on your experience, but some specifics you might mention include how PPC can be used to drive traffic while waiting for pages optimized for SEO to start ranking. Also, we no longer have keyword research tools just for SEO, so we have to use PPC tools. PPC can be used to try out a keyword before committing to using it for SEO.

Again, you’ll answer this question based on your own experiences and knowledge. Factors you might mention include knowing the short- and long-term goals, knowing the competitive landscape, understanding the audience, etc. But how you as an SEO expert go about developing the strategy will probably be unique to your experience.

As part of your answer, you will want to talk about how you use Google’s web analytics to look at direct navigation, referral traffic, numbers of visits, conversions, time on page, etc. and how you interpret all of that data to measure the effectiveness of your SEO strategy.

Obviously, this is an advanced SEO interview question we can’t help you with, but you have to anticipate and be ready to answer the question, preferably with some hard data to add credibility to your story.

Again, this is an advanced SEO interview question we can’t help you with, but you are interviewing for an SEO executive or manager job, so you will need to talk about your experience as a manager

Google is going to have two indexes, starting at some point in 2018: one for desktop searches and one for mobile searches.

Hummingbird was an overhaul of Google’s search algorithm, released in 2013. It strives to move beyond just keywords and understand a searcher’s intent.

Internal links are links within your website linking to another page within your website. Internal links help all of the content on your website to get crawled and ranked.

Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz. It predicts how well a website will rank in search results.

To answer this question, you’ll want to talk about those blogs or newsletters you follow, probably including the well-known SEO websites such as Moz and SearchEngineLand, but also including any others, you find beneficial.

This answer is more subjective and no one will fault you if it turns out your predictions were wrong, but giving a well thought out answer shows you pay attention to the industry. You can talk about the two indexes Google will start using in 2018 and how that will affect mobile SEO, and the continued importance of providing a good user experience (and what that might look like). Local search is still a hot topic, as is voice search. Take a look at what the pundits are saying prior to your answering your SEO interview questions and you’ll come across as someone in the know.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a form of digital marketing where you optimize a website so that Google decides that website gives the best value to searchers and positions the page at the top of the search engine results.
It’s achieved through technical and structural changes to the website, by writing content so Google understands what the page is about and also by the type and number of websites that link to it.

Almost everyone uses Google to search for products and services. Searchers trust the results of a Google search, so much so, less than 5% of people bother to check page 2 of the search results.
By having your business at the top of the search results you allow people who are interested in your product or services to find your business.

“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 are the workhorses of the world wide web. They allow searchers to find relevant information and websites without needing to have any technical expertise.

Others include Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, AOL.com, Baidu.
Don’t forget Amazon and Youtube. Pinterest is also a kind of search engine.

Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California.

There is no official abbreviation for Google. One suggestion is, it’s a misspelling of Googol which means a really large number. Otherwise, there’s plenty of ideas floating around but nothing confirmed.

“WWW” stands for World Wide Web and is found at the start of a URL.

The world wide web (which is the www pre-fix on a URL) is a collection of web pages, all housed on a network of computers.

Every website has an IP address, which is the location of the website. Rather than having to remember different strings of numbers for every website you want to visit, we allocate a name to each domain which is easier to remember.

Top-level domain (TLD) is the last segment of the domain name. Most commonly “.com”. They are normally either generic, such as “.com” and “.net” or they are location specific, such as “.co.uk” (UK)or “.es” (Spain).

A domain extension is just another name for Top Level Domain, which was covered above.

Unfortunately, there is no “right” number when it comes to keywords on a page. TF IDF is a good option (read more). Essentially you look at the words that competitors use and their density and take the position that if Google has ranked them, they must be in the right ballpark for keyword density.

Sometimes a trick question. Most people would think and say it’s websites but it’s actually individual web pages that get ranked, but, that said, the domain as a whole plays a role in determining which page gets ranked.

Web hosting is access to space on a server to store a website. The server needs to be connected to the internet, which usually is through a data center.

Crawling is the process where a Google bot systematically crawls the World Wide Web. It can also be called a spider or spider bot and it’s usually to index or update pages.

Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are the pages displayed by search engines in response to a query by a searcher. It can be used when explaining results, for example:
“the page is currently #1 in the SERPs”.

These are the unpaid search results displayed by Google in response to a query by a searcher. Known as the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). You’ll find them just under the paid results at the top of the page.

Paid search is where advertisers pay to have their ads displayed on the search results. Typically it’s an auctioned based system called PPC (Pay Per Click) where advertisers can bid to have their ad shown first. They are normally placed at the top and bottom of the page.
 

Ans. Google Suggest or Autocomplete is a function Google offers when making a search. As you start typing in the search box a box drops down giving you options to finish your search.
Google wants to help you save time by finishing your search request. As SEOs it’s also a resource of what Google sees as the most popular searches using a base word.

Keywords are words or phrases that searchers might use in searches related to your website’s content. Also known as search queries.
Google will look at the image, metadata, and content on your page and try to determine what the page is about by identifying specific keywords used regularly on the page in question.

Keywords are the connection between what people are searching for and your website. Without the right ones, your website won’t target the right searchers.
Choosing the right keywords and using them, together with synonyms, in the right places on your page (for example in headers and the first paragraph) will ensure Google understands who will most benefit from finding you. And most notably, searchers that are most likely to buy.

Off-page SEO is the term we use to describe activities we do away from a site to improve rankings.
Off-page SEO could also mean social bookmarking or social media marketing because traffic and citations matter to Google too.

Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific keyword phrases that searchers will most likely use in a search.

Not to be confused with meta tags, header tags are the snippets of code that identifies to Google that the content is a Header and therefore is a signpost for the type of content that will be in this part of the page.
Heading tags have a top-down hierarchy from to with H1 being the biggest header and also the most significant in terms of SEO.

An alt tag (sometimes called an Alt attribute or Alt description) is some HTML code that allows us to give images a text description. These are crucial because they allow Google to understand what the images relate to, which adds to Google’s overall understanding of the page.

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator (sometimes known as just ‘Universal)

On-page optimization (or On-page SEO) means the changes you can implement on the website to optimize the site and gain improvements in rankings. Changes can include meta descriptions, content optimization, structuring, and increasing page-load speed.

The meta description is an HTML tag that helps Google ( or search engines in general) to understand your website. Most importantly, it’s the data that’s displayed in the SERPs (rankings).

A backlink is a link one website gets from another website. Backlinks make a huge impact on a website’s prominence in the search engine results.

Google was built on the backlink model. It is what made the Google search engine different from other search engines. They see links from the right sites as a signal that you’re trusted and relevant. Having links from highly authoritative sites, specifically in a niche adds the domain’s authority.
The goal is to have links from niche relevant, high-quality sites. The more you have and the better the quality, the higher you will be ranked in the SERPs.

This is a standard hyperlink. When Google finds this link it will follow it and it will pass authority and trust from one domain to another.

Google defines a no-follow link as :
“Nofollow” provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.”
It doesn’t hold any real SEO value, Google says they generally remove no-follow links from their overall graph of the web.

A do-follow link is a standard hyperlink that Google will follow and add to the overall graph of the web.
Most importantly, for SEO, they pay “link juice” from one page to another.
However, a no-follow link is structured so that Google ignores the link and will not pass any link juice of SEO value from one page to another.

Internal links are backinks that connect one page on a domain to a different page on that domain. They are commonly used in main navigation or UX but as SEOs we can also use them.
They have 2 main usages:
1 – We can use them to build hierarchy on silo the domain to help build relevancy and authority on specific keywords.
2 – They can be used to pass links juice/authority from one page to another, specifically with contextual links.

Inbound links or IBLs are links coming to your domain from another. It’s the phrase used by the person receiving the link.

Outbound links or OBLs are links that link your website to another.
They don’t provide a lot of value to you, in fact, depending on the structure of the OBL they may dilute the SEO done to your site.
OBLs can be do-follow or no-follow. Do-follow links are standard and will pass authority and “link juice” to the domain you’re linking to. No-follow will stop Google crawling the link and will not pass any value to the site you are linking to.

Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. SEO best practices dictate that anchor text is relevant to the page you’re linking to.
Although having exact match anchor texts (including keywords) delivers more value, Google will punish over-optimized anchor distributions and you should have a natural, variable distribution that includes branded, partial match, exact match, and naked URLs. As you would expect from sites naturally linking to your site.

Search engines (specifically Google) will use the anchors as an indicator of the page’s topic a web page is linking to. This will determine which keywords they will rank the site for and therefore determines the quality/relevancy of the traffic a site gets.
However, although you need to signal to Google the keywords that are your focus, you need to make it look natural because Google will punish a website that has an unnatural anchor profile because it will be a signal that some of those links are not organically gained.

Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is a free tool, provided by Google. It is Google’s main channel for communicating with webmasters. It’s been recently rebranded as the Google Search Console.
It allows webmasters to do a load of things, including checking indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. This is where you manage your robot.txt, disavow, crawling etc.

Using Google’s Search Console you can submit your website to Google’s Search Engine. You can do this with other search engines also.
The search engine will crawl the site and index it. You can’t do any SEO until a website is submitted and indexed by the search engines.

Log in to the Google’s Search Engine, click the red button. You’ll be asked to add the website’s URL in the box. Make sure you enter the full URL and then click the blue button.

Wikipedia best explains what social bookmarking is:
“Social bookmarking is a centralized online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents”
Social bookmarks constitute a link. Most sites offer little value from their links but getting the right type of link from some sites like Reddit definitely has some value.
Social bookmarks also help to speed up indexation.

Social signals are interactions people have with your web page on social media platforms. The most popular sites being Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Medium, etc.
By interactions, we mean signals we are all used to using. Such as likes, dislikes, shares, votes, pins, views, etc.

In SEO, guest posting is a form of link building and content marketing where you contact another webmaster (usually via email) and offer to write for them, and when you do, add a contextual link back to your website/blog. This “agreement” could be for free or you might be asked to pay a small admin fee. Some sites will even create the content for you, for a fee.

Every SEO looks for different metrics. First off, you want to ensure that the site is able to show relevancy. You want it to be niche specific. A lot of SEOs look for organic volume as it shows that Google trusts the domain enough to rank it.
Then, you might want to look at the quality and number of referring domains, the quality of the social media pages etc.

Blog commenting is posting comments on web pages (that allow commenting) with a backlink to your site. The process can be split into two groups.
Automated – Where you use a tool like Scrapebox to automate posting comments on a mass scale.
Manual – where you select the sites based on niche relevancy, trying to genuinely add value with your comments and be part of the community of that site before adding your link.

In the last couple of years, the value in blog commenting has been drastically reduced. Many are no-followed or don’t hold any value.
One of the real values in blog commenting is the ability to get some link diversity or “pillowing”. Google expects to see a natural variation of links and anchor texts from a variety of different digital sources. Selecting good quality sites to gain some no-follow, contextual links can help you to paint that picture. If your anchors are over optimized, you can use blog commenting to cheaply and quickly diversify your anchors.

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone Number.
NAP is a key component of local SEO. Google take data into account when looking to determine which companies to display in geo-targeted searches.

Panda was designed to reward high-value websites and de-value lower quality websites, based on a number of factors that included:
Thin content – Pages with low amounts of relevant content or a small number of pages with good quality content.

The Penguin Update (rolled out in April 2012) had the goal of catching out sites that had spammy, low-quality links. Its goal was to try and catch blog networks and link farms and other “black hat” link building techniques.

Hummingbird was the name given the Google search algorithm overhaul that took place in 2013. The goal of the update was to put more of an emphasis on natural search queries, to better understand context.
It didn’t have the same immediate impact on SEO as the other two updates but does represent the start of a move to better understanding user intent.

HTTPS means Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. SSL means Secure Sockets Layer. The S in HTTPS stands for secure and that is essentially what the update did. By making websites move to HTTPS you are encrypting the data sent between your browser and the website, offering searchers a safer experience.

Wikipedia explains it best when they define a Google Penalty:
“A Google penalty is the negative impact on a website’s search rankings based on updates to Google’s search algorithms or manual review.[dubious – discuss] The penalty can be a by-product of an algorithm update or an intentional penalization for various black-hat SEO techniques.”

When talking about Google penalties we are specifically talking about manual penalties rather than changes that occur as a result of an algorithm update. Here are some:

When talking about Google penalties we are specifically talking about manual penalties rather than changes that occur as a result of an algorithm update. Here are some:
Cloaking and/or Sneaky Redirects
Cloaking: First Click Free Violation
Cloaked Images
Hacked Site
Hidden Text and/or Keyword Stuffing
Pure Spam
Spammy Free Hosts
Spammy Structured Markup
Thin Content With Little or No Added Value
Unnatural Links to Your Site
Unnatural Links From Your Site
User-generated Spam

The knowledge graph is a knowledge base of facts that Google launched to enable searchers to get access to facts quickly.
It takes data from a variety of sources and presents it, in a box, in the top right-hand corner of the search page, next to the first few results. If trusted sites all state that Elvis was born in 1935 then that stat could be considered a fact and added to the knowledge graph so searchers can access it immediately without needing to click away from Google.

Google My Business is a free tool from Google that allows businesses to manage their online presence all from one interface. This includes search and maps.

They are called SEO executives, Webmasters, Websites optimizers, Digital marketing experts, etc.
SEO executive: He is responsible for increasing the number of visitors or traffic to a website using various SEO tools and strategies.
SEO/SMO analyst: He is responsible for planning and implementing SEO and social media strategies for the clients. He is supposed to quickly understand and support initiatives to achieve the objectives and goals of the client campaigns.
Webmaster: He is responsible for maintaining one or more websites. He ensures that the web servers, software, and hardware are working smoothly.
Digital Marketing Expert: He is responsible for planning and executing digital marketing programs to promote the brand or increase the sales of the products and services of the clients.

A website made on flash. or
A website made on HTML 5.
The content presented in a flash website is hard to parse by search engines, so, it is always preferred to build a website in HTML for better SEO prospective.

A webmaster is a free service by Google which provides free Indexing data, backlinks information, crawl errors, search queries, CTR, website malware errors and submits the XML sitemap. It is a collection of SEO tools that allow you to control your site in Google as well as allows Google to communicate with webmasters. For example, if anything goes wrong like crawling mistakes, plenty of 404 pages, manual penalties, and malware identified, Google will speak to you through this tool. If you use GWT, you don’t need to use some other costlier tools. So, it is a free toolset that helps you understand what is going on with your site by providing useful information about your site.

Many search engines use programs called spiders to index websites. The spiders are also known as crawlers or robots. They act as automatic date searching tools that visit every site to find new or updated web pages and links. This process is called web crawling. Spiders follow hyperlinks and gather textual and meta information for the search engine databases. They collect as much information as they can before relaying to the server of the search engine.
Spiders may also rate the content being indexed to help the search engine determine relevancy levels to a search. They are called spiders as they visit many sites simultaneously, i.e. their legs keep spanning a large area of the web. All search engines use spiders to revise and build their indexes.

No, Google does not use the keyword meta tags in web search rankings. It is believed that Google ignores the meta tags keywords due to their misuse.

SEO: It is a process of increasing the online visibility, organic (free) traffic or visitors to a website. It is all about optimizing your website to achieve higher rankings in the search result pages. It is a part of SEM, and it gives you only the organic traffic.
Two types:
On-Page SEO: It deals with the optimization of a website for maximum visibility in the search engines.
Off-Page SEO: It deals with gaining natural backlinks from other websites.
SEM: It stands for search engine marketing. It involves purchasing space on the search engine result page. It goes beyond SEO and involves various methods that can get you more traffic like PPC advertising. It is a part of your overall internet marketing strategy. The traffic generated through SEM is considered the most important as it is targeted.

We should follow the following instructions to decrease the loading time of a website:
Optimize images: You can optimize images and decrease the file size without affecting the quality of that image. You can use the external picture tools to resize your images such as the Photoshop, picresize.com and more. Furthermore, use fewer images (avoid them unless necessary).
Use browser caching: Caching involves temporary storages of web pages that helps reduce bandwidth and improve performance. When a visitor visits your site, the cached version is presented that saves the server’s time and loads pages faster. So, use browser caching to make the process easier and faster for your repeat visitors.
Use content delivery network: It allows you to distribute your site across several servers in different geographical areas. When visitors request to visit your site, they will get the data from the server closest to them. The closer a server, the more quickly it loads.
Avoid self-hosted videos: Video files are usually large, so if you upload them to your web pages it can increase their loading time. You can use other video services like Youtube, Vimeo, etc.
Use CSS sprites to reduce HTTP request: It allows you to combine some images within a single image file by implementing CSS positioning of background. It helps you to save your server bandwidth and thus loading time of the webpage decreases gradually.

Webmaster tool should be preferred over Analytics tool because it includes almost all essential tools as well as some analytics data for the search engine optimization. But now due to the inclusion of webmaster data in Analytics, we would like to have access to Analytics.

A spider is a program used by search engines to index websites. It is also called a crawler or search engine robot. The main usage of search engine spiders is to index sites. It visits the websites and read their pages and creates entries for the search engine index. They act as data searching tools that visit websites to find new or updated content or pages and links.
Spiders do not monitor sites for unethical activities. They are called spiders as they visit many sites simultaneously, i.e., they keep spanning a large area of the web. All search engines use spiders to build and update their indexes.

If your website is banned by the search engines for using black hat practices and you have corrected the wrongdoings, you can apply for reinclusion. So, it is a process in which you ask the search engine to re-index your site that was penalized for using black hat SEO techniques. Google, Yahoo, and other search engines offer tools where webmasters can submit their site for reinclusion.

The location of this file is very significant. It must be located in the main directory otherwise the spiders will not be able to find it as they do not search the whole site for a file named robots.txt. They only check the main directory for these files, and if they don’t find the files in the main directory, they assume that the site does not have any robots.txt file and index the whole site.

Keyword proximity refers to the distance between the keywords, i.e., it tells how close keywords are to each other in a phrase or body of text. It is used to measure the distance between two keywords in the text. It is used by some search engines to measure the relevancy of a given page to the search request. It specifies that the closer the two keywords in a phrase or a search term, the more relevant will be the phrase. For example, see the keywords “Delhi Digital Photographer” in the search term “Delhi Photographer Ram Kumar specialized in digital photography.” The proximity between Delhi and Photographer is excellent, but between the “Photographer” and “digital” proximity is not good as there are four words between them. So, a search term’s keywords should be as close to each other as possible.

A TLD is the last part of an Internet address. For example, in xyz.com the TLD is .com.

A ccTLD is a country code top-level domain extension that is assigned to a country. It is based on the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes, which means it can have only two characters, e.g., .us for the United States, .au for Australia, .in for India. So these domain extensions are reserved for countries.

Contextual backlinks are the links to external websites that are placed within the content of a web page, i.e., they are part of the content of a page. They are generally built from high authority web pages. These links can be used to build your keyword ranking higher in Search Engines and to increase the domain trust online.

A website is a collection of interlinked web pages or formatted documents that share a single domain and can be accessed over the internet. It may contain only one page or tens of thousands of pages and can be created by an individual, group, or an organization, etc. It is identified by a domain name or web address. For example, when you type the web address over the internet, you will arrive at the home page of that website.

A web page is what you see on the screen of a computer or mobile when you type a web address or click on a link or enter a query in a search engine like Google, Bing, etc. A web page typically contains information that may include text, graphics, images, animation, sound, video, etc.

It is a computer program that is designed to serve or deliver the web pages to users in response to their queries or requests made by their computers or HTTP clients. In other words, it hosts websites on the internet. It uses HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) to serve pages to computers that are connected to it. See the image given below for more clarification!

A service that provides space for websites or web pages on special computers called servers. A web hosting enables sites or web pages to be viewed on the internet by the internet users. When users type the website address (domain name) into their browser, their computers connect to the server, and your web pages are delivered to them through a browser.

Meta descriptions, which are also known as HTML attributes, provide brief information about the content of a web page. They act as preview snippets of the web pages and appear under the URL of your page in SERPs.

Quality Content
Quality Backlinks
Mobile Friendliness or Optimization
Page Speed
PageRank

A sitemap refers to the map of a website. It is the detailed structure of a site that includes different sections of your site with internal links.

An HTML sitemap is an HTML page that contains all the links of all the web pages of a website, i.e., it contains all formatted text files and linking tags of a website. It outlines the first and second level structure of a site so that users can easily find information on the site.

An XML sitemap is exclusively designed for the search engines. It facilitates the functionality of the search engines as it informs the search engines about the number of web pages, the frequency of their updates including the recent updates. This information helps search engine robots in indexing the website.

A 404 error is an HTTP response status code which indicates that the requested page could not be found on the server. This error is generally displayed in the internet browser window just like web pages.

HTTP 404 error is technically a client-side error which means it is your mistake, i.e., the requested page is not present in your website. If you had maintained that page in your site, it would have been indexed by the crawler and thus would have been present in the server. Furthermore, you also receive this error, when you mistype a URL or when a webpage or resource is moved without redirecting the old URL to the new one. So, whenever you move your webpage redirect the old URL to the new URL to avoid this error as it may affect the SEO of your site.

The “503 Service Unavailable” error is an HTTP status code which indicates the server is not available right now to handle the request. It often occurs when the server is too busy or when maintenance is performed on it. Generally, it is a temporary state which is resolved shortly.

The “500 internal server error” is a common error. It is an HTTP status code that indicates something is wrong with the websites’ server, and the server is not able to identify the problem. This error is not specific as it can occur for different reasons. It is a server-side error which means the problem is with the website’s server, not with your PC, browser or Internet connection.

Image Alt text is a feature which is added to an image tag in HTML. It appears in the blank image box when the image is not displayed due to slow connection, broken URL or any other reason.

The Page rank of your page indicates the performance of your page. The page rank of a page depends on many factors such as quality of content, SEO, backlinks and more. So, to increase the page rank of a website you have to focus on multiple factors, e.g., you have to provide unique and original content, build more backlinks from authority sites and web pages with high page rank and more.

Directory submission is an off-page SEO technique that helps improve the SEO of your site. It allows you to submit your site to a specific category of a web directory, e.g., if your website talks about heath, you are supposed to submit your site in the health category of a web directory.

Submitting sites to a search directory is used to get backlinks to your website. It is one of the key methods to improve the SEO of a site. The more backlinks you get, the more is the probability that the search engine will index it sooner, compared to when it is not listed. Directory submission is mostly free.

Press release submission is an off page SEO technique in which you write press releases and submit them to popular PR sites for building backlinks or to increase the online visibility of a website.

Forum posting is an off page SEO technique. It involves generating quality backlinks by participating in online discussion forums of forum websites. In a forum posting, you can post a new thread as well as reply to old threads in forums to get quality backlinks to your site. Some of the popular forum websites are message boards, discussion groups, discussion forums, bulletin boards and more. So, forum websites are online discussion sites that allow you to participate in online discussion and interact with new users to promote your websites, web pages and more.

RSS feed submission is an off page SEO technique. It refers to the submission of RSS feeds to RSS submission directory sites to improve the SEO of your site. RSS stands for Rich Site Summary and is also known as Really Simple Syndication.
An RSS feed generally contains updated web pages, videos, images, links and more. It is a format to deliver frequently changing web content. The users who find these updates interesting can subscribe your RSS feed to receive timely updates from their favorite websites. Thus, it helps increase traffic to your website.

Google algorithm is a set of rules, codes or commands that enables Google to return search results relevant to the queries made by the users. It is the Google’s algorithm that allows it to rank the websites on SERPs on the basis of quality and relevancy. The websites with quality content and relevant information tend to remain at the top of the SERPs.
So, Google is a search engine that is based on a dynamic set of codes called algorithm to provide the most appropriate and relevant search results based on users’ queries.

HTTPS, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), is a protocol for secure communication on the World Wide Web. It uses SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to add an extra layer of security to the standard HTTP connection, i.e., it is a secure version of HTTP. It encrypts all data or communication between the server and the browser.
SEO Interview Questions
The websites which use HTTP protocol, the data is transmitted between the site server and the browser as plain text, so anyone who intercepts your connection can read this data. Earlier, only the websites that handle sensitive data like credit card information were using it, but now almost all sites prefer HTTPS over HTTP. An HTTPS connection provides the following benefits:
Website Authentication
Data Integrity
Data Encryption

Keyword density refers to the percentage of occurrence of a keyword in a webpage out of all the words on that page. For example, if a keyword appears four times in an article of 100 words, the keyword density would be 4%. It is also known as keyword frequency as it talks about the frequency of occurrence of a keyword in a page. There is no ideal or exact keyword density for better ranking. However, the keyword density of 2 to 4 % is considered suitable for SEO.

Doorway pages, which are also known as gateway pages, portal pages or entry pages, are created exclusively to improve ranking in the SERPs. They do not contain quality content, relevant information and have a lot of keywords and links. They are created to funnel visitors into the actual, usable or relevant portion of your site. A doorway page acts as a door between the users and your main page. Black hat SEO professionals use doorway pages to improve the ranking of a website for specific search queries or keywords.

The Disavow tool is a part of Google Search Console that was introduced in October 2012. It enables you to discount the value of a backlink in order to prevent link-based penalties. It also protects the site from bad links that may harm the website’s reputation.

Fetch as Google is a tool of Google available in the Google webmaster tool. It is used for immediate indexing and to find out the issues with your web pages and website. You can also use it to see how Google crawls or renders a URL on your site. Furthermore, if you found technical errors such as “404 not found” or “500 website is not available”, you can simply submit your page or website for a fresh crawl using this tool.

Google Knowledge graph refers to a block of information that appears on the right side of the SERPs after entering a search query. It is launched by Google in 2012 and is also known as Knowledge Graph Card.

Google Sandbox is an imaginary area which contains new and less authoritative sites for a specified period until they cannot be displayed in the search results. It is an alleged filter for the new websites. In simple words, we can say that it places new websites on probation and ranks them lower than expected in searches. It may be caused by building too many links within a short period of time.
Any type of website can be placed in a sandbox. However, the new websites who want to rank for highly competitive keyword phrases are more prone to the sandbox. There is no fixed duration for a site to stay in the sandbox. Generally, a website can stay in the Sandbox for one to six months. The logic behind the sandbox is that new websites may be not as relevant as older sites.

Google’s rich Answer box is a short, rich featured snippet of relevant information that appears in the form of a box at the top of the SERPs. Google introduced this feature in 2015 to provide quick and easy answers to queries of users by featuring a snippet of information in a box at the top of the search engine result page. The rich answers may appear in different forms such as recipes, stock graphs, sports scores, etc.

Schema markup, which is also known as structured data, is a code or microdata that you incorporate in your web pages to enable search engine better understand your pages and provide more relevant results to users. It helps search engines interpret and categorize information, which you want to highlight and to be presented as a rich snippet by the search engine.

PPC stands for pay-per-click. It is a type of search engine marketing in which you have to pay a fee each time your advertisement is clicked by an online user. Search engines like Google, Bing, etc., offer pay-per-click advertising on auction basis where the highest bidder gets the most prominent advertising space on the SERPs so that it gets a maximum number of clicks.

Bounce rate refers to the percentage of single-page visits in which the visitor views only one page of your website and then leaves the website from the landing page without browsing other pages. In simple words, it is the single-page sessions divided by all sessions. Google analytics tells the bounce rate of a web page or a website.

RankBrain is Google’s machine-learning artificial intelligence system designed to help Google to process search results and deliver more relevant information to users. It is a part of the Google’s Hummingbird search algorithm. It can learn and recognize new patterns and then revisit SERPs to provide more relevant information.

Two types meta tags in Seo
Description Meta tag (150 characters limits)
Keyword Meta tag (200 characters limits)

Ad-sense is a web program conducted by Google that enables publishers of content websites to cater text, rich media, image, video advertisements automatically which are relevant to content of website and audience. These advertisement are included, maintained and sorted by Google itself and earn money either by per-click or per-impression basis.

Ad-word is referred as the main advertising product of Google which is useful to make appear your ads on Google and its partner websites including Google Search. This Google’s product offer PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising which is a primary module and incorporate a sub module CPC (Cost Per Click) where we bid that rate that will be charged only when the users click your advertisement. One another sub module is CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impression) advertising where advertiser pay for a thousand impression on flat rate to publisher. In addition it also includes website targeted advertising of banner, text and rich-media ads. Moreover, the ad will appear especially to those people who are already looking for such type of product you are offering as well as offer to choose particular sites with geographical area to show your ads.

First of all I would attempt to make a search on all search engines employing relevant keywords and key phrases, I am optimizing for. The analysis of result will say whether the methods of optimization have gain results or lost. I would analyze the report regularly as search engine make update and index. I would attempt to another aspect of website statistics which says about origin of traffic.