SEO Mining

SEO Interview Questions & Answers

Here is the list of latest & frequently asked technical SEO interview questions and answers.

1. Which are the most important area to include your keywords? – Page title and Body text are the most important areas where we can include keywords for the SEO purpose.

2. What are webmaster tools? – Webmaster tools is a free service by Google from where we can get free Indexing data, backlinks information, crawl errors, search queries, CTR, website malware errors and submit the XML sitemap.

3. What is the best way to maximize the frequency of crawling of your website by search engines? – Frequently adding new, original and quality content on the website.

4. Do you know who is Danny Sullivan? – He is a Journalist who covers the field of web search, considered as search engine guru and editor at searchengineland.com

5. Who is Matt Cutts? – He is the head of web spam team at Google. Read more about Matt Cutts here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

6. What is the best criterion to identify the value of a backlink? – The authority of the domain, quality of the content on the page where the backlink is provided and then the page rank of the website.

7. What is keyword proximity? – Keyword Proximity is a measurement criteria of the closeness of the keywords within the Page Title, Meta Description and Body Text.

8. What is keyword prominence? – Keyword prominence is the location of the keywords in the page title, meta description and body text…..Read more about prominence at: http://www.seoglossary.com/article/64

9. Difference between exit rate and bounce rate? – Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leaves a particular website just after visiting a single page on this and exit rate refers to the percentage of people who leaves from a particular page….read more here http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/bounce-rate-vs-exit-rate

10. What is the Panda update and which is its current version? – Panda is a search algorithm update by the Google to take on the content farms, low quality websites and the websites getting low quality backlinks, Google removed a lot of the webpage from the higher search index during this update and the current version of Panda is 2.5.3 updated on October 19/20th Oct. 2011…read here for latest panda updates http://www.seroundtable.com/tag/panda

11. What was caffeine update? – Caffeine update was rolled out by Google in June 2010 and the main purpose of this update was to include more fresh results in the search index, at least 50%..read more about caffeine update here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html

12. A customer can give you an access to only one tool, which one will you choose, Webmasters or Analytics? – Of Course Webmaster tools, because these are almost the essential tools for the search engine optimization, we can have some analytics data in the webmasters as well. But now due to the inclusion of webmaster data in Analytics, we would like to have access to Analytics.

13. What is 404? – It is a server error code which is returned by the server what a particular webpage or the file is missing from the webhost server.

14. What is 301 redirect? – It is a SEO friendly version of permanent redirect for the webpages or the domains. Read more about 301 redirect here http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php

15. What is 302 redirect? – It is a temporary redirect. Read more here http://www.internetofficer.com/seo/302-redirect/

16. What is robots.txt? – Robots.txt is a text file used to give instructions to the search engine crawlers about the caching and indexing of a webpage, domain, directory or a file of a website. Read more here http://www.robotstxt.org/

17. What are the other methods to restrict a webpage from the search index? – we can use noindex meta tag. Read more here http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html

18. What are Google Webmaster Tools crawl errors? – Crawl errors provides the information about the URL’s of your website which are not accessible but linked from somewhere. Read more here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35120

19. What is a landing page? – a landing page is a page in the website which is designed to attract the visitors to contact/subscribe/buy a service or the product by reading few lines of important information about that particular service or the product on that page. Read more about landing page here http://www.copyblogger.com/landing-pages/

20. What is the recent change in Google Analytics? – Real time visitors info, visitors flow, webmaster tools SEO data and website speed data. Read more here http://analytics.blogspot.com/

21. How to handle the duplicate page in the website? – using canonical tag. Read more here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

22. What are the types of CSS and which is better for SEO? – 3 types, Internal CSS, inline CSS and external CSS. Read more about CSS types here at http://www.expression-web-tutorial.com/Types_CSS_Styles.html. The external CSS is best for SEO purpose. Read why to use external CSS http://www.basictips.com/tips/article_64.shtml

23. How many heading tags are there in HTML? – 6 tags, from H1 to H6

24. Can we use more than one H1 on a single webpage? – Of course, if there is a need of describing two related topics on the same page then we can use, but using more than 2 or 3 will not provide any credit to the search engines.  Matt Cutts advise on using more than one H1 tag http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM

25. Italic or Bold, which is more useful? – Both are almost same but Italic have a slight more better for keyword targeting on the webpage. Read more here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

26. What are top SEO ranking factors? – Quality of content on the webpage, quality and quantity of backlinks to the webpage, anchor text used in the backlinks, domain authority, social sharing metrics and some other traffic metrics like page CTR, bounce rate and average time on the webpage. Read more here http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors and here http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2010/01/14/google-ranking-factors/

27. What is the criteria for removing a webpage from Google search index? – It should return a 404 not found error or it should be 301 permanently redirected.

28. Some basic and quick steps to increase the webpage speed. – removing the unused code and scripts. Replacing internal and inline CSS with the external CSS. Using web server’s page compression methods. Using small sized images or minimizing the no. of images.

29. What is CTR? – It is Click Through Rate. Read more about CTR here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickthrough_rate

30. What is CTA? – It is Call to Action. Read more here  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_to_action_(marketing)

31. What is the Difference Between Google Panda and Penguin Update? – 
Panda Update - This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.
Penguin Update - This Update was designed to remove/down the websites from index which were doing much more that white hat optimization like creating too many low quality backlinks, use of aggressive exact match anchor text, overuse of exact match domains, blog spam and low quality article marketing, keyword stuffing etc...

32. What is topic modeling? – Topic Modeling is a technique used by search engines to clearly analyse and identify the large volume of text on a webpage. Read more about topic modeling here: http://www.tdktech.com/topic-modeling

33. What is Pagination in SEO? – Pagination is the practice of dividing a piece of content into different pages while at the same time allowing Google to better understand the important pages to be indexed. Read the Google's advice on using the pagination.

34. What are rich snippets? – Rich Snippets are the combination of structured data displayed in Google search results for better relevancy to the user and more data at a glance. Rich snippets are shown after google identifies any microformats (http://microformats.org/) structured tags embedded in your webpage coding, on sept 20th, 2012, Google also launched the new Rich Snippets testing tool and named it the structured data testing tool

35. What are URL parameters? – URL parameters are the values/attributes passed in the URL of a webpage to fetch any data from the database or to alter the order/structure of data displayed on the webpage, This is an important thing to consider while doing SEO for websites which uses URL parameters, especially e-commerce sites because these many times creates the duplicacy of content, you can handle this duplicacy using the rel canonical attribute and the Google webmaster tools, read more about configuring URL parameters in Webmaster Tools.

36. What is A/B testing and Multivariate Testing? – A/B testing is the testing of a webpage by creating its two different versions and redirecting some of the users to variation version from the original URL to know which version is more effective, multivariate testing is done using the software programs to dynamically insert/alter the components on a webpage and record the user interaction/behavior with all the combinations and identify the most effective combination. Google recommends using 302 temporary redirect while running the A/B testing in your website.

37. How to decrease the bounce rate of a webpage? – Using strong Call to Action within the text of the webpage (Known as contextual CTA), alongside with the content, improving design of the page, adding links to the related content, increase the speed of webpage loading, designing easy and user friendly navigation and overall creating a responsive design.

38. Why we use noodp in meta robot tag? – To block the open directory project description from displaying in the search results, applies only to websites which are listed in ODP, i.e. dmoz.org.

39. What is meta refresh tag, should we use it? – Meta refresh tag on a webpage send the user to another url after a specified period of time, typically in seconds. It is not recommended, rather use server side 301 redirect.

40. What are breadcrumb? – Breadcrumb is a website navigation system that clearly states the structure of website to both the users and the search engines, in case, making search engines clearly identify the structure of website, the microformats tags for breadcrumbs should be embedded in the HTML.

41. Is there a way we can tell Google that a particular webpage contains the Adult content? – Yes, we can do it by adding one of these two meta tags to that webpage 

1.     <meta name="rating" content="adult" /> OR

2.     <meta name="rating" content="RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA" />

42. How Google treat links in PDF files? – Same as in the HTML pages, these passes the page rank, indexing signals and other data, it is not possible to nofollow the links in PDF files.

43. Mention soazme SEO myths you know and what the actual facts are? - Here are some myths and answers for reference.

• Meta description is used for ranking- Meta descriptions are not used for rankings by Google and only used as a short snippet of text which users see along with search results
• Google will always use my meta-data- No. Google will not always use your meta title or meta description. Based on the query, Google may change your meta data to suit the searchers query
• More links the better- False. Even one high quality relevant editorial links can trump 1 million spam links you might get via blog comments, forum posting, site wide links and so on (Not to mention your chance to get a penalty)