Search engine
optimization technique is used to optimize a website so as to see the web
site in SERPs(Search engine results page). Here are few important interview
questions and answers for SEO fresher.
What is SEO?
SEO is search
engine optimization or optimizer is a collection of techniques applied
to optimize our site so that it ranks well in SERPs (Search engine result
pages).
Explain the importance
of domain name?
Domain name although the
Age of Domain matters, search engines do not favor older and established sites
with no recently updated content, it is better to have the content separated
and have a different domain preferably with the keywords in it) for different
niches.
What tools do you use
for doing seo?
I use Google webmaster
tools, Google Analytics, Open site explorer, Alexa, Website grader etc.
What is Google Sandbox?
Google Sandbox is an
imaginary area where new and less authoritative sites are kept for a specified
time period until they establish themselves of being displayed on the search
results. It happens by building too many links within a short period of time.
What is the difference
between on page seo and off page seo?
On page seo means
optimizing your website and making changes on title, meta tags, site structure,
site content, solving canonicalization problem, managing robots.txt etc.
Off page optimization means
optimizing your web presence which involves backlink building and social
media promotion.
What are the
limitations of title and description tags?
Title tag can be
between 66-70 characters and Meta description tag can be between 160-170
characters.
How will you increase
the Pagerank of a page?
By building more
backlinks from authority sites and high page rank webpages.
How will you check the
number of backlinks of your competitors site?
To check if our website
is seo friendly Turn off JavaScript, CSS, and Cookies in the web browser and
view the website. This is how search engines most likely see our website. If we
successfully view our website and navigate our website then our site is mostly
search engine friendly. The only other process is to check our URL’s Not using
a session ID or 'id=' in our query strings is also very helpful.
Both are important.
Building great content is necessary as it is your first step towards ranking
;and building backlinks helps to build authority to your website and is an
important metric for ranking well. Hence both should go parallel and both are
equally important.
What do you mean by
anchor text?
Click able text
written on an hyperlink is known as
How will you treat Web
standards while optimizing a website?
Google loves web
standards hence I will apply the web standards provided by W3C while optimizing
a web site.
If the meta robots tag
has a value of "no index, no follow" what does it mean? Does
Google uses keyword tags?
No, Google does not
make use of keyword tags.
What is 301 redirect?
It is a method of
redirecting user from the old page url to the new page url. 301 redirect is
a permanent redirect and is helpful in passing the link juice from the old url
to the new url.
What do you understand
by Cloaking?
Cloaking involves using
deceptive techniques which presents the user with a different version of the
webpage than that presented to the search engines.
What methods would you
apply for decreasing the loading time of a website?
I would use external
style sheets, less images (unless necessary), optimize the images and decrease
the file sizes of the image without reducing the quality of the image, use CSS
sprites to reduce HTTP requests etc.
What are the Social
Media channels you have used for marketing?
I have used blogs like
blogger, word press, type pad etc, social bookmarking sites like Digg,
Jumptags, Delicious etc., social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn etc.,
Video Sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo etc.
What would you suggest
to the client who has a website made on Flash? How would you do Seo for
that site?
Search engines find it
harder to parse the contents presented using Flash. I would suggest the client
to use an alternative to flash like HTML 5.
What do you understand
by Frames in HTML?
A frame is a HTML
technique which divides the content of a page onto several parts. Search
engines see Frames as completely different pages and as such Frames have a
negative impact on Seo. We should avoid the usage of Frames and use basic HTML
instead.
Which is 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.
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.
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.
What is the main purpose
of search engine spiders?
Index sites, because
even though spiders visit sites, their main function is not only to visit them
but to index their contents spiders do not monitor sites for unethical
activities.
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.
When do you apply for re
inclusion in a search engine's index?
If our website is banned
by the search engines for black hat practices and if we have corrected our
wrong doings we apply for reinclusion.
What aspects of a
hyperlink are important for SEO?
The place from which the
link originates, The anchor text, especially the keywords in it is very
important. The place to which the link leads and for back links the reputation
of the web site from which the link originates is also crucial, because if you
link to link farms, this might get you banned from search engines.
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.
What is Keyword
Difficulty?
Keyword difficulty
identifies how difficult it would be to rank well for a particular keyword. and
the value is higher for more popular words because it will be more difficult to
compete with 1,000s of other sites for a popular word than with 10s of others
for the less popular ones
Which of the options
below is the best way to select the keywords to optimize for?
Use a tool to determine
the theme of your web site, because it is the whole theme of a website that is
more important than separate keywords. Selecting competitors keywords which
have the highest density is not recommendable because if your competitor
has wrongly selected the keywords, or even if the keywords are right for them,
this does not mean that they are right for you, so actually you get on the
wrong trace from the very beginning.
Which is better
Robots.txt or Meta Robots Tag?
Meta Robots tag is much
better as it helps in forcing the search engine crawlers not to index
and display the hidden pages in your server.
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
With the help of the
link operator on Google and by using various external tools like Alexa, Backlink Watch , Open
Site Explorer, Backlink
finder etc.
If you have a site that
is targeted at a particular country only, which of the following are
recommendable to do in order to rank well in country specific search results?
Use the appropriate
language attribute in the HTML code of the page, The web site should be hosted
in the same country, so that its IP falls in the range of IPs that are specific
for this country. Have the web site written in the language of the country.
Submit the site to local search engines, search engines use their own
algorithms to determine the language of a a particular sites, even there are
SEO experts who say that no efforts on your side are necessary for ranking well
in country specific search results.
Why are metatags
important?
Because search engines
still use them for estimating search relevancy. although search engines might
not rely on metatags to generate search results, metatags are used (to a
differing extend) by most of the search engines Because it is a professional
approach to Web design to have complete and accurate metatags, since
metatags are part of the html code of a page, they must also be done
professionally, as the rest of the code.
Do you know who Danny
Sullivan is?
He is a Journalist who
covers the field of web search, considered as search engine guru and editor at
searchengineland.com
Who is Matt Cutts?
He is the head of web
spam team at Google.
It means the search
engine crawlers would not index the contents and would not follow the links
present on the page.
From seo point of view,
which is better - one big site or several smaller site?
If you have enough
content in the same niche it is better to have it in one big site because
first, this way the site is easier to maintain and the great number of pages is
good for ranking high in search results. Many small sites allow focusing on
specific niches, therefore competing for different keywords.
How do you know how much
to pay for a text link from another site to yours?
The price of a text link
from another site to yours depends on many factors, The price is often
different because it depends on the current rating of the site that will back
link to us. The most important of which is the Web Site the back link
originates from, because there can't be universal prices for text links. when
you don't know the real price of a link, negotiating to drop the price is
pointless and generally, reputable sites are not going to negotiate the price
of their links.
Do you use separate
Seo strategies for Google,Yahoo and Bing?
Yes I use separate
strategies for Google,Yahoo and other search engines.More backlinks are
required for Google .It pays more attention to backlinks and site authority
while Yahoo and Bing pays more attention to title and Meta tags. Hence, a site takes time to rank on Google as compared
to Yahoo and Bing.
Which of the following
techniques is unethical and can be a reason for banning?
Creating a doorway page
instead a home page is considered as unethical because doorway pages are aimed
at misleading search engines.
Explain some seo
practices?
Building back links.
Rewriting the titles to include the target keywords, Rewriting dynamic URLs into
static.
For which of the
following file types a SEO expert needs to provide an alternative textual
description?
(swf. ---- gif.) Since
.html, .pdf and .doc are text file formats and spiders can read their contents
directly, it is pointless to provide an alternative textual description. On the
contrary, .swf and image file types, like .gif and .jpg, need alternative
textual descriptions because spiders cannot read their contents directly.
What is Keyword
proximity?
It measures the distance
between two keywords in the text. Keyword proximity is used by some search
engines to measure relevancy of a given page to the search request. The idea is
that the closer two keywords to each other are, the more relevant the page ,
keyword density measures how many times (not how far) a given keyword appears
on a page.
If you were a SEO for a
technology web site, what would you do to build backlinks for it?
Four practices are a
quite legal and recommendable way of building backlinks are.
- Post in technology blogs.
- Submit articles to technology engines.
- Exchange links with other reputable technology
web sites.
- Provide free syndicated content to
partner-websites.
Explain onsite search
box, and how it helps to attract traffic?
An onsite search box
allows searching for pages that are inaccessible to unregistered users (i.e.
search engine spiders). When you have an onsite search box, your visitors will
get more search results than in comparison to using Google and the other search
engines. If you have an onsite search box and see what users are searching for,
you will be able to notice new keywords that are of interest to your audience.
Using the “site:”
operator in search engines makes onsite search boxes obsolete is false because
generally search engines do not index every single page of a site, even if
these pages are not disallowed in the robots.txt or are password-protected. A
good onsite search box is really valuable but it is a fact that occasionally
onsite search boxes use so imprecise algorithms that using the “site:” operator
in Google gives much more reliable results.
What are the advantages
of submitting sites to search directories?
By submitting to a
search directory, you get a back link to your web site. When your site is
listed in search directories, this increases the chances that search engines
will index it sooner, compared to when it is not listed. Submitting to search
directories is a good Web marketing initiative. Because that increases the
chances of having your web site index and when your site is listed in a search
directory, you list its URL as well, so you actually get a valuable link
Submitting to search
directories neither gets higher ranking nor gets your web site certified.
Which of the following
are criteria for the uniqueness of a page (unique as opposed to duplicate
content)?
Code similarity, Text
similarity, Page names. Titles, headings, page titles and metatags.
What does the
abbreviation PPC stand for?
Pay per click, Pay per Click
measures how much online advertisers must pay each time their advertisement is
clicked on.
What is LSI?
LSI stands for Latent Semantic Indexing. It is a data retrieval technique which finds connection
between words and the use of synonyms while fetching data from the index.
Will you use an ordinary
html sitemap with Google?
Google has a special
format for sitemaps rather than ordinary html format. So it is good to
use special XML format that Google uses for sitemaps.
What is Page Rank?
This is the Google
technology for measuring popularity among users. Yahoo has a similar
technology, called Web Rank, and Alexa Rank is the Alexa technology. The way
Google measures how popular a given page is based on the number and quality of
sites that link to it.
You have just launched a
new web site. Unfortunately, nobody visits it, even search engines' spiders
don't notice it. What can you do for its SEO success?
Submit the URL of the
web site to search engines and search directories
Why are metatags
important?
Because search engines
still use them for estimating search relevancy. although search engines might
not rely on metatags to generate search results, metatags are used (to a
differing extend) by most of the search engines Because it is a professional
approach to Web design to have complete and accurate metatags, since
metatags are part of the html code of a page, they must also be done
professionally, as the rest of the code.
If you own a web site
and have a weekly newsletter that features the same content as the site, how
can you include Google AdSense in your newsletter when you mail it to your
subscribers?
We can’t include AdSense
in our newsletter, because we cannot include Google ads in offsite content, as
an e-mail newsletter.
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.
Can search engines see
password protected pages?
In most of the cases
Search engines are not different from regular users. Search engines cannot go
anywhere that a regular user cannot go. If we have a password protected area on
our website that cannot be accessed without a login and password then the
search engines also cannot see it.
For seo which is better
text links or graphical links?
Text links are better
for SEO. Text links can contain the anchor text that our web page wishes to
rank well for and that is an important factor in many search engines,
especially Google. Image links are still valuable but do have less benefits
compared to text links. When we have alt attribute
Labels:
Interview
