TOP 20 Basic SEO Interview Questions and Answers
If you’re looking or applying for an SEO job at a fresher or beginner level, are you preparing for a job interview? Here I have listed some most asked basic SEO interview questions and answers.
1. What is SEO?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It means improving your website rankings on Google or other search engines for key terms related to your business. SEO is one of the essential and effective digital marketing tactics to focus on improving the rankings in organic (non-paid) search results. SEO (search engine optimization) should be part of your marketing efforts if you have a website and want to get more traffic.
2. What is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO (On-page Optimization) refers to an optimization performed directly in your website to improve rankings and user experience (UX). With on-page SEO or On-page optimizations, aim to make your website more valuable to users to improve your keywords rankings or visibility in search results on Google, Bing, or other search engines.
3. What is Off-Page SEO:
Off-page SEO refers to actions everything taken outside of your website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs). This means most off-page SEO work is focused on building external links to your website. Building backlinks is the heart of off-page SEO, and it helps to increase domain authority (DA) and get quality backlinks to your website.
4. What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is mostly to help search engine bots successfully crawl and index all the pages of your site then deliver the right content from your website to users at the right time. The main goal of technical SEO is to optimize the user experience and infrastructure of a website.
5. What are the 2 Types of Backlinks?
Dofollow Links: Dofollow backlinks are the most valuable for SEO. These links are a way to pass on authority to a website called “link juice.”
Nofollow Links: Nofollow backlinks are less common and also less valuable links. Nofollow links are used to tell search engines to ignore a particular link, and also, it does not pass on link juice to the website.
6. What is an Organic Search Result?
Organic search results are the results that appear on a search engine results page (SERP) based on relevance terms, quality, and other ranking variables when users search their queries (Keywords) on search engines like Google, Bing, etc. Organic results cannot be influenced by charging Google or other search engines.
7. What is a Paid Search Result?
Paid search results are basically advertisements (ads). The website owners have to pay for their web pages to display specific search queries (Keywords) to get the top four positions on SERPs.
8. What are Keywords or Search Queries?
In terms of SEO, they’re the words and phrases that people or searchers use to search for information, products, or services entered into search engines called keywords or Search Queries.
9. What are 3 Types of Keywords?
Short-tail Keywords: Short tail keywords are search terms made up of two or three words. Short tail keywords should not be more than three words. Short tail keywords have high competition and higher search volume. E.g., “running shoes.”
Mid-tail Keywords: Long-tail keywords are search terms made up of no more than three words. Mid-tail keywords are also referred to as ‘chunky keywords.’ E.g., “best running shoes.”
Long-tail keywords: Long-tail keywords are search terms made up of four or more words. Long-tail keywords have low search volume when compared to other types of keywords. E.g., “Low Cost Running Shoes.”
10. What is Keyword Density?
The number of keywords in a website or web page is keyword density. The ideal keyword density is 1% or 2%.
E.g., You can use targeted keywords 1 or 2 times in 100 words.
11. What is a Title Tag?
This is the HTML title tag, which we also call the title tag or SEO title, or page title. And it is a short description of a web page and appears as snippets at the top of SERP. The average meta description length is between 60-70 characters.
12. What is Meta Description?
A meta description is one of the meta tags of a web page or an HTML element that provides the brief summary of a website or web page that appears in the search engine results. The average meta description length is between 155-160 characters.
13. What is SSL?
SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer, and it is an encryption layer between client and server, and it means your website “HTTP” turns into “HTTPS” S-Stands for security.
E.g., http://seoneeds.in/ to https://seoneeds.in/
14. What is a Hyperlink?
The hyperlink is also known as anchor text. A hyperlink is a piece of text that takes the users to a web page when clicked.
15. What are External Links?
External links are any hyperlinks that point at another domain from your website.
16. What are Internal Links?
These are different from external links. Internal Links are hyperlinks that target or point to pages on the same domain as the link.
17. What is an XML Sitemap?
An XML (Extensible Markup Language) Sitemap is a special text file that lists all web pages on a website in an XML format, so search engines can find and crawl them all. And also, the XML sitemap is not intended to be viewed by users.
18. What is Robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a text (not HTML) file that tells search engines not to crawl certain pages or sections of a website. It is also called the robots exclusion protocol. For example, “https://www.seoneeds.in/robots.txt.” Navigate to your domain and add”/robots. txt “.
19. What are the most important Google Ranking Factors?
Quality Content
Technical SEO
Quality & Relevant Backlinks
Mobile Friendly
Page Speed
Domain Authority
User Experience
Social Media Presence
Page Authority
Content-Type
Content Freshness
20. What is a Canonical Tag?
A canonical tag is also called a canonical URL or canonical link. A canonical tag helps search engines to understand which pages have original content and which pages are duplicates. This means the canonical tag prevents problems caused by duplication of the content appearing on multiple URLs.