Frequently Asked SEO Question 2012

MOST ASKED SEO INTERVIEW QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 2012

1. Tell me something about yourself?

You should brief your interviewer about your family, your educational background and your work experience.

2. What was your exact job profile in your previous company?

Provide a suitable explanation about your job profile which would include your job responsibilities and the amount of work you have handled so far.

3. What all verticals have you handled so far?

Verticals means on what themes of websites have you worked so far- this may include education, real estate, IT, travel, Shopping, jobs etc.

4. 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.

5. How will you solve canonicalization issue or what is .htacess file?

.htacess file is used to solve the canonicalization issue of a website. It may happen that the home page of the site may take several urls like http://www.example.com or http://www.example.com/index.html or http://example.com . The search engines might treat these url as different and may divide the link juice gained by having various backlinks made with any of these 3 urls. The link juice gets divided between these three urls equally. .htacess file is created to have a single url of the home page so that the link juice is passed onto single url.

6. What is keyword stemming?

It is the process of finding out the root word from the search query. A query having the word “ playful” would be broken down to the word “play” with the help of stemming algorithm. The search results returned would be having the word ” play” in it.

7. 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.


8- 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.

9. Does Google uses keyword tags?

No, Google does not make use of keyword tags.

10.   What is 301 redirect?

It is a method of redirecting user from the old page url to the new page url.

11.   What was the recent update which Google had and what changes would you suggest for it?

Google recently had the Penguin update which was a measure to control web spam. Penguin update had penalized websites which had a spammy backlinking profile and returned more semantic results. Semantic results were based on the relationship between words present on the search query. Penguin trusted sites that had original content, fresh content, good social media presence and quality organic links.

12.  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.

13.   What tools do you use for doing seo?

I use Google webmaster tools, Google Analytics, Open site explorer, Alexa, Website grader etc.

14.   What are your good qualities?

You will have to answer here about your good qualities like- I am hardworking, sincere, punctual, love to accept challenges etc.

15.  What is the difference between Seo and Sem?

Seo stands for Search Engine Optimization while Sem stands for Search Engine Marketing. Seo provides organic traffic to a website with the help of search engines while Sem involves the use of Google adwords and other paid channels of advertising.

16.   What is PPC?

PPC stands for Pay Per Click. It is a form of advertising methodology in which the advertiser pays for every click on their ads. Google uses this form of advertising in its channel of advertising called Adwords.

17.   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.

18.  Do you use separate Seo strategies for Google,Yahoo and Bing?

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.

19.   How will you increase the Pagerank of a page?

By building more backlinks from authority sites and high page rank webpages.

20.  How will you check the number of backlinks of your competitors site?

With the help of the link operator on Google and by using various external tools like Alexa, Backlink Watch , Open Site Explorer etc.

21.  Which is more important- Building backlinks to a website or building great content?

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.

22.   Who is Matt Cutts?

Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s web spam team.

23.   If a website has a search engine saturation of 40% , what does that mean?

It means 40% of web pages from that particular website are indexed by the search engine.

24.   What do you mean by anchor text?

Clickable text written on an hyperlink is known as anchor text. It is of great value to the search engines and is used for evaluating the relevance of web pages with respect to search queries.