Most Asked SEO Interview Questions & Answers

Here is the list of 30 latest & frequently asked technical SEO interview questions and answers for the candidates who are willing to grab a new job in SEO field in the very first attempt.

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.

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.

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.

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

Who is Matt Cutts? – He is the head of web spam team at Google. Read more about Matt. 

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.

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.

What is keyword prominence? – Keyword prominence is the location of the keywords in the page title, meta description and body text.

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.

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.

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%.

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 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.

What is 301 redirect? – It is a SEO friendly version of permanent redirect for the webpages or the domains. 

What is 302 redirect? – It is a temporary redirect.

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 are the other methods to restrict a webpage from the search index? – we can use noindex meta tag.

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. 

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. 

What is the recent change in Google Analytics? – Real time visitors info, visitors flow, webmaster tools SEO data and website speed data. 

How to handle the duplicate page in the website? – using canonical tag. 

What are the types of CSS and which is better for SEO? – 3 types, Internal CSS, inline CSS and external CSS. The external CSS is best for SEO purpose. 

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

Italic or Bold, which is more useful? – Both are almost same but Italic have a slight more better for keyword targeting on the webpage. 

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. 

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.

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.

What is CTR? – It is Click Through Rate. 

What is CTA? – It is Call to Action. 

Google Analytics Interview Questions & Answers

 Google Analytics offers very good opportunity to make a career in, to get you started here are top Google Analytics interview questions and answers. Remember, these are not for just the beginner..

• What do you mean by Analytics?

   

  

Analytics is the discovery and communication of different patterns in data. It helps us making better decision, it works like a customer's feedback to a particular product/service. Digital Analytics is a combination of mathematical statistics and computer programs.

• What do you analyse most often in Google Analytics? OR what is the most important things in Google Analytics you will want to analyse. 

Google Analytics provides a lots of data and insights and every data pattern is important but still there are some areas where we can focus more like: - Traffic Sources - Bounce & Exit Rate - Top Performing Pages/Landing Pages - Unique Vs. Returning Visitors - Funnel & Goal Conversions - E-Commerce Tracking (If applicable) - Visitors Demography/Geography

• What is a visit?

 A visit is a browser session initiated by an actual visitor, the session timeout is 30 Minutes in Google Analytics.

• What is a Search Depth?

The average number of pages visitors viewed after performing a search. 
 

• What is RPC?

RPC stands for Revenue Per Click, we use this parameter during the E-Commerce tracking.

• What is event tracking?

 Event tracking involves the Google Analytics code customization and is used to track a particular event/activity on a website like a click, file download or any other conversion.

• Which is more important - Bounce Rate or Exit Rate?

Both are almost equally important but still depends on the number of factors like a high exit rate of a contact page/thanks page or a funnel's end page is natural.

 

• Where to include the Google Analytics code in the HTML & why?

just before the close body </body> tag, because the code will run only after the whole page body is loaded in the browser, thus it increase the quality of visit count and only an actual visitor is counted.

• Difference Between Clicks and Visits?

A Click is an event (Mostly Used in PPC Models) and a visit is a browser session initiated by an actual visitor.

• What are analytics cookies?

Cookies are the text files which are stored on the client computer.

• What is meant by conversions and how will you track conversions through GA?

Conversions happens when any predefined goals are accomplished thereby generating ROI to the business. Proper goal URL's needs to be specified before GA can start tracking conversions. We need to define a goal URL through the Conversion section in GA and whenever the visitor reaches the predefined goal URL, a successful conversion gets tracked.

• What is the difference between a visit and a session?

As per the current standards, sessions and visits are the same thing, there is no difference. Whenever a visitor enters the site, a session starts and lasts for 30 minutes. This counts to 1 visit and 1 session. 

• What do you understand by assisted conversions?

On most of the cases, conversions do not happen using a single channel. often, more than one channel is included in a successful conversion. Assisted conversions helps us to get a clear idea as to which channels are involved in contributing a conversion. This is shown in the Multi Channel Funnel reporting tab in GA. Common channels contributing to conversions are direct, organic search, referral, not set, social network and email.

• I want to track how many organic visits I am getting on a weekly basis for a predefined set of keywords. What is the best way to check that on a regular basis investing the least possible time?

We can create a custom dashboard and specify all the metrics and dimensions there. Creating a custom dashboard will save our time and allow us to check the status at any point of time during the week, month or day without applying filters every time.

• How can I identify the keywords that are sending paid traffic to any site?

The keyword column displays traffic divided under paid and organic. We can easily identify the paid keywords by moving to the keywords section.

• How will I identify the popular pages on my site?

 

The popular pages on the site are the top landing pages of my site. I can identify the top landing pages of my site by moving to the behavior section. This will display the top landing pages that are giving us the maximum visits.

 

• How does Google calculates time on page?

Google puts a time stamp whenever any user lands on a specific page then it compares the time stamp of one page with the other. For example, any visitor enters the site on Page A and moves to Page B then lands to Page C and finally leaves the site. In this case, a time stamp is put on Page A suppose its 10:10, when the user moves to Page B, another time stamp is placed on Page B, suppose its 10:20 and then when the user lands on Page C, another time stamp is placed, lets say 10:30. Now to calculate time on Page A, Google will subtract the time stamp on Page B with that of A. In this case, 10:20-10:10 which will come to 10 minutes for Page A.

• How can I identify where the visitors are clicking the most?

This can be seen with the help of In-Page Analytics.

• Where can I find the UA tracking code?

The Universal Analytics tracking code can be found in the admin section of the web property.

 

• By default, a session is of 30 minutes, is it possible to change the session time and make it 45 minutes?

Yes, we can set custom session timings by moving to the admin section and clicking on the session settings.