100 Updated SEO Team Lead Interview Questions Part – 2
Q – 73 Tell us do you use separate SEO strategies for Google,Yahoo and Bing?
Ans- Yes I use separate strategies for Google,Yahoo and other search engines.Morebacklinks 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.
Q – 74 Tell me what aspects of a hyperlink are important for SEO?
Ans- 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.
Q – 75 Tell me are you a part of the SEO community online?
Ans- There are many different forums and such out there, being active and up to date is essential to staying on top in the constantly changing world of SEO. A few blogs and forums I recommend are SearchEngineLand, SERoundtable and WebmasterWorld.
Q – 76 Explain what is A/B testing and multivariate testing?
Ans- Multivariate testing is a process by which more than one component of a website may be tested in a live environment. It can be thought of in simple terms as numerous A/B tests performed on one page at the same time. A/B tests are usually performed to determine the better of two content variations, multivariate testing can theoretically test the effectiveness of limitless combinations.
Q – 77 Tell me what will you do, for the company website you are working for, decides to move all the contents to new domain?
Ans- The first step would be to update the previous site with a permanent redirect to new page for all the pages. After that, I will remove the previous content from search engine in order to avoid duplicate content issues.
Q – 78 Do you know something about Googlebot?
Ans-
☛ Cross linking is used to refer the process of linking one site to another site and provide a way to allow the accessing to it.
☛ It provides the users with reference sites that consists the content related to the search.
☛ It doesn’t need to be owned by the same person as it provides the methods that have been built on the Internet.
☛ It serves the purpose to display the page on the search engines using search engine optimization techniques and methods.
☛ The site ranking is calculated on the basis of the relevance of the sites and then it is reflected on the search engine.
☛ It uses SEO tools that provide reciprocal links and inbound links that can be used as our SEO.
Q – 79 Tell me few Black Hat SEO techniques?
Ans- ☛ Link Farming
☛ Hidden text, etc.
☛ Gateway or Doorway pages
☛ Cloaking
☛ Keyword Stuffing
Q – 80 Explain what will be your next steps if your SEO methods or technique does not work?
Ans- My first attempt would to try analysis the problem and resolve them step by step
☛ Firstly I would try to see whether it is a new project, and then like to re-check the key words.
☛ Also, I would look for relevant key-words that can be helpful.
☛ Even though the webpage and website has been indexed well and still not appearing on the first 10 pages of search engine result page, then I would make some changes in page text, titles and description.
☛ If website is not indexed well or dropped from the index, than it might comprises serious issues and re-work might be required.
Q – 81 Tell me what are the key aspects of Panda update?
Ans- Panda is to improve the search in Google. The latest version has focused on quality content, proper design, proper speed, proper use of images and many more.
Q – 82 Tell me what is Google Trends?
Ans- A service by Google where you can find what are the hot searches in all over the world.
Q – 83 Tell me what are the limitations of title and description tags?
Ans- Title tag can be between 66-70 characters and Meta description tag can be between 160-170 characters.
Q – 84 Explain what are the Social Media channels you have used for marketing?
Ans- I have used blogs like blogger, word press, tumblr etc, social bookmarking sites like Digg, Jumptags, Delicious etc., social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn etc., Video Sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo etc.
Q – 85 Do you know why are metatags important?
Ans- 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.
Q – 86 Explain what are the criteria for the uniqueness of a page (unique as opposed to duplicate content)?
Ans- Code similarity, Text similarity, Page names. Titles, headings, page titles and metatags.
Q – 87 Do you know what is your SEO workflow?
Ans- Say you get in to work on a Monday at 9 AM – what does your day look like, and your overall week? This of course depends on what their role is; for example, if they’re primarily doing content marketing and blogging, I’d ask them, How do you determine what to write about next? How do you prioritize tasks?
If you’re a link builder, I’d ask, How do you prioritize your link opportunities? This is super important because in SEO, you have an infinite number of things you could potentially do on any given day, and only 8-10 hours in the day to get something done. I want to see their attack plan. They should have an internal system and be able to take initiative – I don’t want to hire an SEO who needs constant hand-holding from a manager.
Q – 88 Tell me what is the difference between clicks and visits in Google Analytics?
Ans- Clicks indicates the number of times any user clicks on an ad while visits indicates the number of unique sessions each visits create.
Q – 89 Tell me which tools do you use for choosing keywords?
Ans- I use Google Keyword tool, Wordtracker tool, Wordstream, Seo book keyword tool etc.
*Remember certain tools are paid but you may use the trial version for some days.
Q – 90 Tell us what SEO blogs do you read?
Ans- As I mentioned above, SEO is always changing. Tom Demers used to come in early every morning and spend an hour or so just reading. Keeping up with the industry is crucial both to stay current on news and various Google updates as well as to get new strategic ideas and tips for increasing efficiency.
So I ask job candidates to tell me what SEO blogs and sites they read. But anyone can list out a few blogs. I’m looking for something beyond the bare-minimum basics (like Search Engine Land). I then follow up with another question: What’s an interesting article you’ve recently read on one of those blogs and why did you find it interesting?
This tells me whether they actually read any blogs, how often, as well as why they read.
Q – 91 Tell me how will you plan an Seo strategy for a website already affected by Penguin update?
Ans- Penguin update deals with scanning through the link profile of a website. I will scan the links pointing to the site using tools like ahrefs and prepare a list of low quality links. I will make every effort to get those links removed like emailing the webmaster.
If somehow, I am unable to remove some links then I will use the disavow links tool to devalue the remaining links from harming the site. Apart from this, I will plan a link bait strategy to get some high authority links in order to increase the reputation of the site. This will surely help a site to recover from the effects of the Penguin update.
Q – 92 Tell me what is the best way to maximize the frequency of crawling of your website by search engines?
Ans- Frequently adding new, original and quality content on the website.
Q – 93 Tell me what is considered as more significant, creating content or building backlinks?
Ans- Both are necessary, creating quality content is equally important to building backlinks. Although, building backlinks are useful in building authority to a site and for ranking as well, quality content is the first element that is considered to be more responsible for ranking.
Q – 94 Explain what are the SEO tools do you use?
Ans- The SEO tools that I use are Google analytic, keyword search, Alexa, open site explorer, Google Webmaster.
Q – 95 Tell me how many types of Meta Tags are there in SEO and what are their characters limits?
Ans- There are two types Meta tags in SEO.
☛ Description Meta tag with 150 characters limits
☛ Keyword Meta tag with 200 characters limits
Q – 96 Explain can you optimize the website which has pages in millions?
Ans- From SEO point of view, for dynamic website, special additional SEO stuffs have to be implemented.
☛ Good Internal link structure
☛ Generation of dynamic title and description
☛ Dynamic XML sitemap generation
Q – 97 Tell me how do you walk the line behind behind best practices and black hat SEO?
Ans- Black hat SEO offers short term solutions and can get your site penalized in Google. What was considered white hat SEO years ago may be black hat now. Which brings me to my next question.
Q – 98 Tell me what would you suggest to the client who has a website made on Flash? How would you do Seo for that site?
Ans- 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.
Q – 99 Tell me what is Keyword Difficulty?
Ans- 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
Q – 100 Suppose you were a SEO for a technology web site, what would you do to build backlinks for it?
Ans- 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.
Q – 101 Tell me what do you understand by Google Authorship and how can you use it for Seo benefits?
Ans- Google Authorship allows you to link your Google Plus Profile to the content you create. This is a way to enhance the overall user experience and stop spamming.
Results containing content from original and reputed authors are valued highly by Google and chances of spamming are also reduced. Hence, implementing Google Authorship is really useful for Seo as it helps a webpage to rank higher based on the author rank.
Q – 102 Explain what do you understand by “Engagement Metrics” with relation to social media?
Ans- Engagement metrics comprises of information which is used to measure the importance of user (customer) engagement with respect to a particular social data.Some example includes likes, retweets, plus ones, clicks, favorites, repins, comments etc.
Q – 103 Tell me what is the difference between soft 404 and 404 errors? How will you find and remove these errors?
Ans- A 404 error is returned when the browser requests a resource from the web server and the server is unable to find that resource so it returns 404 file not found error. On the other hand, soft 404 error is returned when the browser requests a resource from the web server and the server returns 200 OK response for a file that does not exist on the server.
Hence, in both the cases, file is not present on the server but in case of soft 404 the server returns 200 OK response code by mistake. We can find out these errors with the help of Google Webmasters Tool and we can either remove them by adding proper redirects and by creating a custom 404 page for helping the user in proper navigation while browsing the site.
Q – 104 Tell me what was the recent update which Google had and what changes would you suggest for it?
Ans- Google recently had the Hummingbird update which was a change in the core search algorithm. Google moved from keyword based searching to concept based searching. It included semantic level analysis in order to find out real answers and searcher’s intent behind the user query. I would add comprehensive and fresh content to my site after the Hummingbird update.
Prior to the Hummingbird update, Google 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 and good content, fresh content, good social media presence and quality organic links.
Q – 105 Tell me for which of the following file types a SEO expert needs to provide an alternative textual description?
Ans- (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.
Q – 106 Suppose 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?
Ans- 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.
Q – 107 Tell us how do you conduct an SEO experiment?
Ans- Tell me about an SEO experiment that you’ve run recently. What was the result? If you’re in the trenches doing SEO, a key to success is being able to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
I’d like to know how they run their experiments, and if they don’t run experiments, that’s a red flag. Ken Lyons kept an SEO log where he tinkered with various SEO experiments, sometimes dozens at a time. I love an SEO with a bit of mad scientist in them.
Q – 108 Explain me how do you measure SEO success?
Ans- What are the SEO KPI’s (key performance indicators) you track? What is a reasonable goal for a month? There’s really no right answer here because it depends on the client’s objectives, and the guy’s role.
What I’m hoping for is that they say something intelligent about different KPI’s like counting and tracking links, social shares, unbranded organic traffic, referred visitors, engagement metrics, conversions, etc. (Hint: “mad hits” and “keyword rankings” are not metrics I care about.) Even better if they have tried out different metrics and changed them over time, and can explain why.
Q – 109 Name the bots (spider) of major search engine?
Ans- The name of bots/spider of Google search engine is GoogleBot, Yahoo Slurp for Yahoo search andBingBot for Bing search engine.
Q – 110 Explain me onsite search box, and how it helps to attract traffic?
Ans- 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.
Q – 111 Tell me which of the options below is the best way to select the keywords to optimize for?
Ans- 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.
Q – 112 Suppose a customer can give you an access to only one tool, which one will you choose, Webmasters or Analytics?
Ans- 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.
Q – 113 Tell me what do you mean by anchor text?
Ans- Click-able text written on an hyperlink is known as Anchor Text.
Q – 114 Do you know what is PPC?
Ans- PPC stands for Pay Per Click and is an advertisement campaign hosted by Google. It is segmented into two modules CPC ( Cost per click) and CPM ( Cost per thousand impressions) through flat rate and bidding respectively. In CPC, if the user clicks on the advert, only then the advertiser will be charged.
Q – 115 Explain why the Title Tag in website is valuable?
Ans- Title tags are very essential in SEO, as it tells about the contents on that web page. Through title tags only the search engine will tell the user, what is there in the page.
Q – 116 Tell me some SEO blogs that you frequently read?
Ans-
☛ Jimboykins
☛ Search Engine Land
☛ SEOSmarty
☛ MOZ
☛ Search Engine Journal
Q – 117 Explain me me something about Googlebot?
Ans- To index a webpage Google uses the Googlebot software. Caching, Crawling and indexing of a webpage are done through Googlebot by collecting details from that webpage.
Q – 118 Tell me what is the difference between PR (page rank) and SERP (Search engine result page)?
Ans- Page rank is calculated on the basis of quality inbound links from other website or webpages to our webpage or a website.
SERP (Search Engine Result page) is the placement of the website or web-pages which is returned by the search engine after a search query or attribute.
Q – 119 Explain what is robots.txt?
Ans- Robots.txt is a text file. It is through this file, it gives instruction to search engine crawlers about indexing and caching of a webpage, file of a website or directory, domain.
Q – 120 Do you know what does the 302 server response code signify?
Ans- The page has temporarily moved.
Q – 121 Tell me what tools do you use for doing SEO?
Ans- I use Google webmaster tools, Google Analytics, Open site explorer, Alexa, Website grader etc. But now a days there are so many paid tools are available in market like Seo Moz, spydermate, bulkdachecker etc.
Q – 122 Tell me what is 301 redirect?
Ans- 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.
Q – 123 Explain which is the most important area to include your keywords?
Ans- Page title and Body text are the most important areas where we can include keywords for the SEO purpose.
Q – 124 Tell me some SEO practices?
Ans- Building back links. Rewriting the titles to include the target keywords, Rewriting dynamic URLs into static.
Q – 125 Tell me what are the advantages of submitting sites to search directories?
Ans- 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.
Q – 126 Can you differentiate ‘nofollow’ and ‘dofollow’?
Ans- Nofollow link is exactly vice-versa of dofollow link. These are noncrawling link which are not passed by search engines bot and hence can’t be cached or indexed. It is obvious when we wish to prevent a link from crawlingand indexing.
Dofollow link is a kind of hyperlink which says all search engines crawlers to pass through which also put an impact over page rank. When we opt to employ or attempt to achieve a dofollow link then it is counted by search engines and sits in the eye of Google, Bing, MSN, Yahoo etc. as a backlink for your website and enhances your site ranking
Q – 127 Explain what do you know about Black Hat SEO?
Ans- In order to attain High Ranking in search engine result page, websites go for various methods and techniques which are characterized by two categories.
The method which are implemented and acceptable according to search engine guidelines are White Hat SEO, on the other hand, the method which are less acceptable or instructed to avoid in search engine guidelines are “Black Hat SEO”.
Q – 128 Explain me some Black Hat SEO techniques?
Ans- Some Black Hat SEO techniques are:
☛ Keyword Stuffing
☛ Cloaking
☛ Doorway Pages or Gateway Pages
☛ Link Farming
☛ Hidden Text, etc.
Q – 129 Tell me what are the different techniques used in Offpage SEO?
Ans- There are lots of techniques used in Offpage SEO work. Major Techniques are:
☛ Directory Submission
☛ Social Bookmarking
☛ Blog Post
☛ Article Post
☛ Press Release Submission
☛ Forum Posting
☛ Yahoo Answer
☛ Blog Comment
☛ Deep link Directory Submission
☛ Regional Directory Submission and all that
Q – 130 Do you know what are Meta Tags?
Ans- HTML meta tags are usually referred as tags of page data which sits between opening and closing head tags of a document’s HTML code. Actually these are hidden keywords who sit in the code. These are invisible to visitors but are visible and readable by Search Engines.
Example:
Not considered as Meta Tag, even required anyway
Q – 131 Tell me what do you know about Google Panda update?
Ans- The Panda update was done to improve the quality of search results in Google. Panda update also known as the farmer update was done to eliminate content farms which provided less user friendly experience. It used machine language scalability as one of the important metrics for judging relevancy of a web page.
All the focus was transformed on the user and now quality content , proper design, proper speed, proper use of images and videos, content to ad ratio all mattered more after the Panda update. You need to optimize your site for better clickthrough rate and a less bounce rate.
Q – 132 Explain what is the difference between HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps?
Ans- HTML sitemaps are created for the user and contains a basic structure for displaying all the pages of the website in a hierarchy. XML sitemaps are created for the search engines and helps a search engine bot to easily cache, index and discover new pages.
Q – 133 Tell us what are your favorite ways of attracting natural backlinks to your site?
Ans- Having user friendly content on the site is the best way to attract natural backlinks but one of my favorite ways of attracting natural backlinks is by offering free widgets and free infographics to my audience.
Q – 134 Do you know in Google Lore – What are ‘Hilltop’, ‘Florida’, and ‘Big Daddy’?
Ans- Hilltop:
An old and often contested algorithm that calculates PageRank based on expert documents and topical relevancy. The theory behind it was to decrease the possibility of manipulation from buying high PR links from off topic pages. Florida: The highly controversial update implemented by Google in November of 2003, much to the chagrin of many seasonal retail properties. Big
Daddy:
A test data center used by Google to preview algorithm changes.
Q – 135 Explain what methods would you apply for decreasing the loading time of a website?
Ans- 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.
Q – 136 Explain something about Black Hat SEO?
Ans- In order to get a high ranking in search engine result page, websites go for various methods and techniques which are characterized by two categories. One method that is acceptable by search engine guidelines is known as White Hat SEO, while the other method which is not acceptable by search engine guidelines is known as Black Hat SEO.
Q – 137 Tell me what are Spiders, Robots and Crawlers and what are their functions?
Ans- Spiders, robot and crawler, they are all same and referred by different names. It is a software program that follows, or “Crawls” different links throughout the internet, and then grabs the content from the sites and adds to the search engine indexes.
Q – 138 Which is the popular search engine in Russia?
Ans- Yandex is popular in Russia.
Q – 139 Tell me how do you go about building your links?
Ans-
Q – 140 Explain what is difference between +1 button and +1 project?
Ans- +1 button is similar to like button for example you can recommend a page to others by +1 button. Nowadays. its showing in Google SERP near to Title. Google + project is social media website similar to Facebook and we can say competitor of Facebook.
Q – 141 Tell me what is Page Segmentation?
Ans- Page segmentation is all about to track the site visitors like which are the landing pages and exit pages. So that you can have a brief idea that how can you improve exit pages content and design to make it more convenient for the landing user.
Q – 142 Explain can you mention the difference between SEO and SEM?
Ans- SEM (Search Engine Marketing), it is used for the promotion of website through Search Engine Result Page (SERP) , while to optimize the search result of your webpage or website SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is used.
Q – 143 Tell me how many characters limits in Title tag?
Ans- We can add 70 characters in title tag.
Q – 144 Tell me what is the main purpose of using keyword in SEO?
Ans- Keyword is a single word, and while a combination of those keywords makes phrases. These keywords or phrases are used by the search engines to populate the subjects over the internet. Search engine stores keywords in the database, and when search is done, it will come up with the best possible match.
Q – 145 Do you know what is SEO and introduce its types?
Ans- Search engine optimization or SEO is a process of keep changing the position of a web page or website in a search engine results by using keywords or phrases.
Two Types of SEO are:
On Page Optimization
Off Page Optimization