SEO Interview Questions – Set 04

What is PPC?

PPC stands for pay-per-click. It is a type of search engine marketing in which you have to pay a fee each time your advertisement is clicked by an online user. Search engines like Google, Bing, etc., offer pay-per-click advertising on auction basis where the highest bidder gets the most prominent advertising space on the SERPs so that it gets a maximum number of clicks.

What is keyword stuffing?

Keyword stuffing refers to increasing the keyword density beyond a certain level to achieve higher ranking in the SERPs. As we know, web crawlers analyze keywords to index the web pages, so some SEO practitioners exploit this feature of the search engine by increasing the keywords in a page. This way of improving the ranking is against the guidelines of Google, so it is considered a black hat SEO technique, and it should be avoided.

Tell the names of most important Google ranking factors?

A search engine is a web-based software program that is developed to search and find information on the World Wide Web. It enables internet users to search the information via the World Wide Web (WWW). The user is required to enter keywords or phrases into the search engines and then search engine searches websites, web pages or documents containing the similar keywords and presents a list of web pages with same keywords in the search engine result pages.

We can say that it generally answers the queries entered by the users in the form of a list of search results. So, it is a web-based tool that enables us to find information on the World Wide Web. Some of the popular search engines are Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

What is Search Engine Submission?

Search engine submission is an off page SEO technique. In this technique, a website is directly submitted to the search engine for indexing and thus to increase its online recognition and visibility. It is an initial step to promote a website and get search engine traffic. A website can be submitted in two ways: one page at a time or the entire site at a time using a webmaster tool.

What is robot.txt?

Robots.txt is a text file that gives instructions to the search engine crawlers about the indexing of a webpage, domain, directory or a file of a website. It is generally used to tell spiders about the pages that you don’t want to be crawled. It is not mandatory for search engines, yet search engine spiders follow the instructions of the robots.txt.

The location of this file is very significant. It must be located in the main directory otherwise the spiders will not be able to find it as they do not search the whole site for a file named robots.txt. They only check the main directory for these files, and if they don’t find the files in the main directory, they assume that the site does not have any robots.txt file and index the whole site.

What is error 503?

The “503 Service Unavailable” error is an HTTP status code which indicates the server is not available right now to handle the request. It often occurs when the server is too busy or when maintenance is performed on it. Generally, it is a temporary state which is resolved shortly.

What do you mean by Spider?

Many search engines use programs called spiders to index websites. The spiders are also known as crawlers or robots. They act as automatic date searching tools that visit every site to find new or updated web pages and links. This process is called web crawling. Spiders follow hyperlinks and gather textual and meta information for the search engine databases. They collect as much information as they can before relaying to the server of the search engine.

Spiders may also rate the content being indexed to help the search engine determine relevancy levels to a search. They are called spiders as they visit many sites simultaneously, i.e. their legs keep spanning a large area of the web. All search engines use spiders to revise and build their indexes.

What is Mobilegeddon (Mobile-Friendly Update)?

Mobilegeddon is a search engine ranking algorithm introduced by Google on 21 April 2015. It was designed to promote mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results. It ranks the websites based on their mobile friendliness, i.e., the mobile-friendly sites are ranked higher than the sites that are not mobile friendly. After this algorithm update, mobile friendliness has become an important factor in ranking the websites in the SERPs.

Why are backlinks important?

The backlinks are an indication of the popularity of a website. They are important for SEO as most of the search engines like Google give more value to websites that have a large number of quality backlinks, i.e., a site with more backlinks is considered more relevant than a site with fewer backlinks.

The backlinks should be relevant which means they should come from the sites that have content related to your site or pages otherwise the links if they are coming from sites that have different content, will be treated as irrelevant backlinks by the Search Engine. For example, there is a website about how to rescue orphaned dogs, and it receives a backlink from a website about dog care essentials then this would be a relevant backlink in a search engine assessment than a like from site about automobiles.

What are the basic tools required for SEO?

Google webmaster tools, Google Analytics, Open site explorer, Alexa, Website grader are some of the free and basic tools which are commonly used for SEO. However, there are also many paid tools like Seo Moz, spydermate, bulkdachecker, readily available in the market.

Google webmaster tools: It is one of the most useful SEO tools. It is designed for the webmasters. It helps webmasters communicate with Google and evaluate and maintain their website’s performance in search engine results. Using webmaster, one can identify the issues related to a website such as crawling errors, malware issues, etc. It is a free service offered by Google, anyone who has a site can use it.

Google analytics: It is a free Web analytics service offered by Google. It is designed to provide analytical and statistical tools for SEO and digital marketing. It enables you to analyze website traffic and other activities that take place on your website. Anyone who has a Google account can use this service.

Open site explorer: It is a Mozscape index-powered workhorse which is designed to research backlinks, find link-building opportunities and find out links that may impact rank badly.

Alexa: It is a global ranking system that compiles a list of most popular websites based on the web traffic data and accordingly provides Alexa Rank to a website. The lower the Alexa rank, the more popular a website, e.g., a site with rank 150 will have more visitors than a site with rank 160.

Website grader: It is a free online tool designed to grade a website against some critical metrics like performance, SEO, security and mobile readiness.

Some Paid SEO Tools:

SEOMoz: It is a premium SEO web application designed for SEO. It provides analytics and insights to improve your search engine rankings. It is a collection of various SEO tools that cover all vital areas of SEO.

Spyder Mate: This software allows you to improve the ranking of your website as well as offers various methods to promote a website. It enables you to manage your web portal to attract more and more traffic to your site.

Bulkdachecker: It is used to check the Domain Authority of Multiple Websites simultaneously.