SEO Interview Questions – Set 08

How would you optimize your content for Google’s rich answer box?

There are plenty of ways to optimize your content or site for Google’s rich answer box. Some of the commonly used methods are as follows:

  • Identify complex queries and questions: The answers to simple questions are available in abundance across the SERPs. So, find out complex queries related to your niche by using keywords tools such as Google AdWords, SEMRush and Wordstream and write content that specifically answers these questions.
  • Engage readers: Your one answer should be suitable for all similar questions. Furthermore, customize your content to suit beginners in your field and use graphs, tables, and step-by-step answer formats to engage the readers.
  • Provide Supplemental Information: The users tend to read or follow related questions, so you can answers some similar questions down the page as supplemental information.
  • Enhance User Experience: Keep your website well structured and formatted and optimized for mobiles to improve your users’ website experience.
  • Select User Searched Topics: Choose topics that are highly searched by users then accordingly provide information about these topics.
  • Create Quality Content: Do market research to understand your audience and make a list of questions mostly asked by them and then accordingly create unique and quality content.
  • Implement Schema Markup Code: This code allows Google to identify semantic contents in the source code of your site so that it could separate information from your page and use it in the Answer Box.

What are Google Sitelinks?

Google Sitelinks are little sub-listings that generally appear under some search results in a SERP. Google adds Sitelinks only if it thinks they are useful for the user otherwise it will not show any Sitelinks. It uses its automated algorithms to shortlist and display Sitelinks. The four links under flipkart.com, in the image given below, are known as “Sitelinks.”

How would you maximize the frequency of crawling of your website by search engines?

  • Update your pages regularly: You must have to frequently add new, original and quality content on the website for this.
  • Server’s Uptime: If a site is down for a long time, the crawlers reduce the frequency of crawling for that site. So, host your website on a reliable server with good uptime.
  • Create Sitemaps: You can submit sitemap of your website to make your site discover quickly by search engine spiders. In WordPress, you can generate dynamic sitemap with Google XML sitemap plugin and submit it to Webmaster tool.
  • Avoid Duplicate Content: The copied content tends to reduce the crawling rate as using plagiarized material is against the guidelines of Google. So, always provide new and unique content.
  • Reduce site’s loading time: The loading time should be less as the crawl has a limited time and if it spends too much time on big images included in the content, it will have no or less time to visit other pages.
  • Build more links: You can build more backlinks from regularly crawled sites. Interlinking helps search engines to crawl deep pages of your site. So, whenever, you create a new page add a link in your old related pages to your new page.
  • Use optimized images: The crawlers cannot read images directly so always use alt tags to provide a description that search engine crawlers can read and index.
  • Update your pages regularly: You must have to frequently add new, original and quality content on the website for this.
  • Server’s Uptime: If a site is down for a long time, the crawlers reduce the frequency of crawling for that site. So, host your website on a reliable server with good uptime.
  • Create Sitemaps: You can submit sitemap of your website to make your site discover quickly by search engine spiders. In WordPress, you can generate dynamic sitemap with Google XML sitemap plugin and submit it to Webmaster tool.
  • Avoid Duplicate Content: The copied content tends to reduce the crawling rate as using plagiarized material is against the guidelines of Google. So, always provide new and unique content.
  • Reduce site’s loading time: The loading time should be less as the crawl has a limited time and if it spends too much time on big images included in the content, it will have no or less time to visit other pages.

Tell the names of some Off page SEO techniques?

There are several Off page SEO techniques such as:

  • Directory Submission: You can submit your site to a particular category of a web directory, e.g., if you are offering online tutorials, you should submit your site to the education category of a web directory. It will help you build more backlinks.
  • Social Bookmarking: It enables you to store your links on bookmarking sites. These links serve as backlinks and thus helps improve the SEO of your website.
  • RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Submission: It allows you to submit RSS feeds to RSS submission directory sites to improve SEO of your site.
  • Article Posting: It enables you to submit articles to popular article submission directories. It gives you backlinks and improves the page-rank of your website or blog. You are required to submit articles in relevant categories for better results.
  • Blog Posting: It allows you to post blogs and thus you can offer fresh content to your users on a regular basis. Blogs help convert prospects into actual customers.
  • Press Release Submission: You can write a press release about new events, products, and services of your company and submit it to PR sites.
  • Forum Posting: It enables you to build quality inbound links by participating in online discussion forums.

Which are the social media channels generally used for marketing?

Some of the most used social media channels are:

Blogging Platforms: Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr , Medium, Ghost, Squarespace, etc.

Social bookmarking sites: Digg, Jumptags, Delicious, Dribble, Pocket, Reddit, Slashdot, StumbleUpon, etc.,

Social networking sites: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Skype, Viber, Snapchat, Pinterest, Telegram, etc.

Video Sharing sites: YouTube, Vimeo, Netflix, Metacafe, Liveleak, Ustream, etc.

Which tool should be preferred between Webmaster and Analytics?

Webmaster tool should be preferred over Analytics tool because it includes almost all essential tools as well as some analytics data for the search engine optimization. But now due to the inclusion of webmaster data in Analytics, we would like to have access to Analytics.

What do you mean by 301redirect?

301 redirecting is a method of redirecting users and search engines from the old page URL to a new page URL. The 301 redirect is used to pass the link traffic from the old URL to the new URL. It is a permanent redirect from one URL to another site without typing the URL of the new site. It helps you maintain the domain authority and search rankings when the URL of a site is changed for any reason.Furthermore, it allows you to associate common web conventions with one URL to improve the domain authority; to rename or rebrand a site with a new URL; to direct traffic to a new website from other URLs of the same organization. So, you must set up a 301 redirect before moving to a new domain.

Which type of website is good for SEO purpose?

  • A website made on flash. or
  • A website made on HTML 5.
    The content presented in a flash website is hard to parse by search engines, so, it is always preferred to build a website in HTML for better SEO prospective.

What is the RSS feed?

SS feed submission is an off page SEO technique. It refers to the submission of RSS feeds to RSS submission directory sites to improve the SEO of your site. RSS stands for Rich Site Summary and is also known as Really Simple Syndication.

An RSS feed generally contains updated web pages, videos, images, links and more. It is a format to deliver frequently changing web content. The users who find these updates interesting can subscribe your RSS feed to receive timely updates from their favorite websites. Thus, it helps increase traffic to your website.

What is a TLD?

A TLD is the last part of an Internet address. For example, in xyz.com the TLD is .com.