Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is process applied to improve your website visibility in search engine result pages and can increase your website revenue.
Today, businesses depend on online marketing to boost sales, as traditional marketing like flyers and brochures are no longer effective. So how do you find a job that can leverage your knowledge and help you build a career?
There are thousands of job openings in various companies for SEO Experts. If you want to join any of these well established companies as an expert, you must succeed during your SEO interview. There is one thing to remember, you have your own techniques...make sure to express them in your interview with clear explanations (Don't use SEO jargon, that your interviewer might not be verse with, instead show them how it's done.
With 8+ years of experience in Digital marketing and all things tech, here are the best questions and answers for your next SEO interview. Use this as a guide, as questions might be phrased differently.
Top 20 SEO interview Q&A
General SEO Interview Question
Q. Introduce yourself to your interviewer
Ans. Start with your personal experience then about your work experience.
Q. How much Experience in SEO?
Ans. Have a portfolio or a link to your portfolio that shows your work.
Q. How will you define SEO in your own terms?
Ans. SEO is process applied to increase a website visibility in search engine result pages.
Tip: Always use Search engine optimization instead of SEO in your answers.
Q. SEO is classified into how many types?
Ans. Two types of SEO. On-page SEO and Off-page SEO.
Q. How are On-page and Off-page SEO different?
Ans. On-page SEO is optimizing landing pages within a website in order to rank in search engine results. While off page SEO involves link building and other techniques to build a relations with other sites.
Q. Why is SEO important today?
Ans. If you own an online business SEO can improve your websites ranking and visibility for targeted keywords being search on sites like Google. If done right, it can lead to increased leads and revenue for any online business.
Tip: Give and example from your experience.
On Page SEO Interview Question
SEO on-page Q&A for your next SEO interview.
Q. What is On-Page SEO?
Ans. On-Page SEO is process to help increase any website visibility in search engine results such as optimizing the websites Title tags, descriptions, Meta tags, alt tag, website speed, content and other factors that come to play within the optimization process.
Q. How many characters should in Title?
Ans. With my experience, I'll recommend to keep it between 55 to 60 characters with blank spaces.
Tip: Always use a character count tool to verify.
Q. Why is a Title and Description important in SEO?
Ans. A website title and meta description tells search engines what to find on a certain page.
Q. Why should Alt tags b e considered for SEO?
Ans. Alt Tag is for describing an image on a website. Search engine bots can't read images that are not labeled. The alt tag helps to improve the keyword density of that page and can help boost your targeted keywords.
Q. How will you optimize a web page content?
Ans. Web pages need content to rank, with at least a 3-4% targeted keyword density, it's good to make unique content for each page on a website.
Q. How do you create a Robots.txt file and why?
Ans. A Robots.txt file is used to block web page from search engine bots. You can create robots.txt file from notepad and use code User-agent: * and Disallow: /pagename to block areas of a site you don't want crawled.
Q. How do you resolve a 301 Redirection?
Ans. 301 redirection is resolved by a .htaccess file. This will redirect a webpage permanently to another web page.
Q. What is the Difference between 301 and 302 Redirect.
Ans. 301 is a permanent redirection code and 302 is a temporary redirect. I suggest you to use 301 redirects in your website to resolve canonical issues.
Q. What is Pagination?
Ans. Pagination is method to connect one page to other web page for search engine bot such as you can use next and prev page in head to indicate search engine bot to index.
Q. What is a Canonical issue?
Ans. If search engine bots get confused while indexing a web page that is called a canonical issue.
Q. How to resolve Canonical issue?
Ans. Canonical issue can be resolve by canonical meta tag and .htaccess file.
Q. How will you improve a website's downloading speed?
Ans. There are multiple ways to improve a websites downloading speed. Reduce the server loading time, reduce image size, decrease JavaScript and CSS files. These can all improve the downloading speed of most websites. A website speed is best around 3 seconds.
Q. What is Keyword Density?
Ans. Keyword density is the about of targeted words been targeted on a particular page, this includes the page Title, Description, Alt text and content.
Tip: This varies by industry, so long as you are not stuffing the keywords just for search engines.
Q. What is an H1 Tag and how many H1 tags should be in a web page?
Ans. H1 tags are headings that explain what the page is all about. One H1 Tag per web page is best.
Off-page SEO Interview Questions
SEO off-page Interview Questions that can help you get set for your interview.
Q. What is Off-page SEO?
Ans. Off-page SEO is a technique used to improve a website's visibility in search engine results by connecting links from other sources around the web. The main focus is to create links with authority in your niche or related content.
Q. Why do we need off-page SEO?
Ans. That's the best way to get a website ranking better on search engines. The main focus should be on high quality inbound links.
Q. List 5 off-page techniques.
Ans. Guest posting, Video, Article submission, Press release submission, Blogging, infographics posting.
Q. Do you know about guest posting?
Ans. Guest posting on well established sites can help generate powerful backlinks to a website.
Tip: You have to understand guidelines when guest blogging or posting on other sites. Don't Spam!
Q. What is a Do-follow and No-follow when it comes to backlink?
Ans. A do-follow is an instruction code for search engine bots to index a page follow that web page. No-follow gives instructions to a search engine bot to not index a link, so they will be no cache.
Conclusion
This Q&A is simply for practice and only a few might be asked at your interview, so it's best to understand you SEO techniques. You will need to apply these techniques on the job, so take your continues learning of this constantly change field.
Divine Tumenta is an entrepreneur and professional digital marketing expert based in Los Angeles. He has worked in digital marketing for more than 8 years. He is currently founder and CEO of backlinkfy.com and a go to consultant for startups and small businesses in the USA.
