30 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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
5. Who is Matt Cutts? – He is the head of web spam team at Google. Read more about Matt Cutts here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. What is keyword prominence? – Keyword prominence is the location of the keywords in the page title, meta description and body text…..Read more about prominence at: http://www.seoglossary.com/article/64
9. 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….read more here http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/bounce-rate-vs-exit-rate
10. 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…read here for latest panda updates http://www.seroundtable.com/tag/panda
Update: 12 Latest Technical SEO Interview Questions & Answers
11. 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%..read more about caffeine update here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
12. 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.
13. 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.
14. What is 301 redirect? – It is a SEO friendly version of permanent redirect for the webpages or the domains. Read more about 301 redirect here http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php
15. What is 302 redirect? – It is a temporary redirect. Read more here http://www.internetofficer.com/seo/302-redirect/
16. 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. Read more here http://www.robotstxt.org/
17. What are the other methods to restrict a webpage from the search index? – we can use noindex meta tag. Read more here http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html
18. 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. Read more here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35120
19. 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. Read more about landing page here http://www.copyblogger.com/landing-pages/
20. What is the recent change in Google Analytics? – Real time visitors info, visitors flow, webmaster tools SEO data and website speed data. Read more here http://analytics.blogspot.com/
21. How to handle the duplicate page in the website? – using canonical tag. Read more here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
22. What are the types of CSS and which is better for SEO? – 3 types, Internal CSS, inline CSS and external CSS. Read more about CSS types here at http://www.expression-web-tutorial.com/Types_CSS_Styles.html. The external CSS is best for SEO purpose. Read why to use external CSS http://www.basictips.com/tips/article_64.shtml
23. How many heading tags are there in HTML? – 6 tags, from H1 to H6
24. 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.  Matt Cutts advise on using more than one H1 tag http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIn5qJKU8VM
25. Italic or Bold, which is more useful? – Both are almost same but Italic have a slight more better for keyword targeting on the webpage. Read more here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization
26. 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. Read more here http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors and here http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2010/01/14/google-ranking-factors/
27. 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.
28. 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.
29. What is CTR? – It is Click Through Rate. Read more about CTR here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clickthrough_rate
30. What is CTA? – It is Call to Action. Read more here  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_to_action_(marketing)

Update: 12 Latest Technical SEO Interview Questions & Answers