Answering 30+ Most Common SEO Questions: Basic to Advanced Level

With the increasing importance of an online presence for businesses, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is becoming an even more important aspect for website owners. It’s challenging or we can say it’s almost impossible to establish a good online presence of your business if you don’t have a good understanding of what SEO is. Whether you want to understand SEO to boost your own website's rankings or you want to grab a job in the SEO field, these SEO questions will help you achieve your goals. We’ve already covered a lot of basic SEO interview questions in a previous blog.

Let us now dive deeper into the field and find answers to some more important and advanced questions:

1. What is a 302 redirect?

Ans. A 302 redirect is a temporary change to the URL that redirects search engines as well as users to the new location for a limited period of time. However, the authority and SEO ranking remain with the original URL only. This helps website owners ensure a good user experience as they can temporary change the location of a URL unless the original page is under construction or not functioning properly.

2. What is Keyword Density?

Ans. Keyword density is a measure of how many times a particular keyword or phrase appears in a piece of content. It is calculated in the form of a percentage by dividing the number of times the keyword appears on the web page by the total word count of that page. 

For example, suppose the total word count of a web page is 1,000. Now, if you have used a particular keyword 10 times, the keyword density would be: (10/1000)*100 = 1%. A keyword density of 1% to 2% is considered ideal, however, this is not a major ranking factor. 

3. What is Google Panda Update?

Ans. Google Panda update was launched in 2011 with an aim to reduce the visibility of sites using black hat SEO tactics. This update was initially named ‘farmer’ by Google and they later changed it to ‘Panda.’ Google Panda was introduced to boost the rankings and visibility of high-quality websites and demote sites with low-quality content. Read more about Google Panda update.

4. What is an Orphan Page?

Ans. An orphan page is a web page that no other pages of that website are linking to, i.e. its URL is not there in any other page of the entire website. Such pages are hard to get indexed by search engines as they cannot be found on any other web page. As the only way to access these pages is to know the direct URL, which makes it hard for search engines as well as users to find these pages and they might remain unindexed for long periods. 

5. What is an external link?

Ans. An external link is a URL of a page or resource that comes from outside your website’s domain. These are also known as outbound links sometimes. Outbound links can help boost your site’s SEO rankings and visibility if they are coming from reputed or authoritative websites. 

6. How to do an SEO audit?

Ans. An SEO audit, which is a check of how well a website is optimized, requires you to follow a few essential steps, which are:

• Identifying indexing issues by running a crawl of your website
• Looking for duplicate versions of your site and ensuring that users are redirected to your preferred version
• Identifying the reasons behind the decline in traffic and fixing potential issues
• Ensuring mobile-friendliness of your site
• Checking core web vital scores
• Fixing broken links, and many more. 

Also Check: Your Step-by-step guide to conducting an SEO audit.

7. What is ‘Accelerate Mobile Pages (AMP)’?

Ans. Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP is an open-source project aimed at providing a better user experience on mobile devices. It is sort of a technology that web developers can use to improve the loading speed and readability of web pages on mobile devices. 

8. What is Keyword Stuffing?

Ans. Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of incorporating keywords an excessive number of times into a web page. Website publishers usually do this to manipulate search engines to achieve higher rankings on SERPs. However, this practice is considered spam by Google. If identified, sites that use keyword stuffing might get penalized and see a decline in their search engine rankings. Therefore, keyword stuffing should be avoided. Keywords must be incorporated naturally into the content.

9. How to create Topic Clusters?

Ans. Topic clusters are like groups of web pages created to improve the authority of a website and establish the website’s image as a subject matter expert. To create topic clusters, you can start by choosing a core topic and creating a pillar page that will contain links to all the cluster pages (pages that cover subtopics in depth). Go through this step-by-step guide to creating topic clusters for in-depth information.

10. What is Cloaking?

Ans. Cloaking is a black-hat SEO technique that website owners use to show a different version of web pages to the search engines than the version that users see. It is done by identifying the user agent of a website and sending the alternate version of the webpage to them. This technique is strictly against Google’s guidelines and may result in penalties if identified by Google.

11. What is Google Penguin?

Ans. Google Penguin is an algorithm launched by Google back in 2012. With this update, Google aimed to reduce the search engine visibility of sites using black hat SEO techniques to trick search engines instead of genuinely publishing high-quality content. This algorithm was updated 10 times by Google and the last update was introduces in 2016. It impacted over 3.1% of sites in the English language.

12. What is disavow?

Ans. Disavow is an SEO-specific term used to describe the process of asking search engines to ignore some specific links that point to your website. In this process, any spammy backlinks or links that might hurt a site’s rankings are removed in order to maintain a good backlink profile of the site. Once a website publisher marks specific backlinks as disavow, those links won’t be considered by the search engines to determine that site’s rankings.

13. Why is Technical SEO important?

Ans. Technical SEO of a website also plays a crucial role in a website’s overall performance and its visibility on search engines. As Google now prioritizes user experience, technical SEO has become an even more important aspect to consider for website owners. Technical elements like page loading speed, mobile friendliness, user interface, and ease of navigation, play an important role in user experience, and hence in determining a site’s rankings. 

Also Check: The Importance Of Technical SEO In Modern SEO Services

14. How to optimize for Featured Snippets?

Ans. Featured snippets are the snippets shown on SERPs featuring the part of the text of a web page that answers a particular question asked by the user. Some tips to optimize a website for featured snippets include:

Creating content is a way that it answers frequently asked questions 

Organizing content in an easy-to-read manner

Looking for keywords that result in featured snippets and optimizing your content for the same.

Also Check: How To Optimize Featured Snippet To Rank On Position Zero

15. What is a people card on Google?

Ans. Google launched Google People Cards under its ‘Add Me To Search’ feature. These are like virtual visiting cards of people that appear in the search engine result pages when someone searches for their name on Google. These cards show relevant information about a person and their business. One can add several elements to their people card on Google, such as their profile picture, a brief bio of themselves, their location, their occupation, contact information, etc.

16. When to use a 302 redirect?

Ans. A 302 redirect, which is a temporary change to a web page’s URL, should be used when:

• You are redesigning or updating a webpage
• You want to bring back the original page after a short period of time
• The original page is not functioning properly and requires some action

17. What is the Google BERT update?

Ans. Google BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is an update launched by Google in 2019. This update was aimed at improving the way how Google understands users’ search queries and showing more relevant results to the users. With the help of BERT, Google targeted more conversational queries in order to better understand their context. 

18. What are Inbound Links?

Ans. Inbound links or backlinks are the links on other websites directing to your web pages. It is an important Google ranking factor. When other websites include your webpage links in their content, search engines consider your site as a valuable source of information that other websites are referring to. Having high-quality backlinks from relevant websites can help you improve your site’s rankings.  

19. How to do enterprise SEO?

Ans. Enterprise SEO, which refers to optimizing an enterprise website for better search engine rankings, can be done using the following steps:

• Finding industry-relevant keywords and analyzing them to identify ranking opportunities
• Creating high-quality content and optimizing it
• Improving technical SEO elements, such as website’s loading speed, mobile-friendliness, etc
• Following local SEO strategies to improve your visibility to local audiences

Check this detailed guide to implementing Enterprise SEO.

20. What is breadcrumb?

Ans. Breadcrumbs are navigation tools that help users understand where they currently are on a website, i.e. it helps them understand their location on a website. They are like small paths of URLs showing where users are and how they reached there to make it easy for them to get back to any previous page if they want. Breadcrumbs can usually be seen on the top of a web page.

21. What are meta keywords? 

Ans. Meta keywords are one of the three important parts of metadata used by search engines to understand the content of a web page. Meta keywords are a set of keywords or phrases that describe the content of a particular webpage and are included in the page’s prominent places like title tags, meta descriptions, headings, image alt text, etc. 

22. Why is Local SEO important?

Ans. Local SEO holds utmost importance for businesses offering their products and services across one or multiple locations. Some of the benefits of implementing local SEO include:

• Enhanced traffic from more relevant audiences
• Higher conversion rates
• An opportunity to outrank competitors
• Establish long-term rankings

23. What is the recommended format for implementing schema markup?

Ans. Schema markup can be implemented using different methods, including Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD. However, JSON-LD is a recommended format as it is not woven into the actual content of a webpage. If not JSON-LD, microdata can be used.

24. What is a backlink strategy?

Ans. A backlink strategy is a set of methods used by website owners to get high-quality backlinks from relevant websites. Here are a few effective backlink strategies to consider in 2024:

• Creating high-quality content that other websites can use as a source of information
• Analyzing competitor strategies and looking for sites that they are getting backlinks from
• Guest posting on relevant websites
• Replacing broken links with links to your pages.

25. What are doorway pages?

Ans. Doorway pages are also a part of black hat SEO tactics that website owners use to manipulate search engines. Doorway pages can be defined as pages that target long-term keywords to redirect users to another primary page upon clicking on their URL. When a user clicks on a doorway way, he/she is first sent to one or multiple intermediary pages before they can reach the actual page they were looking for. 

26. Why hire an SEO agency?

Ans. In today’s highly competitive market, it can be difficult for businesses to establish an online presence and gain visibility. Without proper knowledge of SEO tools and techniques, they might not be able to attract enough organic traffic to their websites. This is where SEO Agency in India come into play. SEO agencies like MadHawks, with their experience and expertise in the field, can help website owners achieve their ranking goals. 

27. How many search engines are there?

Ans. There are over 1500 search engines globally at the present time. However, some of them are more popular than others. The 10 most popular and widely used search engines are: Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, Ask, Baidu, AOL, Naver, and Internet Archive. Google is the top search engine holding around 85% of the total market share.

28. What is a Crawl Budget?

Ans. The crawl budget of a website can be defined as the number of pages that Google crawlers can crawl through and index within a particular time period. Usually, the crawl budget of a website is good enough to crawl and index all the pages. However, websites having thousands or millions of pages (such as e-commerce websites) might face issues with the crawl budget.

29. How to come up with blog topics?

Ans. Below are some important tips that one should keep in mind to come up with relevant blog topics for their website:

• Identifying relevant keywords and taking inspiration from blogs that appear when these keywords are searched for on Google
• Keeping an eye on competitors and borrowing topic ideas for their site
• Creating topics around the latest industry-specific news or trends

30. What is organic traffic?

Ans. Organic traffic is the traffic that comes naturally to a website, i.e. traffic that comes from non-sponsored web pages. This kind of traffic comes to a site when a user searches for a particular term on Google, finds your page’s URL, and clicks on it to view the complete page. Unlike paid traffic, organic traffic comes at no cost.

31. What are SEO Backlinks?

Ans. Backlinks are the links on other websites that direct users to your website. These are also known as inbound links are are one of the important ranking factors. The more backlinks a website has, the more authoritative it is considered to be by the search engines. High-quality backlinks can improve a website’s rankings.

Summing Up

Now that you have understood most of the important concepts of SEO, our SEO experts recommend gaining a thorough knowledge of these concepts in order to gain higher expertise in the field. Just make sure that you can easily differentiate between white hat (good) and black hat (bad) SEO techniques. Try to understand each concept with examples and if you are learning SEO for your own website, try implementing SEO techniques one by one and see how they affect your site’s rankings. 

In case of any further queries or to understand how you can do better SEO for your site, feel free to get in touch with our SEO experts!