According to Rahul Venugopal from Simplilearn, wrote these commonly asked questions in an interview:

1. What makes a website search engine friendly?

Several factors make a website search engine friendly, including keywords, quality content, titles, metadata, etc. A website needs these factors to be ranked by a search engine and therefore found by a user.

2. How do you measure SEO success?

You might want to answer this question based on the type of company you’re interviewing for, as goals might differ. In addition, there are a variety of ways to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) and, therefore, success. During an SEO interview, possible answers might include increasing traffic to a website or particular landing page, increasing conversions such as newsletter signups or sales, growing the number of inbound links, driving traffic for a particular keyword phrase, or increasing referral traffic. It’s critical that an SEO professional measures result to know if the tactics and strategy need to change to succeed.

3. How did you learn SEO?

Obviously, this answer will depend on your individual situation, but it matters because a potential employer wants to ensure that you are well-versed in SEO best practices. If you learned SEO by the seat of your pants at your last job because someone had to do it, an employer might doubt the quality of the skillset you offer. And, if that’s the case, you can always get certified before applying for that job to ensure you are well trained!

4. Which SEO tools do you regularly use?

You will likely have tools you’re familiar with, and you’ll want to talk about those. If you don’t yet have much of a toolbox because you’re new to SEO, check out the multiple webmaster tools Google offers, as well as the tools offered by Moz.

5. How do you approach keyword research?

As with the question above, your answer might vary. You’ll want to explain which keyword tools you use for research, as well as how you go about it. For example, if you use Google Keyword Planner to do your keyword research, then that’s your answer for the tool used. But you must also explain how you go about it. You must demonstrate you do more than simply guess at a keyword and type that into the tool before checking the results. For example, perhaps you use personas to consider potential problems a prospect faces, and you look for keywords around that. You should also explain that you consider longer keyword phrases, search volume, and the competitiveness of a keyword. Demonstrate that you know how to find the sweet spot in keyword research, where the keyword narrower so it’s targeted and has good search volume, but is not highly competitive.

6. What is link building and why does it matter?

Google exists to serve the searcher. That means Google is constantly trying to determine which results are most relevant to any given searcher and any given time. In addition to relevance, Google considers credibility too. So the search engine looks to see if other websites have linked to yours. If so, that means your content is worth linking to and is, therefore, more credible when compared to a website not linked to externally. In a nutshell, link building is what SEO professionals do to try and get links to their websites in order to improve search results.

7. What are backlinks?

A backlink is what we call the links into a website from an external source, as mentioned in link building.

8. What is page speed and why does it matter?

Page speed refers to how fast your site loads for a user, something Google takes into account while ranking websites since a faster loading page directly translate to a better user experience. If the interviewer asks what you would do to increase page speed, describe how you’ve achieved this in the past with examples such as reducing image sizes, enabling compression, reducing redirects, removing render-blocking JavaScript, leveraging browser caching, improve server response time, using a content distribution network to compress files, optimizing the code, etc.

9. What method do you use to redirect a page?

In general, a 301 redirect is the best way to redirect a page so you don’t lose any SEO value that has been accumulated.

10. How can you do SEO for a video?

Videos are growing increasingly popular on the web, which can improve SEO if the videos produced get attention and therefore share and backlinks. But to get the video seen can require SEO to get it found, and Google can’t watch a video. It needs the same types of information required for text-based pages to rank a video. Including the transcript as a text is an easy way to do SEO for a video because search engines can crawl the text. In addition, the same attention should be paid to keywords, page titles, and descriptions.

11. Which meta tags matter?

Meta tags have changed since SEO became a common practice, but two remain critical: the page title and the meta description. Stick to these when answering your interview question. The page title (sometimes called SEO title) plays an important role in ranking but it is also important because it is the title that shows on the Search Results Page (SERP). It must use a keyword to rank well with Google but it must also be compelling so a user will want to click on it. The meta description does not affect ranking, but it also plays a role in the SERP because it also must make the user want to click on the search result. You should also mention that Google recently increased the character length limit of meta descriptions to around 280 to 320 (no one is sure of the actual limit yet).

12. What is the difference between a do-follow and a no-follow and how are they used?

Nofollow links exist because we don’t want every single webpage or link to be something a search engine crawls and ranks. Therefore, no-follow link attributes tell search engine bots not to follow a certain link. The link is still clickable for a user, but not followed by a bot. On the other hand, all other links could be considered do-follow links, even though they don’t have to have special attributes to tell the search engine bots to follow them—the bots will by default.

13. Which SEO factors are not in your control?

The biggest SEO factor not in your control is Google! How exactly Google ranks websites is unknown. The company does not make public the search algorithms it uses, although SEO professionals have determined the best practices we adhere to in order to achieve results. However, Google doesn’t like young domains that aren’t yet tried-and-true, and you can’t control that if you’re launching a new site. Nor can you force people to link to your site, share your content, spend more time on your site, or come back to your site for another visit. Google looks favorably on all of these factors and ideally a marketing department is working hard to create content and user experiences that will make these happen, but these factors are beyond the control of the SEO person.

14. What is on-page vs off-page SEO?

This gets back to the question about the factors that are outside of your control. On-page SEO includes the factors you can control, such as keywords, content, page structure, internal linking, load time, etc. Off-page SEO includes those factors you can’t control, such as backlinks.

15. What are some black hat SEO practices to avoid?

Ideally, you won’t interview with an organization that condones any black hat SEO practices, but it might be a trick question to make sure you wouldn’t use them either. Cloaking, keyword stuffing, copying content from another site, exchanging or trading links, buying links, hiding text, and using a link farm are all underhanded techniques frowned upon—and penalized—by Google.

16. What is the relationship between SEO and SEM?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. The biggest difference between the two is that SEO is free and SEM is paid. SEM includes pay-per-click advertising and display ads that are purchased. Despite the major difference between the two, they work best in unison.

If you have any additional SEO questions that were not answered in this article, or would like a free SEO consultation for your website, don’t hesitate to contact us at info@shourai.io

For more articles about SEO, click here.

Reference:

https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/seo-tutorial/seo-interview-questions

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First, let us discuss the similarities between these two.

Both SEM and SEO …
Both help a brand appear in search results.
Both are designed to drive more traffic to a website.
Both require knowing your audience.
Both use keyword research to uncover popular search terms.
Both target specific keywords.
Both require testing and continual optimization.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) vs Search engine optimization (SEO) Definitions

“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.” A definition from Neil Patel.

According to an article in WordStream, “Search engine marketing (SEM) is the practice of marketing a business using paid advertisements that appear on search engine results pages (or SERPs). Advertisers bid on keywords that users of services such as Google and Bing might enter when looking for certain products or services, which gives the advertiser the opportunity for their ads to appear alongside results for those search queries.”

Now, let us differentiate these two marketing strategies to find out which one is better to help you reach your marketing goals.

Below is an infographic from Delhi School of Internet Marketing showing a comparative study of SEO vs. SEM:

Search Engine Optimization

• Organic
• Cost-effective
• Steady
• Time Consuming
• Difficult to Measure
• User Friendly
• Dependent
• SEO = Google

Search Engine Marketing

• Paid
• Expensive
• Inconsistent
• Instant
• Easy to Monitor
• Lack of Trust
• Independent
• SEM = Google + Bing

Another image from Alexa Blog shows the differences between SEM vs. SEO

In Radd Interactive website, they differentiate these two as “In simple terms, SEO focuses on just optimizing for search results traffic – usually by optimizing website content. SEM involves the entire range of search marketing opportunities available including those that go beyond SEO, like paid-ad spots on search engines and paid social media marketing.

SEM involves using the full range of search marketing tools including SEO, Pay-per-Click advertising, social media advertising and Google or Bing shopping campaigns. SEO is still considered a part of SEM since it’s a valid method of marketing in the world of web search. One that exploits search engine algorithms to naturally rank higher on search results pages.”

Overall, the main difference between SEM vs. SEO is that SEM is a paid strategy and SEO is an organic strategy.

For more articles to read, please click here.

References:

https://neilpatel.com/what-is-seo/
https://www.wordstream.com/search-engine-marketing
https://raddinteractive.com/seo-vs-sem-marketing-infographic/
https://dsim.in/blog/2017/01/31/infographic-seo-vs-sem-comparative-study/

https://devrix.com/tutorial/sem-vs-seo-in-depth-review/ (Grabbed Photo)
https://blog.alexa.com/sem-vs-seo/

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