important notes for seo

1. SEO NOTES
THE SOCRATES TECH
The Socrates tech
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
SEO NOTES

2. 1. What is SEO and how does it work?
SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic in
organic search results. This is done by increasing the visibility of a website or
web page on a search engine without paying for it.
2. What does SEO stand for?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
3. Why do you think we need SEO for business?
1993 saw the first clickable web-ad banner. HotWired had purchased a few
banner ads for their promotion and advertising. There has been no looking
back ever since. Marketing had seen a paradigm shift, and every year
something new has been available on the Internet for people to use and
explore. With the increase in online behavior, the race to show up on the first
page of search engines has become extremely competitive. For a business to
succeed in the online world, it must implement SEO to stay on top.
4. What is local SEO?
Local SEO is targeted towards users and potential customers who are
interested in local searches for a business’s products or services. These
basically include location-based queries and results.
5. What is a search engine?
A search engine is a software system, which searches the world wide web for
relevant information on a particular query raised by a user on the Internet.
6. Can you name a few search engines other than Google?
This is one of the popular SEO interview questions. Here are a few of them:
 Bing
 Yahoo!
 DuckDuckGo
 Yandex
 YouTube
 Amazon
 Baidu

3. 7. What does WWW stand for?
WWW stands for the World Wide Web. It is a collection of websites stored in
web servers, which are connected to local computers.
8. What do you know about web crawling?
Web crawling is the process where a web crawler (spiderbot/spider/crawler),
an internet bot, browses the World Wide Web for web indexing. It uses
hyperlinks to visit pages and copies them for processing and indexing by the
search engine so that users on the Internet can search more quickly and
efficiently.
9. Do you know about Googlebot?
Googlebot is Google’s web crawler. It finds, crawls, and indexes web pages.
10. What is search engine submission?
Search engine submission is the process of submitting your website to search
engines to ensure that it gets crawled and indexed. Even though search
engines are smart enough to find your website and index it easily, it is
advisable to follow through with the search engine submission as you will get
the opportunity to submit some useful information about your website from
your end, and the search engines will alert you if potential errors are there on
your site.
11. What is SERP?
SERP stands for search engine results page. This is the page where users see
all the results of their queries on search engines.
12. Can you explain the difference between organic and paid results?
Both organic and paid results are types of search results on SERP shown on the
basis of quality and relevance to the user query. Organic results are not paid
to show up on SERP. It is very hard to rank high organically, and it requires SEO.
Paid results require bidding on keywords, and based on the Max CPC (cost per
click) and quality score, they are positioned above the organic search results
on SERP, and these are paid advertisements. The more you score, the less
money you need to pay.

4. 13. What are on-page SEO and off-page SEO?
On-page SEO is used to ensure that the website performance is improving and
better by optimizing the meta tags and descriptions, page title, URL structure,
keyword density, body tags, internal linking, images, etc.
Off-page SEO involves activities such as guest blogging, reverse guest blogging,
press releases, social networking, etc. These are done away from the website
to promote and increase the visibility of the same.
14. What is a domain name?
On the Internet, a domain name is an address where the Internet users can
access your website, and it includes web addresses, email addresses, and the
addresses of the Internet protocols. It is basically a shortcut to the server that
hosts your website.
Without a domain name, one would have to enter the full IP address to visit a
website. IP addresses are numerical labels and not very convenient for regular
use.
A domain name has two main elements:
 The website’s name (g., entertainment bracket)
 The domain name extension (e.g., .com)
 https://entertainmentbracket.com
15. What is a URL?
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. It is the complete address of a web
page or a document on www. A URL contains the following parts:
 Protocol: A method used to process the URL (https, http, etc.)
 Domain: The domain name
 Path/File: The exact location of a page, file, other assets, etc.
 Query string: Parameters for dynamic data
 Hash: A specific section of a web page
16. What are SEO-friendly URLs?
URLs that are easily understandable by both search engines and users are SEO-
friendly URLs. They will typically include keywords, and they are mostly self-
explanatory and future-proof so that they will not become obsolete over the
years).

5. 17. What is web hosting?
Web hosting is the www equivalent of buying a property. Web hosting
companies will provide you with space to build your website. The server will
have to be connected to the Internet for this hosting purpose.
18. What is DA?
Here is another commonly asked SEO interview question. DA or domain
authority (a metric developed by Moz) is a search engine ranking score, which
ranges from 0 to 100. The score predicts how well a website will rank on SERP.
The higher your DA, the better chances you have at ranking higher.
19. Explain the difference between DA and PA.
While DA (domain authority) explains the authority of your entire website, PA
(page authority) describes the authority of a specific page based on
quality backlinks, social sharing, etc. The DA requires more time and effort
than PA, but the former is more worthwhile in the long run. However, both
are mutually beneficial.
20. What is TLD?
Top-level domain (TLD) is the final extension of an Internet address, for
example, .com, .net, .org, .co.in, etc.
21. What are SEO tools?
SEO tools analyze the performance of web pages and give insights for high
placement on the SERP.
22. Name some popular SEO tools.
This SEO interview question will be asked to gauge your expertise. So, here are
a few popular SEO tools:
 Google Search Console
 Google Analytics
 Moz
 Ahrefs
 Ubersuggest

6. 23. Explain keywords.
Keywords are words or phrases users on the Internet use to find relevant
results to their queries. They are also known as search queries. Figuring out
potential keywords and using them in your website content can help you get
a better ranking by search engines.
24. What is keyword frequency?
The number of times a particular keyword appears in a web page content is
called keyword frequency. While the appropriate keyword frequency can
optimize your website, using them excessively can quickly become a case of
keyword stuffing.
25. What is keyword difficulty?
Keyword difficulty gives the measure of how difficult it is to get ranked for a
particular keyword based on its high usage.
26. What is keyword density?
Keyword density is the ratio or percentage of keywords used on a specific
page. Around 3 to 4 percent is considered best practice.
27. What is keyword stuffing?
Keyword stuffing is considered to be a form of the black-hat SEO method.
Increasing the keyword frequency to rank for specific keywords is generally
frowned upon and could get your website penalized.
28. How many keywords should you use on a page?
It is good to have three primary keywords and some secondary keywords, but
it shouldn’t look unnatural within the content, and the number of keywords to
be used depends on the content length, page flow, keyword difficulty, etc.
29. What are long-tail keywords?
Keywords can be made into a more specific combination of several words.
These are called long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords can be very specific
and, hence, can be good for attracting quality traffic from people who are

7. interested in that specific search query, and they are more likely to transform
this kind of traffic into conversions.
30. Define the bounce rate.
Get ready to face this important SEO interview question. The bounce rate is
the percentage of visitors who exit the website from the landing page without
visiting any other pages or without any activity. It is the ratio of a single-page
session to all sessions on a website.
31. What is PPC?
This is again a common SEO interview question. Pay-per-click (PPC) is an
advertising model in which an advertiser pays the publisher when the ad is
clicked. This helps drive traffic to your website, and you only pay when users
click on your ad.
32. What is CTR?
Click-through rate or CTR is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the
number of total users who view it on a web page or other medium.
33.Explain LSI keywords.
LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords are the keywords that Google sees as
semantically related to the topic. Most SEOs see them as related words and
phrases. Despite this, being technically inaccurate, we will roll with that
definition. But then again, John Mueller from Google is on a totally different
page:
34.What are white-hat SEO and black-hat SEO?
Be prepared for this SEO interview question as well. White-hat SEO is a type
of SEO that follows the guidelines of search engines. It doesn’t involve the
manipulation of search engines to rank higher, deploying questionable
methods.
Black-hat SEO violates search engine guidelines and manipulates search
engines to improve the ranking on the search engines. If a website is found
guilty of keyword stuffing, cloaking, link exchange, link farming, PBN, buying
links, link hiding, using doorway or gateway pages, etc., then it gets penalized.

8. 35. What is cloaking?
Cloaking is a black-hat SEO technique used to display to users the content that
is not what is presented to search engine crawlers to manipulate search engine
rankings for certain keywords.
36. How can you improve Google rankings?
While E-A-T is a good way to go about it, there are a few other factors that
have been observed to give Google rankings a boost:
 Content quality
 Freshness and accuracy of the content
 Authority of your domain for the topic
 Quality backlinks
37. What are the common SEO mistakes?
 Lacking a unique title and description
 No freshness and quality in content
 Poorly written content
 Using of very broad keywords
 Keyword stuffing
 Low-quality backlinks
38.What is HTTPS?
HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, and it ensures secure
communication on the World Wide Web. It encrypts the data between a user
and the server.
39. How can we increase the frequency of crawling by search engines?
We can increase the frequency of crawling by updating our pages regularly,
adding fresh content, removing unnecessary pages, getting quality backlinks,
ensuring that the server has no downtime, updating sitemaps, decreasing the
loading time, etc.
40. What is Panda Update?
Google introduced its Panda Update in 2011. It de-ranks or penalizes web
pages lacking useful content or those pages with duplicate content.

9. 41. What is Penguin Update?
Google Penguin Update was introduced in 2012 to identify sites with spammy
backlinks and to detect sites that use every other black-hat linking methods.
42. What is the Hummingbird update?
The Hummingbird update is a Google Search algorithm that was introduced in
2013 to make searches more about context and less about keywords. Google
now better understands the intent of the keywords used than just the
keywords.
43. Explain Google Pigeon.
The Google Pigeon update was introduced in 2014 to provide preference
to local search results (location and distance are the key aspects of the search
strategy here).
44.The most important Google Ranking Factors are:
Quality Content
Technical SEO
Quality & Relevant Backlinks
Mobile First
Page Speed
Brand Strength
Domain Strength
User experience
Schema Code
Social Signals
Domain Authority
Content-Type

10. Content Depth
Content Freshness
HTTP
45.What is a primary keyword?
A primary keyword is a keyword that a piece of content is centered around. The
primary keyword is the primary topic of the page. This primary keyword can be used
as a launchpad to find other related keywords to do with a particular topic.