51 Digital Marketing Interview Questions
Lot of people look forward to make a career in digital marketing industry. So the first step after acquiring knowledge is to understand what recruiters are looking for.
Here are some questions you can expect in an interview.
1. What is SEO & why is it so important?
Ans. In simple words, SEO or Search Engine Optimization denotes to any activity performed for the improvement of Search Engine rankings of websites, products, services or other content. It shows unpaid results which is also referred to as “free”, “organic”, “natural” or “earned” results.
The importance of SEO starts with the desire of the companies to gain more traffic for their websites. The ranking over search engines matter because users pay more heed to the first 5 searches on Google. Moreover, the users tend to trust Google’s refined search results because they consider these searches to be more authentic and specific.
2. What is a Search Engine?
Ans. A search engine is a web-based software system which is developed to search and locate relevant information on the World Wide Web. Search engines generally answer the queries entered by the users and give them a list of search results.
3. Name of a few search engines.
Ans. The names of some search engines are- Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, DuckDuckGo and Yandex.
4. Who are the Founders of Google?
Ans. The founders of Google are Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
5. In which year was Google founded?
Ans. Google was founded on 4th September, 1998.
6. What is World Wide Web?
Ans. The World Wide Web (WWW) or the Web, which was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in the year 1989, is an information system of internet servers containing webpages where specially formatted documents and resources, supported by Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP, can be located by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) with other hypertext links.
7.What is Web Hosting?
Ans. Web hosting refers to any service providing space for websites over the Internet. Web host enables your website to be viewed by others via modem or network by making space over its server.
There are different kinds of web hosting services available today which are used as per the needs and requirements of the web developers.
8. What is Crawling?
Ans. Crawling or web crawling refers to an automated process through which search engines filtrate web pages for proper indexing.
Web crawlers go through web pages, look for relevant keywords, hyperlinks and content, and bring information back to the web servers for indexing.
As crawlers like Google Bots also go through other linked pages on websites, companies build sitemaps for better accessibility and navigation.
9. What is Indexing?
Ans. Indexing starts when the crawling process gets over during a search. Google uses crawling to collect pages relevant to the search queries, and creates index that includes specific words, or search terms and their locations.
Search engines answer queries of the users by looking up to the index and showing the most appropriate pages.
10.What is SERP?
Ans. Search Engine Result Page or SERP refers to the page that is displayed when a specific search query is entered over the search engine. Apart from showing a list of results, SERP might also include advertisements.
11. What is organic result?
Ans. Organic result in SEO denotes to the listing of the web pages that are most relevant to the search query entered by the user. It is also referred to as “free” or “natural” result. Getting a higher ranking in the organic result over the search engines is the very purpose of SEO.
12. What are paid results?
Ans. Paid results in SEO mean the exact opposite of organic results. It generally denotes to advertisements that are displayed above the organic results.
Several website owners make payments to Google to display their websites for certain search terms or keywords. Paid results show up when some user enters a search query with those keywords.
13. What is On Page SEO?
Ans. On page SEO refers to all the activities performed within the websites to get higher ranking and more relevant traffic from the search engines.
On page SEO is related to the optimization of the content as well as the HTML source code of any web page. Some of its aspects include meta tags, title tags, meta description and heading tags.
13. What is Off Page SEO?
Ans. Off page SEO relates to the other aspects that influence the search ranking of websites on the Search Engine Result Page.
It refers to the promotional activities, such as content marketing, social media and link building performed outside the boundaries of any web page to improve its search ranking.
14. What is the definition of keyword?
Ans. Keyword means any word serving as a key. Keyword in SEO refers to the key phrases and words included in the web content which helps the users to find the specific website by entering relevant search queries over the search engines.
15. What is long tail keyword?
Ans. Long tail keywords are phrases containing over 4+ words that make search results highly specific.
16. What is Canonical URL?
Ans. Canonical URLs relate to the concept of selecting the best URL for the web pages that the visitors want to see. Also, known as canonical tags, these URLs help in content syndication when multiple versions of a same page become available over the Internet. Thus, it is used to resolve issues related to content duplication.
Example:-
- www.example.com
- example.com/
- www.example.com/index.html
- example.com/home.asp
But technically all of these urls are different.
17. What is SEO friendly URL?
Ans. SEO friendly URLs are used to optimize the structure and word usage in URLs so that the process of indexing a website by search engines become improved.
SEO techniques, such as putting keywords and having proper length and file structure in the URLs, help in improving website ranking and enhancing website navigation.
Search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.) and users may have problems with complicated URLs. Clean and simple URL helps users and search engines to understand a page topic easily.
18.What are meta descriptions?
Ans. Meta descriptions are also called HTML attributes which should provide an accurate description of any web page content. These descriptions act as preview snippets of the web pages over the SERP page.
Meta descriptions, which should ideally be within 150 characters, enhance the promotional value of the web pages, and can gain greater user click-throughs, if performed correctly.
19. What are backlinks?
Ans. Backlinks are also called incoming links that help users to shift from one web page to the other web pages. These links play an important part in SEO.
When Google search engine views multiple quality backlinks to a page, it considers the page to be more relevant to the search query, which helps in its indexing process and improves its organic ranking on SERPs.
20. What is a Do-Follow link?
Ans. A Do-Follow Link, as the name suggests, allows Google link calculator called PageRank to count all the inbound links from other web pages and websites as link points.
The higher the link juice or link points are, the greater would be the search ranking of that web page, as these links make the web page appear very relevant and popular to the Google search engines.
21. What is a No-Follow link?
Ans. A No-Follow link is exactly the opposite of a Do-Follow link as such the link attributes do not allow the Google bots to follow them. These links cannot be followed by robots; only humans can do it.
No-follow link attributes are structured in the following manner:
<a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Link text</a>
22.What is internal linking?
Ans. Internal Linking is a process of providing hyperlinks on the web pages that connect to the same domain. It is another way of directing the visitors from one web page to another of the same website.
They help search engine spiders to crawl and index all the inner pages of a website/blog easily and such links help in building information hierarchy while pushing up the link juice level in any given website and allowing the visitors to navigate the website pages properly.
23.What are the most important Google ranking factors?
Ans. According to Andrey Lipattsev, the Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, the top 3 ranking factors affecting the search engine algorithm of Google are:
#1 Content
#2 Backlinks
23. What is robots.txt?
Ans. Robots.txt is one way of telling the Search Engine Bots about the web pages on your website which you do not want them to visit.
Robots.txt is useful for preventing the indexation of the parts of any online content that website owners do not want to display.
IF you want to block all search engine robots from crawling your website, just put the follow code:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
IF you want to block Google from crawling your website, just put the follow code:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /
It is important to decide the location of Robots.txt very carefully, or else errors might occur while displaying the website.
24. What is XML Sitemap?
Ans. XML or Extensible Markup Language is primarily created to facilitate the functionality of the search engines.
A good XML sitemap informs the search engines about the number of pages present on a specific website, the frequency of their updates and the time of the last modifications performed on them, which helps in proper indexing of the website by the search engines.
25. What is anchor text?
Ans. Anchor text denotes to a visible hyperlinked text that can be clicked through. Such hyperlinked texts link to different documents or locations available on the web.
These texts are often underlined and blue in color, but different colors might be given with the changes in the HTML code.
26.What is Image Alt Text?
Ans. Google Bots cannot process images on the web. Therefore, it makes use of the alt attributes to understand what an image is all about.
The Image Alt text is generally considered as an alternate text for an image, which provides a textual alternative to the web crawlers to index the web page bearing the image.
27.What is 301 Redirect?
Ans. 301 redirect is considered as one of the most effective ways of performing redirects on any website. When a web address has been changed permanently, it is best to use 301 redirects which will redirect all the users to the new web address.
With this redirect, the search engine passes all the values associated with the old website to the new website. Moreover, 301 redirect also pushes all the link juice to the new web address that keeps the ranking of the website unaffected.
28.What is Google Webmaster Tools/Google Search Console?
Ans. It was on 20th May, 2015 that Google changed the name of Google Webmaster tools to Google Search Console.
Google Search Console provides free web services to the web masters by enabling them to monitor and sustain the online presence of their specific websites.
29.What is Google Analytics?
Ans. Launched in 2005 by Google, Google Analytics is one of the most empowering analytical tool in SEO, which helps the web masters to track and monitor the traffic on their websites.
It is a freemium web service, which means that it provides certain basic services free of charge while the premium services demand investment.
30. What is Google Algorithm?
Ans. Google algorithm is a set of commands written for the purpose of feeding back with search results relevant to the queries made.
31.What is Google Panda?
Ans. Google Panda was a change to Google’s search results ranking algorithm that was first released in February 2011. The change aimed to lower the rank of “low-quality sites” or “thin sites”, and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.
Google Panda was created to target sites that publish low quality content and penalize them if possible.
32. What is Google Penguin?
Ans. Google launched the Penguin Update in April 2012 to better identify and regulate websites that were considered spammy or overly-optimized.
The Penguin targeted sites that manifested keyword stuffing as well as those that practiced black-hat SEO. On the other hand, this algorithm rewarded the sites that used white-hat SEO and that were of high quality in a generic sense.
33. What is Google Hummingbird?
Ans. Google Hummingbird is a search algorithm used by Google from August 30, 2013. It was designed to embody the special characteristics of speed and precision.
One of the significant advantages of Hummingbird is that Google was able to refresh not just their index but their search engine as well. However, they also retained important elements such as the search algorithms they previously created.
34. What is HTTPS/SSL Update?
Ans. HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is the protocol for secure communication on the World Wide Web. It prevents eavesdroppers from seeing information that visitors send or receive over the Internet.
35. Popular SEO Blogs to follow
Ans. Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch, Content Marketing Institute, Moz, KISSmetrics, HubSpot etc.
36. What is AMP?
Ans. AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is an open-source coding standard for publishers to be able to load their sites quickly on mobile since mobile responsiveness could be unimpressive and slow compared to the desktop resources which are heavy and plenty.
37. Name of a few Popular SEO Tools.
Ans. The names of a few SEO tools are Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Keyword Planner, Buzzsumo, Bing Webmaster Tools, Moz, SEMRush, Check My Links etc.
38.What is Google trends?
Ans. Google Trends is a public web facility of Google Inc., that shows how often a particular search-term is entered or used to search, relative to the total search-volume across various regions and languages in the world.
The Google Trends tool uses real-time search data to help you gauge consumer search behaviours over time.
Most important of all, Google Trends shows you high-volume trending search terms in your niche.
39. How can I see what pages are indexed in Google?
Ans. There are two ways to see if the webpages of any specific website are indexed by Google.
1) One can check the Google Index Status of any specific website through Google Webmaster tools. After adding the website on the dashboard and verifying the ownership, clicking on the tab “Index status” would show the numbers of pages indexed by Google.
2) One can also perform a manual search on Google by typing on Google search bar site:domainname.com, and the number of pages indexed would reflect on the SERP.
40. What are doorway pages?
Ans. Doorway Pages, also known as gateway pages, portal pages or entry pages, refer to web pages or websites that are developed for higher ranking when specific search queries are entered.
Such pages give way to multiple web pages on the SERP which lead users to the same web destination. These can also funnel the users to intermediate pages that does not hold as much importance as the final webpage. Two common forms of doorway pages are cloaking and redirecting pages.
41. What is Domain Authority?
Ans. Considered to be one of the most influential SEO factors, domain authority is a key performance metric developed by Moz, which rates any website on a 1-100 scale.
The greater your DA, the more likely your website to have strong traffic and high ranking in Google.
You can check domain authority of any website in Open Site Explorer.
42. What is Search Engine Submission?
Ans. Search engine submission refers to a specific activity of the web masters in which a website is directly submitted to the search engine so that its online recognition and visibility is increased.
In other words, it is one way of informing the search engines about the existence of any website, which is then indexed by the search engines and reflected on the SERP page.
This is also performed by the web developers and the SEO experts so that the search engines reflect the most recent content of the website.
43. What is Directory Submission?
Ans. Directory submission in SEO relates to the listing of any web address or site with the relevant details over various web directories under a specific category.
Directory submission performs the same function as phone directory and increases the popularity of websites with greater online exposure. Directory submission can be both free of cost and paid.
Note: Over the last few years, directories have changed – they are no longer good for getting thousands of links to your site so you can game Google. Today, directories are valuable when used carefully.
44. What is Article submission?
Ans. Article submission is considered a part of Off Page SEO optimization. Article submission, which involves the presentation of articles to online article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, ArticleTrader etc. with proper anchor text for link building, is performed for the promotion of any website.
Even though it enjoyed wide popularity as one of the very effective SEO techniques, article directories lost its charm with Matt Cutts, Google’s webspam team head, issuing a warning against its usage in 2014.
45. What is Press Release submission?
Ans. Press release submission involves writing press releases and submitting them to effective and popular PR sites for building incoming links to any specific website.
Online press-releases remain in the database forever, which means that they could be used anytime by anyone in need. It also enhances the online visibility of websites in the future.
46. What are Classified ads?
Ans. A classified ad is a form of advertising which is particularly common in newspapers, online and other periodicals which may be sold or distributed free of charge.
Classified advertisements are much cheaper than larger display advertisements used by businesses, although display advertising is more widespread.
47. What is Forum Posting?
Ans. Forum posting is the act of engaging, interacting, and writing on a forum thread by leaving a simple response to the thread or to a particular post by a user on the same thread. Posting on popular forums is a powerful method of engaging and interacting with new users, while driving prospective clients to your website or business.
Example: FileZilla Forums, WebmasterWorld…
48. What is a Business directory?
Ans. A business directory is a website or printed listing of information which lists all businesses within some category. Businesses can be categorized by business, location, activity, or size.
Business may be compiled either manually or through an automated online search software.
49. What is Social Bookmarking?
Ans. Social bookmarking is a way for people to store, organize, search, and manage “bookmarks” of the web pages. Users can save these links to the web pages that they like or want to share, using a social bookmarking site to store these links.
These bookmarks are usually public, and can be viewed by other members of the site where they are stored.
50. What is RSS Feed?
Ans. RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. RSS feeds enable publishers to syndicate data automatically. A standard XML file format ensures compatibility with many different machines/programs.
RSS feeds also benefit users who want to receive timely updates from their favorite websites or to aggregate data from many sites.
51. What is Guest posting?
Ans. Guest posting is the process of creating content and publishing it on another person’s website. Guest posting blogs allow to show author bio (writer) at the top or bottom of an guest post.