greetings everyone this is rob sanders with simply learn thank you for joining and today we're going to cover search engine optimization interview questions and answers so thanks for joining again and here's how it's gonna work so if you have any questions to these questions or answers feel free to just comment right below this video and we'll get back to you as soon as possible we're going to go through a series of questions and i'm going to answer those questions for you okay so the first question that you might be asking an interview is differentiate between
do follows and no follows okay so if you take in or listen to my seo courses on youtube for seo we we talked a lot about do follows and no follows and and simply put i mean do follows are just signals to the search engines to follow the link so there's a link on site a pointing to site b we're gonna basically tell google bing and some of these other search engines hey go ahead and follow that link now i know file is just the opposite so no follow link doesn't allow the search engine crawlers
to follow it so if we have a link on our site site a pointing to site b we can put a nofollow tag in there and what that's going to do it's going to signal to the crawlers hey don't follow this link so in the end if the crawlers don't follow the link then there's not going to be any link juice passed and so google is not going to give you credit or give that site credit for having a link pointing to it or pointing to another site or from another site and so it's all
about linking so we can control if there's links on our site whether we want the crawlers to recognize those or not simply with no follow tags so just a reminder link jews is the reputation of equity passed from one website to another so if you have a link on another website and that website is of high quality meaning their page authority their domain authority is high they have a lot of content you know they're not spammy they're really rich and they're relevant then you may want to make sure that the link pointing from that site
to your site is a nofollow so that way that google can recognize the link from that site to your site and basically that reputation is going to be passed on to you okay so that's a do follow versus a no follow and why would we do a no-follow well it depends it really depends a lot of social media platforms like facebook have no follows if you have a lot of content you may not want to be pushing out a lot of do follows it could actually look bad from an external linking standpoint and so a
lot of sites are really particular about who they want to pass link juice onto and give credit for the link so it's a business decision at the end of the day there's really no hard fast rule here except from an seo perspective if i have a site and i have a lot of external links pointing outward to other sites i'm going to be particular about who i allow the search engine to follow and what links i allow not to follow so here's an example of what they look like so do follow is simply just the
href notice the nofollow has the the tag appended to it the href tag with a nofollow so if the search engine is crawling your site and they see that no follow there they're not going to follow that link and vice versa if there's a link on another site pointing to yours and there's a no follow there you're not going to get credit the search engines aren't going to pick up that link okay so question two what is 301 redirect and how is it different from a 302 redirect so 301 redirects tell users and the search
engine specifically that an original page has been moved and this is the keyword here permanently so permanently moved we're going to explain that in a minute so it's just moved from one page to another and so if we don't have a page anymore we have a new page let's just say you built a new website with new urls you want to make sure the old page is pointing to the new page with a 301 redirect so if a 301 redirect is permanent then a 302 is temporary so we want the search engines to recognize that
we have 301 permanent redirects in place why because if we have temporary then it might alert google to not keep that page in its search engine rankings because it's temporary so why would google want to keep a temporary page or even a page that is pointing to another page on a temporary basis so they may remove both pages from its index okay but if we have something permanent in place google may say okay this page is permanently linking to another page or redirecting to another page therefore it's stable it's permanent we're going to keep that
new page in the index and eventually remove the old page so really something permanent is more stable in the eyes of the search engine something temporary may not be as stable in the eyes of say google and if they don't see it as stable then they may remove both pages from the index okay so the idea is we want to be found in google search index and we get it sometimes pages go away for a variety of reasons and if it does go away just make sure you have a new page for it and that
new page is a 301 permanent redirect okay so question three why are backlinks important in seo well we kind of hinted on that a bit with the nofollow because if we have a link from another website pointing to ours and that link from that other website is really relevant and and it has a high page and domain authority then it's going to benefit us and so backlinks are important because if we have backlinks from quite quality sites it's going to improve the credibility of our site especially if it's a do follow tag so the search
engines are gonna recognize the relationship between the site that has a link pointing to us okay so it's just gonna build our credibility it's gonna increase increase our domain authority and then the net effect of that is if we're credible and we have high domain authority then that's going to increase the rankings of our pages and when the pages increase in ranking then we're going to get more of a lion's share of the traffic for certain keywords that our pages are found for and if our pages are found and getting traffic then because we have
increased rankings we're likely going to have increased traffic and then it's just a snowball effect so more traffic leads to more engagement and conversions so the whole idea for seo is remember you have an on-page strategy and an off-page strategy building external links is part of an off-page seo strategy and we want to make sure that you know we are relevant in the form of a link or in the form of content on other high quality sites being on a high quality site only benefits us because again increases our domain authority google sees this is
more relevant therefore pages are going to benefit by ranking higher and therefore when we rank higher we get more traffic so it's a snowball effect so having backlinks is important because it snowballs all the way through to conversions okay so what are the best practices to rank your videos on youtube this is a great question really great question given the importance of videos especially with seo because videos are found youtube in itself is a search engine so if we have a video how are we going to get it to rank on youtube well first things
first you never want to put a video out there and want it to rank if it's not engaging or informative so make sure you go ahead and follow the best practices of having engaging in informative content in your video now once you have that video in place you want to optimize it and then some of the key factors for optimizing the video are you want to choose a title that has high search volume and low difficulty just as you would keyword for example for web page you want to choose a title with a keyword in
it that has high volume and low difficulty i.e low competition okay so you want a nice ratio there and you know what you want to choose a title it's going to get people to watch the video too so it's not all about just choosing a title just for the sake of high volume you also have to choose something that's relevant that's going to be catchy as well and then with that title goes the description so you want a description that's very relevant to your title okay because most people aren't going to click on a video
just for the sake of the title they're going to want to probably get a sneak peek via the description of what it is so again you want to optimize that description but make sure the description is is just as snazzy as the title okay you also want to use accurate and relevant video tags just as you would on twitter or facebook tag these videos okay so make sure your title tag length doesn't exceed 100 characters because it will get chopped off so again that goes back to just writing something really short and to the point
that's going to grab somebody's attention okay you also want to upload a captivating thumbnail something that's relevant that's going to grab somebody's attention and then again we set it similar to the video tags we want to use relevant hashtags again just as you would with twitter and facebook go ahead and throw some hashtags in there that people could see because people search via hashtagging and then this goes about saying you did all the work created a really great video it's engaging it's informative you optimized it feel free to promote your video on other social media
platforms okay don't just stick with youtube per se so the benefit here is if you post it on facebook or linkedin or whatever platform of your choice and it gets engagement people click on the link go to youtube they're gonna like it and then other people are gonna see that engagement they're gonna see how many people liked it or how many subscribers you have so promote your videos to help you with the ranking of the video on youtube so that does play into it so go ahead and promote it so other people can watch it
like it comment etc and that's going to engage other people to want to do the same so what is mobile first indexing this is a really important and timely question mobile first indexing means google's just using mobile friendly content for indexing and ranking websites so in other words google for example has two bots they have the traditional desktop bot and they have a smartphone bot and eventually everybody that has a website is going to be migrated over to the smartphone bot and so with that smartphone bot goes to your website and starts crawling what do
you think they're looking for their smartphone bot they're looking for mobile friendly content if it's not mobile friendly meaning the page isn't designed for a smartphone browser or let's just say the images are way too large or you have to expand the text just to read it you know a lot of these these issues that somebody would have just simply trying to read something on a web page on their mobile device google's not going to grab that content so you want to make sure it's mobile friendly so it gets indexed and so if your website
has a responsive design google will rank your website based on its performance on mobile devices okay so you want to make sure that your website is mobile friendly and if you're in an interview and somebody asked this question you could even take it a step further and say look i'm going to measure how friendly my wall my website is for mobile devices in google search console because google search console has a report that will show you what pages on your website are not mobile friendly and it's not a guarantee but i can tell you if
i'm google and i'm crawling your site with my smartphone bop and that page or one of my pages is not mobile friendly i'm probably not gonna index it or rank it so you want to leverage that report in google search console to see what pages are mobile friendly so that's a little bonus for you to really impress the interviewer who asks you this question because how are you going to know if one of your pages is mobile friendly or not if you don't look at a report so keep an eye on google search consoles mobile
usability report okay number six list down the most important local seo ranking factors okay so organic local ranking is just as important as anything else in organic search because if you have a local business you want to use the likes of say google my business to show up when somebody types in you know looking for a florist or you're looking for a coffee shop so what you want to do is you want to create a web page for every product and service okay you also want to opt for your business listings on google my business
and and there are plenty of other local business directories out there like yelp for example or bing even has one so go ahead and also make sure you have a business listing as well but since google in the united states has a huge market share you want to start with google first you want to update your nap citations on your website maintain consistency of your nap okay so nap is name address phone number so you want to make sure that that's current and consistent so if you have a number on your website make sure it's
the same number on google my business okay you can embed a google map on your website you could certainly optimize the meta tags and content not only on your web pages but within your google my business directory so you can add your business to other local directories like i mentioned yelp and then also just as important opt for reviews and ratings okay so the more reviews the hat you have the better off you are okay so i always say this with the uh with local search three of the main factors in showing up for local
search on say google is obviously the keyword the second is the proximity of where that person is and then third is the reviews so you can't really control the proximity but you can control the keyword and you can control the reviews to some degree so work hard at getting reviews for your business but at the same time you can certainly work in some keywords let's just say for your product and service pages on your website but also you can translate that over to google my business okay so working in those keywords making sure your your
number your address your name they're all consistent and and really just spreading your the the business out on other directors that's really all these are really key factors for local seo okay so question number seven how to avoid duplicate content getting penalized for duplicate content so for example if you have two different versions of a web page you may result in a duplicate content issue so it's just seo 101 you never want to have two two or more pages with the same content so what do we do well we can avoid this in having google
penalize us by again setting up a 301 redirect remember three or ones are permanent we can also use what they call canonical tag and a canonical tag basically alerts the search engines as to which page is the original okay so if we have an original page we want to point to that page with our canonical tag and the third option is opt for preferred domain in google search console okay so if you have multiple no names make sure you set up a primary one in search console so those are ways to work around it of
this three i would always go with the canonical tags because that's just a tag that's going to sit on the page it's going to alert google as to what the original is just in case they get their hands on the duplicate so all the pages that have the same content are gonna have the same canonical tag pointing to one page so again three ones are permanent you can simply just redirect one to the other if you end up having duplication or you could just tell search engines hey this is the original page or you can
go through search console okay number eight what are the tactics to increase a web page speed okay so what are some of the tactics well when you build a site especially for mobile you want to keep it as simple as possible and what i mean by simple as possible really i mean hey use a simple website design don't get overly creative if you will most websites all websites have images you're not going to be able to get around that but just make sure you optimize your images in other words don't have such a large image
size if you don't need something very large don't have it okay you want to improve server response time what do we mean by that well your site's sitting on a server somewhere you could own that server or you can be renting it out from say amazon web services or let's just say godaddy as your registrar they also have web hosting well if you have it on say godaddy's server you may be sharing that server with other businesses and at certain times of the day other businesses may get a lot of traffic and suck up a
lot of bandwidth what is that going to do that's going to reduce the server response time for your site and so you want to make sure you have an idea of you know what server your web page your website is on and you want to be able to can have some control over that because if your server response is slow that's going to slow down everything else in terms of loading in the browser and that's not going to be good for seo okay optimize your code what do you mean by optimize mimifying when we see
mimifying we mean get rid of some of the redundant code if you have css you know get rid of chop some of the get rid of the javascript you're not using so that's what we mean by optimizing code reduce redirects okay ideally you just want to have one redirect in place you don't want to create a daisy chain so to speak of redirecting and redirecting after that that's never going to bode well and it's going to slow things down as well enable browser caching so if you enable browser caching basically if somebody comes back to
the page they've been on say two days ago they're probably gonna see a cash version of that page and then off for the content delivery network as well so these are some of the ways to reduce page speed now if you're curious about the page speed of your website you can always go to google's page speed insights tool and all you have to do is just google page speed insights or even just something generic like google page speed and you're going to get this tool pagespeed insights and all you need to do is just plug
in a url when you plug in the url google is going to analyze the url for both mobile and desktop and so here we could see google gives a score so we could see the score from mobile and we could see the score for desktop just by clicking on desktop and so here i could see some of the issues that the site may be having in terms of page load time for their desktop if i flip over to mobile you know here i can see some other issues for example they have a server static assets
with efficient cash policy now if you're not sure what the heck that means you can always just click on it and you can see some specifics here anywhere you can just always google it as well uh here you got to reduce the impact of third-party code okay so that's another thing uh reduced javascript execution time so again going back to a lot of some of the comments we met about coding okay so sometimes too much code or code not functioning as well as it should will tend to slow down the site okay so you can
use pagespeed insights you can always get a glimpse of how pages are loading simply by also going to for example google analytics under behavior okay you can go to site speed and if you click on overview okay google what google does is they do a sampling of pages over time and in this case based on 89 page views they have an average page load time and so you can get a sense of how quick specific pages load your site overall simply by looking at the site speed overview report in google analytics to get a sense
of how quick your pages are loading now there are certain factors that do affect load time so obviously the way the page is built with the code the images etc but also the browser each browser loads differently okay so you want to take a look at it by browser also by country every country has a different network you can be in the united states and have worse network service than you do say in you know ivory coast in africa okay so it really depends on the network you're on so and also the page every page
is built differently so you want to get a sense of what pages are loading quicker and which pages are not you can simply just go to page timings and google analytics you get a sense of what pages do not load fast which ones do and maybe hone in on the pages that aren't loading fast and address those pages first okay so you have two tools at your disposal one google analytics and one page speed insights okay so let's look at question number nine here so when should an individual target short tail and long tail keywords
okay so remember short tail are usually one to two keywords very broad in nature long tail keywords maybe three four keywords in a query or maybe an entire sentence those are considered long tail keywords so usually short tail keywords have higher volume but also higher competition longer tail keywords usually have lower uh volume but also lower competition but the great thing about long tail keywords the conversion rate will tend to be a little bit higher than say a short tail because it's less vague and more specific so you can use short tail keywords if you're
trying to drive a lot of visitors because those keywords are going to be vague or broad in nature long tail keywords are used for targeted pages such as product pages and articles so if you have a specific product with a long name you could certainly optimize that page for that product name again the product name may have low volume but if somebody types in exactly that product name you show up the chance of you them converting are going to be very high so you don't have to always be that specific with the product name but
try and be as specific as you possibly can in order to get somebody to click on your link in the search engine results and get them over to your site to convert okay so those are really the big differences short tail very broad very vague a lot of volume but also a lot of competition but hey if you're ranking for short tail keyword you're probably going to get a lot of traffic the conversion rates may not be as high as something say long tail where hey maybe you're just honed in on a few set number
of products and you're not care you don't care a lot about the traffic you just care about getting the relevant traffic to your site to convert okay number 10 what are they port elements to focus while developing a website so we're talking in terms of seo okay so if somebody asks me this question in an interview what am i going to focus on while developing a website well the answers are right here yes we talked about mobile mobile is so important because a lot of websites are going to be indexed with google smartphone bot so
mobile usability is very important so we need to make sure our website is responsive for mobile just some basic practices when it comes to site architecture and navigation we want to have a simple url structure okay no overly cumbersome the navigation should simply be clean and neat okay if you have five products okay maybe you have uh in your navigation you have something called products with all five listed or you have all five products in the main navigation the key is you just wanna make it clean and neat easy for somebody to find the the
rule of thumb is if it's good for the end user probably going to be good for google but if complicated for the end user it's probably going to be complicated for google you always want to create a site map now what is that sitemap a sitemap is simply just a formatted file with to that includes all your urls and assets your images and your videos they're going to be sitting on your server as well so you want google or these these bots to be able to find your pages and assets and by the way you
want to take it a step further and make sure you upload that site map which is sitting in the root directory meaning domain.com sitemap.xml okay you want to take that site map and make sure you input that site map location in google search console that way google search console has a one-way ticket to grab the elements in the sitemap another important element to focus on while developing a website is having a robot's text file and all a robot's text file is it's like a lock i always say to a house so if you lock a
door in your house nobody's gonna be able to get in that door so it's all a robot's text file is you're telling google and these other bots that are coming across your site what's locked and what's not logged meaning what they have access to what they don't have access to so you want to be able to make sure you have a robot's text file if you're trying to not index specific pages of your website because if you tell google don't crawl these pages or this directory they're not going to get crawled if they don't get
crawled they're not going to get indexed so robots text file is an important element to focus on while you're developing your website and while you're developing your website it could be on a you know in a directory just called new website so you probably want to have new website as the directory in the robots text file and just to let google know don't go into this directory because it's my new website i'm not ready to go live yet so you don't want it indexed so there's a lot of reasons to have robots text files that's
the main reason map you want google to get these pages and assets quickly okay you want to make sure that your site architecture navigation is in order you want to make sure your site is mobile friendly and you also want to make sure you have content on your website that's the key because that's what's going to keep people on the website and engaged and when i say content i don't necessarily just mean words i also mean videos i also mean images you know something interactive okay you want to keep people engaged that's the key behind
it trust me if if an end user finds your site engaging google is likely going to find your site engaging okay so those are good brownie points to bring up if somebody asks you this question in an interview so just to recap here it's important to have a better site structure so the bots can easily access and mix the content okay with a responsive design helps to make your website mobile friendly and user friendly would also increase the amount of time a user spends on your website which may improve your site's ranking sitemap is simply
just a file that helps search engine bots to understand the structure of the website okay how many pages are on your website and where they located along with the videos and images okay and then the robot's text just instructs the search engine crawlers to understand what pages should not be indexed okay this is simply just a text file and it's added to the root directory again think like a door think of a lock okay you can tell you can lock whatever doors you want in your house then give it that way if you have any
questions feel free to visit us at simplylearn.com i want to thank you for hanging in there and good luck and we'll see you on the next video hi there if you like this video subscribe to the simply learn youtube channel and click here to watch similar videos turn it up and get certified click here
