SEO FAQ’s (50+ Most Common SEO Questions, Answered)

SEO that stands for “search engine optimization” is the process of optimizing a website or a web page for the search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) so that the website or the webpage rank well (at the top) in search engine result pages.

There are generally three types of SEO: White HAT SEO (the best SEO techniques that are recommended by Google, we only follow White HAT Techniques in our SEO services), Black HAT SEO (this is against Google policy and you may get a penalty if you do this), Grey HAT SEO (it’s basically in between the two, technically correct but ethically wrong, it should be avoided to be safe from any type of penalties).

When you submit your website to Google, Google (bots) crawls your website and stores all of its metadata in their database and indexes your website pages. When someone searches for a related topic (keyword), Google displays your website in the search result pages. All the other search engines also work in a similar way.

On-Page SEO includes all the activities that we do on your website to optimize your website for search engines. On-Page SEO includes optimizing Title Tag, Description, Website URL, Image Alt Tags, etc. You control most of the On-Page SEO factors.

Off-Page SEO is everything that you do outside your website to optimize your website or web page for search engines to improve your website ranking. For example – Link Building, Promoting your website on Social Media, Etc.

You need to tell Google that you have created a new website (Google still may get to know about your website but that may take time). If you want to quickly index your website, submit your website URL, and sitemap to Google.

The sitemap contains the links of your website with the updated date. It’s an XML file that you need to submit to Google (and also to other search engines) so that once you add a new page to your website or if you update the existing page of your website, Google will come to know immediately and update your page in its database.

Although you can use any platform that is well coded and optimized for SEO, We recommend WordPress because WordPress is optimized for SEO and you will also get many SEO plugins that you can use to further optimize your website or blog.

SEO cost depends on the number of keywords and it varies from company to company. Here’s our SEO Pricing & Packages that starts from Rs. 7999 or USD 160.

It’s not fixed, It may take 4 Months to 12 Months time to get the result from SEO. It usually depends on keyword competition, domain age, content on your website, and many other factors. We usually recommend for 6 Months time for SEO to get the result (so, when you are hiring an agency, you should plan accordingly) but the result with SEO may vary depending on the factors.

Keyword research is the process of finding the right keyword to target and optimize your website. There are many free as well as paid tools to do the keyword research.

As it’s named, long-tail keywords include 4-5 words, for example, “SEO” is a short keyword whereas “SEO Services In India” is a long-tail keyword. It’s easier to rank for a long-tail keyword and it has got a better conversion rate.

LSI stands for Latent semantic indexing, these are the correlated keywords to your targeted keyword. It helps Google understand your content better and also helps you rank well for other related LSI keywords. Using LSI keywords is good in SEO.

Link building is the process of acquiring backlinks to your website. Guest Blogging, Blog Commenting, Creating Web 2.0 Profiles are some of the ways for link building.

Backlinks are the links that point to your website from other websites. Backlinks help you improve your website ranking. It helps build your domain authority.

When a “nofollow” tag is added to a link, it is called nofollow link, the absence of nofollow tag to any link is called dofollow link. Google only considers dofollow link while indexing and ranking any website. Thus dofollow links are better than nofollow links.

Technical SEO generally deals with finding the technical errors in a website and rectifying that. Some of the activities included in technical SEO are – Improving the website speed, correcting the HTML codes, Implementing SSL, URL restructuring, etc.

It depends, there are different activities in SEO and for every activity, you can use different tools. There are many free tools that you can use to SEO your website. For Example, Keyword Planner for keyword research, Google Analytics For Traffic Analysis, Search Console for Finding Technical Errors, and submitting your sitemap.

SEO is an ongoing process that you need to continue doing if you want your website to stay at the top always. When you stop doing SEO, your competitors may outrank your website in search results (if they are doing SEO continuously).

Google Rich Snippet is a schema markup that helps Google understand your web pages. Say for example if you review products on your website, you should use the “Product Review” Schema Markup or if you write an article you should use “Article” Schema Markup. In case if you are using WordPress, you can use plugins to add these related schema markups to your web pages.

Google keeps updating its search algorithm. If you see a sudden drop in your traffic, do check your Google’s search console for any technical error. If your website is hit by a penalty, consult a good Google Penalty Recovery Service Provider.

There are many Google Algorithms, the major ones are – Google Panda (deals with duplicate and thin content and keyword stuffing, etc), Penguin (deals with spam or irrelevant links), Hummingbird (deals with thin content), Mobile (deals with poor mobile usability), etc. There are some other algorithms as well.

SEO is one of the ways that can help you drive tons of organic traffic to your website. If you want to further increase your website traffic, you can use social media (marketing) and search engine marketing. You should use the mix of all the channels to drive traffic to your website and then see which works best for you.

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater chance of ranking. The right SEO will improve your domain authority as well.

Yes, Google has clearly said that website speed is one of the very important ranking factors. Thus, for all the factors in place, if the speed of your website sucks, it will be very difficult to rank your website. So, if you want to rank your website, you should optimize it for speed or you may need to use a fast web hosting.

Google uses more than 200 factors to rank a website, they never tell about all the ranking factors. But there are some known ranking factors that you can use to optimize your website ranking. Some major Google Ranking Factors are Content Quality, Backlinks, Site Speed, SSL, Mobile Friendliness, Social Signals, etc.

Competitor research is the process of analyzing the competitor’s websites. With the competitor research, you can easily know what’s working best for your competitor so that you can implement the same on your website.

Yes, Social Signals impact website ranking so if you are going for SEO, make sure you have created social media pages of your website on all popular social sites. You should regularly share the content on your social media sites for better social signals.

The core of SEO remains the same when you do the SEO for YouTube videos or if you do SEO for your website. In order to rank your YouTube videos, do proper keyword research, add target keywords to the title and description of the video, and use the target keywords in tags. In case if you are thinking of keyword stuffing just don’t do that, it won’t do any good rather it may harm you in a negative way.

It’s difficult to track the position of keywords in Google search results manually. There are many tools that you can use to track your keyword positions in SERPs. To start with, you can use Google Analytics with Search Console (both these tools are completely free) or if you can go with a paid tool, you can try SEMRush.

SEO results cannot be guaranteed. Even Google warns against those agencies who guarantee #1 Ranking in search result pages. In fact, results cannot be guaranteed in any marketing activities, one can only give you an estimate. Thus while hiring an SEO Company, be careful with anyone who guarantees the results.

Yes, content length does matter in SEO. It is found in (many) online researches that a post that has 2000-3000 words (or even longer) ranks well in SERPs. Though content quality matters more than the content length, so while writing the page or post content, we recommend you aim for a minimum of 1000 words.

SEO strategy involves planning for SEO to drive traffic to your website. Having the right SEO strategy not only helps you implement your SEO properly but it also helps you in getting the result faster. SEO Strategy majorly involves keyword research and analysis, competitor analysis, content planning, On-Page SEO, and Off-page SEO, etc.

Google Search Metrics helps you in keyword research and analysis. Some of the important metrics that are really helpful in SEO are – search volume, competition, keyword difficulty, average CPC, and keyword trend.

SERP stands for “Search Engine Result Page” or SERPs in Plural. When you search for a query, Google displays the results in pages, each page consists of 10 organic search results. These pages are called SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Local SEO is the process of optimizing a website or a web page for any specific location. This is best suited for the companies that provide their services in that location only, for example – Restaurants, Hotels, Training Centers, etc.

Google’s Knowledge Graph is used both behind-the-scenes to help Google improve its search relevancy and also to present Knowledge Graph boxes, at times, within its search results that provide direct answers to the search query.

Mobile SEO is more focused on mobile users. With the growing number of mobile users, you need to make sure your website is properly optimized for mobile devices so that you can drive more visitors to your website, using mobile devices.

Google provided a voice search option where you can search your query by saying terms aloud rather than typing them into a search field. A couple of technics to optimize for voice search is to write shorter paragraphs that answer the search questions.

Google Ads (Previously Adwords) is the marketing services by Google, where you can run paid advertisements on Google search and other Google Networks. Here you will be charged on per click basis (PPC) or on per thousand impression basis (PCM). Google Ads has a built-in keyword research tool known as keyword planner which you can use in your keyword research and analysis.

Google Ads is an advertising platform that you can use to monetize your website or blog. Once you are signed up with Google Ads, you can run the advertisements on your website or blog. Google will push advertisements to your website or blog and help you monetize your website with those advertisements.

A bounce occurs when a user comes to your website and leaves immediately from the same (entry) page. The bounce rate is the percentage of users leaving your website from the entry page and is not good for SEO. In order to reduce your bounce rate, add engaging content, images, videos, and interlink with the related pages or posts.

Google Analytics is an analytics tool by Google. It’s a completely free tool that you can use with your website. With the help of this tool, you can get the analytics of your website visitors, and then you can take the corrective steps if needed.

SEO means optimizing your website or web pages so that it ranks well in SERPs organically whereas SEM (search engine marketing) is a marketing channel, where you can create and run your advertisement. SEM is good when you need immediate traffic or leads. Still, you can go with SEO for long-term results.

When you enter a query in Google search, it starts giving suggestions (based on the searches). Google suggest if used properly can help you really well in keyword research and analysis. You can also take the keywords shown below the search results.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open-source custom web development framework introduced by Google to speed up the loading time of web pages on mobile devices.

Robots.txt is a text file that webmasters create to instruct search engine robots on how to crawl and index pages on their website. With the help of this file, you can restrict robots not to crawl certain pages or not to follow the links on certain pages.

A canonical URL refers to an HTML link element, with the attribute of rel=”canonical” found in the element of your webpage. It specifies to search engines your preferred URL. In simple words, if you have a web page accessible by multiple URLs with similar content you can instruct search engines to consider and crawl the preferred URL.

SiteLinks are hyperlinks to subpages of a website that appear under certain Google listings in order to help users navigate the site. Generally, you see SiteLinks only when you search for a site name or site URL. Though only Google decides if they will display the SiteLinks or not; but if you have clear navigation (menu) and enough website authority, Google may consider displaying SiteLinks for your website.

I don’t think so, at least not anytime sooner. If we see the latest trends, the search demand and SEO growth are only going up rapidly. So if you are planning to do SEO or even want to build your career in SEO, you can go ahead.