SEO FAQs for 2024: Top 50 Of The Most Frequently Asked SEO Questions Answered

If you’re just getting started, SEO looks like an ocean. In fact, it really it is. SEO can be scary at times, even experts can’t predict changes to get better search rankings.

If you’re new to SEO and looking for some essential answers to your SEO questions, this detailed SEO FAQ page is created just for you.

Bookmark this page because we’ll update this SEO FAQs questions answers page more often with latest SEO questions that our audience ask. You too can ask if you’ve any (using the comment section at the end of this post).

Table of Contents ☰

Top 50 SEO FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions Answers About SEO

top SEO faqs with answers in 2024

1. What is SEO? Explain it to me like I’m 10 years old.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of increasing your website’s visibility in terms of visitors, leads and sales through search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.

To simply put, SEO helps you get more visitors from search engines like Google to your websites by using few strategies such as link building, on page SEO, keyword research etc. You’ll find all those strategies in the same post (so don’t panic about the terms).

2. What are the types of SEO?

There are 3 main types of SEO which include:

  • White hat SEO: White hat SEO focuses on users instead of search engines (that’s what Google loves too) and requires a lot of time and efforts. This is the preferable type of SEO you should follow if you want to get more out of search engines. It includes tactics like content marketing, mobile optimization, keyword research, competitor analysis etc.
  • Black hat SEO: You should absolutely avoid this type of SEO as Google penalizes the sites that practice black hat SEO techniques. It includes things like link cloaking, keyword stuffing, hidden text manipulation etc.
  • Grey hat SEO: This is usually a combination of both the above two techniques (still you should avoid it) and usually contains tactics like buying links, having higher keyword density than text, spun content etc.

If you want to boost your search engine rankings using white hat SEO (the most preferred way), here are 7 awesome tactics you can follow.

3. How can I index my new website in Google search really quickly?

SEO is mostly about driving traffic from search engines like Google. In order to get more traffic from Google, you need to let search engine crawlers to index your site. For that, you need to index your website on search.

We wrote a detailed post on how to index your new site on Google quickly which can use to easily find out what things you need to do for faster indexing on Google search.

Quick tip: One of the simplest ways to index your site is to submit a sitemap or you can install a sitemap plugin if you’re using WordPress.

4. What is a sitemap?

Google basically uses a website’s sitemap to index pages within them. A sitemap usually contains a list of pages on your site that you have decided to tell Google what to index and what NOT to index.

You can create your own website’s sitemap using XML maps generator or Google XML sitemaps plugin if you’re using a self-hosted WordPress platform. An XML sitemap looks like this:

xml sitemap

5. What is the best blogging platform for better SEO?

Although there are a ton of free blogging platforms out there such as Blogger, Typepad, Tumblr, WordPress.com etc but we don’t recommend anyone of them. The reason is simple: you’ll get less control over your sites and your site can get de-indexed or deleted if you penalize any of these blogging platforms terms and conditions.

So go for a better blogging platform such as self-hosting platforms like WordPress.org where you can have full control over your site. Yes, you need to spend money from getting a domain and hosting but it is worth every penny if you’re concerned about SEO and making sales online.

WordPress is search engine friendly and gives you access to a ton of tools, plugins and themes that you can use to make your site more user friendly and appealing. Also make sure to pick the RIGHT hosting for your WordPress site as your hosting can make or break your blogging success.

6. How much does SEO cost?

how much does seo cost

SEO can be expensive. It is one of the few industries in digital marketing which is worth of billion dollars and SEO industry is growing rapidly.

At an average, an SEO expert charges $100 per hour. It can go all the way up to several thousand dollars depending upon the SEO expert or agency you choose. That means SEO usually costs you $500 to $5000 or even more every month.

If you’re running a small business or want more sales to your local business, investing on SEO can give you biggest returns. So instead of thinking SEO like a spending, consider it as an investment for the long term, you’ll be profitable.

You can invest on SEO for things like link building, on page optimization, competitor analysis, paid advertising etc depending on the type of your business or website.

Quick tip: If you don’t want to spend any money on SEO, you’ve only one choice: learn and practice it. It takes time but the best way to get better results from SEO for cheap is to start a blog, learn from best SEO blogs and implement what you learn to get results. Otherwise, you can consider hiring a writer who can manage all the content marketing for you at limited budget.

7. How long does it usually take to get results from SEO?

We’ve been doing SEO for so many years now and we know one thing for sure: getting results from SEO takes time. There’s no exact answer on how long does it usually take to get SEO results but we can give you an idea about it.

It usually takes 6 to 8 months (or at least 1 year if you’re entering into a competitive industry) to start getting results such as search visitors, leads and sales to your sites from search engines like Google.

You’ll considerably be getting better results as you continue doing SEO for long time when compared to short term results. That means whatever the search traffic that you get to your site in the first 6 months will be much lesser when compared to the next 6 months and so on.

8. What is keyword research and how to do it?

Keyword research is the process of finding and using the right keywords within your content (either in blog posts, sales pages or landing pages) to attract more visitors from search engines like Google.

People usually type in some keywords on Google to find what they are looking for (either to educate themselves about the products they want or simply to shop online). Here’s where keyword research plays a crucial role. If you’re using the right keywords, you can easily get a ton of sales and traffic to your site.

So how do you find better keywords to increase your search traffic and website sales?

There’s no short answer. In fact, we write an in-depth article on doing keyword research that you can refer to if you want to know more about it. You can tools like keywordtool.io for quick keyword research.

keywordtool.io: keyword tool

Quick tip: Keyword research becomes easy if you’ve access to the right SEO tools such as Semrush, Keyword Planner from Google, Ahrefs etc. Just make sure to find and use the right keyword research tool to get more traffic to your sites. Pick low competition keywords if you want to get better results with minimum efforts.

9. What is on-page SEO? How can I do it?

On page SEO is the process of optimizing your website individual pages to get higher rankings on Google. On page SEO elements usually include things like;

  • Title tag
  • Meta description
  • Image alt tags
  • URL
  • H2, H3 sub heading tags and so on

On page SEO can only be effective if you’re already done with keyword research. That means, you should do keyword research before you think about optimizing your blog posts or pages.

If you’re wondering about how to do better on page SEO to get higher rankings on Google, here’s an excellent on page SEO tutorial for you.

Quick tip: If you’re using WordPress, install WordPress SEO by Yoast which is one of the widely used optimization plugins for quickly optimizing your individual pages for better search rankings. It’s also free to use.

10. What is off-page SEO? How to do it?

Off page SEO is the process of improving your website SERP (Search Engine Results Page) results by using techniques like link building, brand mentions etc. Off page SEO generally include things like:

  • Building links
  • Social media shares
  • Brand mentions
  • Email outreach etc

To put it simply, on page SEO happens inside of your website whereas off page SEO happens outside of your website.

If you’re looking for a simple tutorial on off page SEO for beginners, check out this post. It contains a lot of tips and strategies that you can use to improve your website’s off page SEO which also talks about some of the best tools you can use.

off-page-seo

11. What is link building? What are the best link building strategies?

Link building is the process of attracting backlinks from other sources such as websites, forums, online journals etc to your site to increase your backlink profile and website authority.

Link building is essential if you want to get better search rankings for the keywords you are targeting. There are a ton of link building strategies out there which include;

  • Guest posting
  • Blog commenting
  • Video marketing
  • Infographics
  • Guestographics
  • Skyscraper technique
  • Editorial links
  • Broken link building and the list goes on

Google considers backlinks as “votes” and gives higher rankings for the sites with more backlinks. That’s why it’s essential for you to focus on attracting as many quality and relevant backlinks as possible to your sites to generate more traffic and sales.

Here’s a detailed link building strategy that you can use to get higher ranking for niche sites and new websites.

12. What is technical SEO and how does it help?

Technical SEO mostly deals with how search engine crawlers look at your site. So it basically involves in finding and fixing all your website technical related issues such as crawling issues, no sitemaps, images with missing alt tags, 404 error pages etc.

If you find and fix your site issues using SEO techniques like site audit, you can easily get better search rankings and it helps you increase your technical SEO with ease.

Here’s an ultimate guide on technical SEO that you must check out to increase your overall rankings and visibility to your sites on Google search.

13. What are the best SEO tools?

Here are some of the best SEO tools that we use (or already used) and highly recommend.

Semrush: This is the ONLY SEO tool that we use extensively for everything from keyword research to backlink analysis to competitor research. It helps you do a lot of things and costs you fair enough (at around $120 per month and worth every penny). If you’re looking to give a try to all of its features, click on the below link.

Click here to try Semrush free for 14 days worth $129.95

WordPress SEO by Yoast: We also promote Yoast SEO plugin as much as we promote Semrush (although this plugin is free). The reason is, even if you’re new to SEO, you can still better search rankings by optimizing your content using this plugin. It’s an essential plugin if you want more search traffic.

Moz tools: Moz tools are used by SEO enthusiasts all over the world and developed by SEO experts like Rand Fishkin. They have a ton of tools in their arsenal that can you help with keyword research, link building, competitor research and what not?

Google PageSpeed tools: This free tool from Google helps you quickly analyse your website speed. The good thing about using this tool is that it also gives recommendations to quickly optimize your website speed and performance.

Keyword Planner: This is another widely used free tool from Google which is used for keyword research. Although it is not as much accurate as other premium keyword research tools but gives you a ton of informative metrics such as monthly volume, various keyword suggestions, CPC cost etc to find better keywords.

LSI Graph: This is a free tool and highly recommended for long tail keyword research. It helps you easily find a ton of long tail keywords for any industry. Long tail keywords are golden when it comes to increasing your website traffic especially when it’s brand new.

Buzzsumo: If you want to find the top performing content such as blog posts, case studies, infographics etc, Buzzsumo is a great platform. It’s a great place for you to come up with great post ideas for your blog or website.

Here’s a great compilation of free SEO tools you can use to skyrocket your website search traffic.

14. What is Google TrustRank?

Google TrustRank tells you how trustworthy a website is. It basically determines the overall backlink profile of a site. There’s no accurate tool to find out the TrustRank of a site but MozTrust from Moz gives you a better understanding about how trustworthy a site is.

15. What are backlinks? What are the best resources for SEO?

A backlink is considered as an inbound link. When someone links to your site, that’s called a backlink (which is also called as incoming links).

You’ll find a variety of technical words used for backlinks which are mainly;

  • Internal links (which contain links of your own site)
  • External links (which contain links from other sites)

Here are some of the best resources for SEO especially for beginners. Almost all of them are free to use so make sure to learn your SEO basics from the following SEO resources.

  • Google at the Webmaster Central Blog (you can get latest news straight from Google itself)
  • Moz (a ton of useful SEO resources from free to premium along with a forum)
  • Search Engine Journal
  • Search Engine Land
  • Search Engine Roundtable
  • Backlinko (a great resource to learn about SEO)
  • Neil Patel personal blog (another great SEO resource which is free)
  • The SEM Post

We highly recommend you to subscribe to all the above blogs as they are highly informative and provide you excellent resources and insights on SEO. Google gives top rewards to the sites with high quality links.

backlinks factor

16. How to protect my site from being hacked?

Everyday thousands of websites get hacked either from hackers or crackers who get access into your site through brute force attacks, malicious codes insertion (through nulled plugins or themes). So website security should be your top priority if you are serious about building a profitable business online.

We have written a detailed guide on WordPress security, so make sure to follow the tips if you want to secure your WordPress site from hackers. Always make sure to protect your site from hackers by also taking precautions of not installing any nulled themes or plugins from unwanted sources (which are mostly available for free, stay away from using them if you want to safeguard your site).

Quick tip: Use the right hosting choice that gives you “fixed for you guarantee” which means, if at all your site gets hacked, they will fix it for you at free of cost. One such hosting company that provides this service is WPX hosting (we’re using the same host to run this site).

17. Help! My website search traffic is going down. How can I recover from it?

There are a ton of reasons for website traffic drop, here are some of them.

  • Your website is hit by Google penalization (such as Panda, Penguin updates)
  • You did something terribly wrong with your website’s SEO (technical SEO mostly)
  • You changed your website design (it does affect, that’s why authority sites don’t change their web design even after years)
  • You’re building toxic backlinks or linking to quickly
  • Your website is full of thin content and so on

Once you realise that your website traffic is going down, make sure to conduct a detailed site audit using tools like Semrush so you can easily find and fix all the technical issues related to site.

Start creating high quality content more frequently and use effective link building strategies such as guest posting, blogger outreach to build quality links to improve your overall website’s SEO.

18. How Google search works?

Did you know that there are millions of search queries are typed on Google search all over the world. Google’s search crawling indexing is HUGE with billions and trillions of search queries and results. So how do you think does Google figure out what to show up in the first page and the rest in remaining pages?

Google has a ton of ranking factors (over 200 factors) that determine the quality of a web page. Based on your search queries, Google shows up only the BEST results which have informative content.

If you want to know more about how Google search really works, you may want to check this out.

Here’s a great illustration that helps you quickly understand how search engines like Google usually works (source).

how google works

19. What are Google major algorithms?

Few years ago, Google primarily used to depend on Page Rank (PR) of a website. If a website has a high PR (up to 10), it would got high search engine rankings and better search traffic. Once webmasters and spammers started manipulating the system with low quality content, guest posting etc Google started introducing new algorithms to make their search a better place.

Although there are a ton of algorithms used by Google, but here are few of the major Google algorithms that you should be aware of.

  • Google Panda (deals with duplicate or thin content, keyword stuffing etc)
  • Penguin (deals with spam or irrelevant links)
  • Hummingbird (deals with thin content)
  • Pigeon (deals with poor on-page and off-page SEO)
  • Mobile (deals with poor mobile usability)
  • RankBrain (deals with poor UX features, shallow content etc)
  • Fred (deals with affiliate heavy content which is full of ads, banners etc)

So if you want to stay safe from getting penalized by any of the above mentioned Google major algorithms, make sure to avoid the mistakes mentioned above.

20. How can I increase my search engine traffic?

There’s no simple answer for increasing your website’s search engine traffic. You should just remember one thing that, it takes a lot of time, efforts and money to get quality traffic to your sites from search engines.

Search engines like Google don’t trust new websites and that’s why you need to work really hard to increase your website authority, backlink profile, content quality etc in order to start ranking higher on Google search results.

That being said, here are few proven ways to increase your search engine traffic to your sites in 2024 and beyond.

Do proper keyword research: If you want to get more search traffic, you need to find keywords that are less competitive and has decent search volume for you to send targeted visitors from search. Use tools like Semrush, Keyword Planner to find keywords with 500 or below monthly searches and you can easily get first page rankings with informative content.

Do proper on page optimization: On page SEO is the key when it comes to ranking well for your targeted keywords. The simple way to do that is to install WordPress SEO plugin which has been mentioned above in the same post.

Get as many links as possible: Make sure to attract as many QUALITY backlinks as possible from other sites to your content. The more relevant links you build, the higher your web pages rank in Google search because Google gives top priority to the pages with more quality and relevant backlinks.

Promote as much as you can: There’s no way to get increase your search traffic without the initial push. That means you have to promote well to get comments, increase your social shares, bring links from others etc in order for your content to rank well.

Long form of content is the key: Last but not least: don’t create generic or thin content. Almost every blog post that you see in top 3 search results on Google (for any industry) contains more than 2000+ words. That means, Google gives top priority to the sites with long form of content, so start creating such content if you want to increase your search traffic.

21. What is domain authority and how can I increase it?

Domain authority is a metric from Moz tools which is highly used by bloggers and SEOs all over the world to find the authority of a website. It is also known as DA (Domain Authority).

It basically analyses your backlinks along with the toxic links such as spam links, redirection links, irrelevant links etc to give your site is domain authority which ranges from zero to 100. 100 being the highest domain authority which only few websites have such as Google, Facebook etc.

If you are looking to increase your website’s domain authority, here are a few quick tips that work well for you.

  • Start link building. Try to get as many quality backlinks as possible from various domain names instead of getting too many links from single website source. Domain authority usually gets updated every single month so the higher quality links you get within a month the sooner you will get higher DA to your sites.
  • Domain authority is also about increasing your website User Experience (UX), that means you need to work on improving your website design along with navigation such as menu, sidebar, footer section etc. The faster your website loads the better chances will have to increase your overall performance along with DA.
  • Improve your interlinking structure. Along with domain authority, Moz also provides page authority (PA) which calculates the authority of every individual page of a website. The better interlinking structure you have within your website the higher your page authority will be which will impact your overall domain authority score of your website.

Here’s a great resource on increasing your website’s DA easily.

22. Does website speed affect search engine rankings?

Yes, your website speed and loading times impact your overall search engine rankings of your website. In fact, website speed is one of the most important ranking factors in Google search.

So if you are looking to increase your overall search engine rankings of your website, make sure to increase your overall website speed. Here are few quick tips to increase website speed and loading times.

  • First things first: Go to Pingdom tools and check your website speed and performance. It’s free and easy to use, so go check out your speed. If you website is taking more than 3 seconds to load, you need to work on increasing your performance as early as possible.
  • Get a managed WordPress hosting for your website as most of dedicated hosting services use SSD storage along with CDN which ultimately increases your overall website speed and performance when compared to shared hosting plans. We highly recommend you to check out this post on managed WordPress hosting vs shared hosting to know the differences and benefits.
  • Use less plugins on your WordPress sites as plugins takes too much of bandwidth and storage of your website hosting storage. As a rule of thumb, limit your plugin usage to 15 or below.

23. What are the major Google ranking factors?

There are over 200 ranking factors that Google uses to rank a web page on Google search.

Here are some of the major Google ranking factors considered by Google to determine the quality of a web page.

  • Content quality
  • Backlinks
  • Website speed
  • Mobile first indexing (make sure to use responsive design)
  • Social signals
  • Domain authority
  • Https (secure connections over http)
  • User experience (how easy your site is to navigate and get crawled by search crawlers)

24. What is competitor research and how to do it?

Competitor research involves in analysing your competitor websites to increase your odds of getting more search traffic, backlinks and sales to your site. Competitor research is quite common in all industries and it basically involves in:

  • Finding and analysing top content
  • Backlink analysis
  • Estimating traffic of your competitor sites
  • Knowing their target audience
  • Finding how they are making money and sales
  • And so on

Competitor research is one of the best and proven ways to find and analyse what is working well for your competitors so that you can also repeat the same with your own website which will help you in getting more traffic from search engines and also increasing your website sales.

Here’s a great tutorial on how to do competitor research with ease. It doesn’t matter what industry you are (whether it is fitness or marketing or real estate), competitor analysis is must if you want to build a profitable business online.

Quick tip: Create a spreadsheet and build a list of 20 to 30 of your competitors along with their website URLs. Also mention their top blog posts, traffic and backlink sources etc in the same spreadsheet so you can easily use it for quick analysis whenever you need it.

25. Does social media impact my Google search rankings?

The short answer is YES. While social media is not a ranking factor in Google but it plays a key role in calculating the user engagement of your site (social sharing, comments etc).

If you create highly informative content and if it goes really popular on social media, you can easily get higher rankings for that page in Google search. That’s why most authority sites with thousands of social shares usually get quick rankings in the first page of Google search results.

Social media not only helps you with SEO but also increases your brand awareness, helpful for promotion, getting more target audience to your sites etc. So don’t ignore social media if you want to get better results in the long run.

Here’s a great illustration of how social media impacts your website’s SEO.

seo cycle

Just make sure to use social media sites for interacting with other bloggers in your industry and not waste your time by chatting or something else (that’s what most beginners do when they are just getting started with blogging).

26. What are the best SEO tips for YouTube?

Whether you know it or not, YouTube is the second largest search engine with millions of queries after Google. If you’re serious about SEO, you should definitely consider YouTube to increase your odds of getting more traffic and sales to your sites or products.

Here are some of the best SEO tips for YouTube in 2024.

  • Make sure to use proper keywords within your videos in title, meta description, tags etc. Also use LSI relevant keywords to boost your organic visibility for your videos from search engines.
  • Start commenting on other videos by using your YouTube channel. Although it doesn’t help you instantly with SEO but gives you enough traffic to your videos if you’re leaving witty and smart comments, which also helps you increase your subscribers and likes on your videos.
  • Always make sure to do keyword research before you create and upload any video on YouTube. That way you can find less competitive keywords that you can use to rank better in YouTube or Google search.

27. How to track my keyword positions on Google?

Keyword tracking is one of the most essential things you need to if you want to improve your SEO and search rankings. Tracking positions can be done in a lot of ways. You can do it manually by searching for your targeted keywords on Google or you can use keyword tracking tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, SpyFu etc to easily track all of your keywords at one place.

Always make sure to track your keyboard positions on find out how your best performing keyword for ranking on Google search so you can work on improving them accordingly to bring more distance from search engine like Google.

28. How to find and fix my website issues?

You can use tools like Semrush to easily find and fix all your website technical related SEO issues. It basically gives you a website health score (0 to 100, 100 being the best without any errors or warnings) so you can easily work on fixing all your website errors to get better rankings on Google search.

Also make sure to conduct frequent site audits of your website in order to find and fix all the technical and SEO related issues that your site might have so you can eliminate all the issues that are preventing you from getting bored search engine traffic to your website.

29. Why and where should I invest money in SEO?

First things first: spending on SEO is not an expense, it’s an investment that gets you 10 fold or 100 fold return if done right. That’s why so many agencies and entrepreneurs are spending millions of dollars every month on SEO experts and agencies to bring more value from search engines to their products, services and websites.

Whether you’re writing a book and looking for better ways to promote it or running a small business to generate more better leads, you need the help of search engines. Here’s where SEO comes into handy.

You can either hire an SEO agency or an expert to do these things for you;

  • Content marketing
  • Increasing your website search traffic
  • Tracking your keyword rankings
  • Frequent site audits etc

Here are some of the benefits of SEO.

  • Increased search traffic
  • Better brand recognition
  • Higher ROI
  • Helps you get more leads
  • Increases your website sales and so much more

30. What is an SEO strategy and how to create it?

An SEO strategy involves in finding and using the PROVEN tactics and techniques to bring more visitors from search engines like Google to your sites. An SEO strategy not only helps you increase your search traffic but also your website sales, which is why it’s so essential for every business and website to thrive online.

what is seo strategy

Your SEO strategy usually includes;

  • Content marketing
  • Inbound marketing
  • Bring more visitors from search
  • Generating more backlinks
  • Competitor analysis
  • Keyword research and usage
  • Technical audits and so on

If you’re wondering about how to create an SEO strategy to increase your search traffic, rankings and sales, here are few tips.

  • Firstly, define your target audience. Without knowing who you’re serving through your websites, products or services – it’s impossible to layout a strategy that works well for your business. So know your target audience along with their wants and needs.
  • Do a thorough keyword research
  • Define and analyse your competition
  • Tweak your SEO strategy as you go

31. What are long tail keywords and how to find them?

Long tail keywords usually contain 4 or more keywords within them and are helpful for increasing your search engine traffic even with minimal effort (especially useful for new websites).

For example, “top 50 SEO FAQs for beginners” is a 6 word long tail keyword whereas SEO FAQs is a 2 word short tail keyword and is really hard to rank for when you’ve a new site.

Here’s a great tutorial on how to find them quickly. Long tail keywords contribute to 70% of overall search engine traffic.

LSI keywords

32. What are Google search metrics?

Here are some of the Google search metrics that are highly useful when you’re doing keyword research for increasing your search traffic or sales.

33. What is SERP in SEO?

A search engine results page (SERP) is the page displayed by search engines like Google for user queries. First SERP shows you the first 10 results of the first page and second SERP shows you the the results between 11 to 20 (in 2nd page) and so on.

34. What is local SEO?

Local SEO simply means that you’re optimizing your website, business or products to generate traffic from location based searching.

For example, if you’re running a small business in New York, you can do local SEO for your business to only target local customers from New York. This is highly useful if you want to ONLY attract a specific demographic audience to buy or research about your products or services.

Recommended: Top 10 Local SEO Tools to Improve Your Local Search Rankings

35. What is Google knowledge graph?

It can be simplified as the box on the right hand side of the results page which shows all the important information of a business, product or person you search for. Here’s how it looks like;

google knowledge graph

36. Will SEO die?

The simple answer is NO. Not anytime sooner. The search demand and SEO growth is only going up rapidly. So there’s more to come and SEO is a billion dollar industry where businesses like Walmart, Apple, Amazon are spending billions of dollars on Google search, AdWords etc. So you can be sure that you can pick a career in SEO.

37. What is mobile SEO?

Mobile SEO is all about turning your website pages into mobile responsive, which means, giving a better experience to your users no matter what device they are using to browse information from your website (whether a smartphone, tablet or PC).

Mobile SEO is only increasing and if your site is not yet optimized for mobile, you should act on as soon as possible. If you’re using WordPress, you can install WPTouch (a free plugin, which creates a mobile theme for mobile visitors to your WordPress website).

38. What is voice search and how to optimize my site for it?

Voice search uses a speech recognition technology that allows anyone to search by saying terms aloud instead of typing them on Google search. It is becoming more popular with the rapid growth of smartphones.

Write like your target audience talk. In voice search, instead of focusing on keywords, focus on your audience and find out how they talk so you can use the exact same words within your content. That way, they will find your site through voice typing on Google search.

39. What is meant by Google AdWords and how does it help?

Google AdWords is run by Google itself which is simply an online advertising service where advertisers, business owners or marketers pay money to show their product listings, website ads, services etc.

It helps advertisers in the following ways;

  • Increase in search traffic
  • Increase in sales
  • Increase in brand awareness etc

40. What is Google AdSense and how to make money from it?

AdSense is a publishing program which is run by Google which helps the publishers such as marketers, bloggers, website owners to earn money by showing AdSense ads from a wide range of topics.

AdSense ads include text, images, video ads and so on and they serve the publishers to earn more money from clicks.

Here’s a great guide on increasing your AdSense earnings.

41. What is bounce rate and how can I reduce it?

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who bounce from the same page without navigating other pages on your website. It simply means, a website visitor is leaving your site without visiting any other page.

If you want to reduce your website’s bounce rate, here are few proven tips to do it.

Quick tip: Make sure to show related pages or products under your content so you can quickly reduce your website bounce rates and it works like a charm.

42. What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics can be considered as a website tracking platform where you can get all your website’s tracking information such as website traffic, top content, bounce rate, audience demographics, active users on your site and so on.

Make sure to sign up to Google Analytics if you’re running a website so you can easily find out your website traffic and audience behaviour which will be helpful for you to create better content and products for them in the long run.

43. How to make money with SEO?

There are a ton of ways you can make money with SEO. Here are few of them.

  • You can offer SEO services such as running PPC campaigns, AdWords, conducting site audits, keyword research and so on
  • You can become an SEO expert and help businesses to bring better results from search
  • You can create an SEO agency to start offering SEO services
  • You can create and sell SEO products such as tools, plugins etc
  • You can become a freelancer and start creating search engine optimized content for your clients and agencies
  • The list goes on

44. What is Google Suggest?

Google suggest basically gives you all the relevant search results for your queries as you type on Google search box. Google suggest is also known as Google autocomplete or auto suggestion tool which looks like this;

google suggestion tool

45. What does it mean by AMP? What is a Google rich snippet and how to get it?

AMP is also known as Accelerated Mobile Pages which is designed to have web pages load quickly on mobile devices to give the users a faster and better experience.

AMP pages load really quickly so Google gives top priority the website and pages which already tweaked for AMP.

In technical terms, a Google rich snippet is a structured data markup that website operators can add to their existing HTML which allows search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc to quickly understand what information is contained on each page.

In simple terms, a Google rich snippet is the information that you get for your search queries which includes heading, meta description and/or Google SiteLinks. It looks something like this;

sitelinks

46. What is the difference between dofollow and nofollow links and when to use them?

Dofollow links tell search engine crawlers to follow the links and nofollow links work the exact opposite which are not followed by Google search crawlers.

Dofollow links are what pass link juice from one website to another website and are considered as quality links which are also helpful for increasing your search engine traffic and rankings.

Nofollow links are widely used for social media links, affiliate and other product links. These links don’t contain any search value so there’s no point in spending most of your time or money on getting such links.

Read: Dofollow vs Nofollow Links: How they help with Rankings

47. What is robots.txt?

what is robots.txt

It is a text file that can be used to tell search engines which pages of your website crawl and which pages to avoid. It basically gives you full control over how your website should be crawled by search engine bots. You don’t need to make changes to this file unless you know what you’re doing (so avoid making changes if you’re a beginner).

48. What is 301 redirect and when to use it?  What is a canonical URL?

301 redirects are used for permanent URL redirection. This is especially used when you delete some of unwanted pages from your website and to avoid broken link issues, you can use 301 redirects to redirect your visitors to some other working (or active) pages on your site.

You can use plugins such as Redirection (free WordPress plugin) to easily send redirecting requests to another page on your site or elsewhere on the web.

A canonical URL is a URL that allows you to tell search engines that few similar URLs are actually one and the same. It is usually used with the tag rel=canonical. It is generally used to prevent duplicate content issues. Using it smartly where you need helps you improve your website’s SEO.

49. What are Google SiteLinks and how to get them for my website?

These are the links that appears below the website main page in the SERP results which mainly contain some of the most popular pages of your website.

Here’s a great tutorial on getting Google SiteLinks for your site really quickly.

50. What are LSI keywords and what are their benefits?

LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) are those keywords which are similar to the primary keyword that you type or target.

For example, here are the LSI keywords for the keyword “good”

Fine, healthy, capable, superior etc (as you can see these are relevant to the primary keyword and also known as LSI keywords).

Here are some of the benefits of using LSI keywords.

  • They increase your search traffic
  • They help you better optimize your content without keyword stuffing
  • They give better reading experience to your website audience

If you’re looking to find better LSI keywords, make sure to check this out.

Browse more SEO Tutorials:

Final Thoughts

As I said earlier, SEO involves in too many things from keyword research to backlink analysis to competitor research. So if you want to get ahead in SEO, make sure to learn and practice the right SEO tactics so you can bring more visitors from search engines to your sites to increase your website sales.

We hope that you find this top SEO FAQs post informative, if yes, please share it with others and leave a comment below sharing your thoughts.

About Author
Anil Agarwal is the Founder of Bloggerspassion. He is a full-time blogger and SEO expert who has been helping people build profitable blogs for over a decade Now. He has been featured in Over 100 Publications including Forbes, The HuffPost, HubSpot, Shopify, Semrush, Kinsta, Bluehost, Hostinger and G2.com etc. Know more about Anil Agarwal from here.

Reader Comments (14)

  1. You have written post in a amazing way. I think in search engine optimization field, Content is main king. We can also rank in google without backlink. Backlink is second important part in ranking. If our blog is new then we should focus on our on page seo. Thnak you dear I have learnt new factor regarding SEO Field. Please Keep sharing information about event blogging.

    Reply
  2. Awesome information It takes too long to read It But the information which I get from it amazing and useful it also increases my knowledge about Seo. As I Am also an internet marketer so This article really help me. Thanks for this awesome stuff.

    Reply
  3. Hi Anil,

    I think you have mentioned all the question which I have and also many other newbies have. Like how to do on page/off page SEO?, how SEO will work? which tools are best? how to do proper keyword research etc.

    But after going through this article it helps me a lot.

    Thank you so much for creating this helpful guide and sharing with us.

    Keep up the good work.

    Reply
  4. Hi Anil,
    This is a really great article. I’ve been in the SEO scene for less than 3 months now and i’ve been doing self research at that span of time as well. A lot of my questions are actually answered here sir like mobile SEO and keywords related topics. This is probably one of my favorite resources. Thanks for this!

    Reply
  5. Hi Anil,
    Awesome Post with amazing questions and answers. Almost you have covered all Important question.
    Thanks for sharing.

    Reply
  6. Hi Anil,
    I am education blog. I am confusing about the long tail and short tail keywords. Someone said Long Tail keywords are no longer.
    is it true?

    Reply
  7. Hi Anil,

    Someone wants to be a blogger, for that what he need to know, everything you have described perfectly in this post. These FAQs also works for me. Thank you for that.

    Is there any differences remain between LSI keywords and Long Tail Keywords? I am totally confused with two words. Actually when I go to for keyword analysis, I just could not ensure myself on what words should I find? LSI of Long-Tail. I hope you will make me clear.

    Regards
    Sadhan Pal
    CEO, BlogLand

    Reply
  8. Hi Anil,

    This was just amazing. Almost you have covered all the generic questions asked in the community.

    Thanks for sharing.

    Reply
  9. Hey Anil,
    Thanks for providing this detailed post on SEO FAQs. You have represented the questions related to SEO very nicely. The answers are compact. This will definitely help the beginners very much.

    Reply
  10. Hello,
    thanks for posting this article. I’ve been learning about seo for a while now but there are many new things I didn’t know. Good job and have a nice day.

    Reply

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

275 Shares