As hard as it is to assess ANY job candidate’s knowledge, it’s even harder with SEO candidates because there’s so much gray area in the industry. This blog series presents questions you can pose to help you determine a candidate’s level of knowledge.
How did you learn SEO?
When interviewing a job candidate, you want to get some insight into their overall interest and passion for SEO. Are they a self-starter? Or did they just happen to fall into SEO because someone told them to? The candidate’s answer to this question can tell you a lot about what kind of employee they may turn out to be.
How I would answer:
I am entirely self-taught in SEO. I started with a book called Learn HTML in 24 Hours and used that to build my first website. I then got a program called Web Position that was designed to help analyze sites so you can optimize them according to specific criteria that search engines appeared to be looking for.
I learned pretty quickly that there is so much more to optimization than chasing a search engine algorithm. In fact, the algorithms are trying to mimic human behavior, so trying to get a page to mimic an algorithm can only create a temporary win. As soon as the algorithm evolves, the optimization is out of date.
Over the years I have followed some of the pioneers in the search industry not realizing that I was a pioneer myself. But no one every knows it all. In fact, even after twenty years, there’s always more to learn!