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.
What is the difference between a search engine friendly and search engine optimized website?
How a job candidate answers this question will tell you quite a bit about their knowledge and skill level overall. If they don’t know the difference, you’re looking at someone extremely green. If they do know, they should be able to provide some strong details and examples of those differences.
Here’s How I would answer:s
My complete answer can be found here, however let me summarize the main point: Making a site search friendly is a one-time task. Actually, it’s a lot of one-time tasks. But unless something changes, once a site is search friendly it will remain search friendly.
The process of optimization is very different. It’s an ongoing process of improving the site for increased online exposure. You can never really “finish” optimization, because there’s always something more that can be done to improve the site’s ability to get rankings, drive traffic, and convert visitors into customers.