I am asked every so often to put together a few thoughts, books, and links on SEO. Usually these go into an email or ppt deck used to kick off what always turns into a larger discussion about traffic acquisition as a whole. SEO is not the magic pill but it does force you to ask hard questions about your company and product.

Question #1 - Did I hire an engineer to build my web site? Someone who really understands best practices from information architecture or did I find the backyard mechanic … “yeah, it works but that thing won’t pass inspection!”

Question #2 - Does my marketing department keep current with what Google is doing?

Quesion #3 - Did my designers, content producers, and product team build something that is easy to use, informative, and worth sharing? If no one links to your site, if no one talks about you on Twitter or Facebook - chances are you have an elevated perception of your own site.

And without further interruption here are a few links -

Good house keeping:

• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
• Search Engine Visibility (old, but a good primer on SEO and I’ve used it for teaching a few times)

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If you are a marketer understanding how to create a sensation and influence perception are powerful tools to have in your tool kit. If you are an SEO you may not have allowed yourself to think about these psychological concepts as you are probably knee deep in policing your web site, fixing massive information architecture issues, wishing your link graph was better, and hoping that the folks in editorial would just create something that would go viral.

Perception – the way we interpret the information we take in and thus what is used to build our mental model of that which we are interacting with. Perception is unique to each individual and thus our perception of reality is our own reality.

It is however perception that triggers how we respond to a situation. In short, did you do anything to impact the user’s perception of your site in a positive way? So much so that they want to tweet about your site? Was the user left feeling as though they need to share your site via a link from their blog?

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