The Polar Bear Book

The Polar Bear Book

First on my list is a book that everyone involved with websites really should read. It’s O’Reilly’s Polar Bear book, more commonly known as Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.
This book explains the basic concepts of information architecture – how to label and structure information so that users can easily find and use it – and is an absolute must-read for SEOs. This book will change the way you think about websites. Everything from how internal navigation is laid out to how you structure on-page content will be influenced by what you learn from this book.

Don’t Make Me Think

Steve Krug’s definitive work on conversion optimisation, Don’t Make Me Think is also a vital resource for SEOs. Our work is increasingly judged on tangible metrics such as increased sales, which means that an SEOs work doesn’t end at the SERP click. We also need to ensure that the extra traffic we send to a website converts in to paying customers.
That’s where Krug’s book comes in. A typical example of practice what you preach, this short but immensely powerful book is laid out in such a way that its information is easily understood, and you’ll have read it cover to cover before you’ve realised. When you’ve done that, here’s a tip: read it again.

Search Geek Extravaganza

To be honest I don’t expect you to read this next book. I myself am struggling with it, only able to come to grips with small portions of this book at a time. And even then I have to come back to it regularly to fully comprehend what’s being explained.
The book in question is a public domain work from Stanford university: Introduction to Information Retrieval.
In case you didn’t know, what search engines like Google do is actually a discipline within Computer Science, specifically the Information Retrieval (IR) discipline. By learning the basics of IR you will essentially learn about the very basic foundational aspects of search engines.
I say basic and foundational, because reading this book doesn’t teach you how Google works. This book is to Google what a toddler’s ABC book is to Milton’s Paradise Lost.
But I can guarantee you one thing: nearly all of Google’s search engineers will have read this book or something very similar to it in college. If you’re serious about becoming an advanced SEO, this is required reading.

The Future of the Internet

Jonathan Zittrain’s 2008 book The Future of the Internet – And How To Stop It presents a chilling scenario for where the internet is heading. It’s steadily moving away from its free-for-all roots towards a closed, proprietary, corporate-managed collection of connected apps that can be controlled and monetised.
And that is a Very Bad Thing.
This book explains what the internet might come to look like if we don’t change things. And that future internet is one where SEO is, well, obsolete. Because SEO depends on freely accessible websites that can be crawled and indexed by search engines. And an internet of apps won’t be freely accessible, and search engines won’t be able to crawl and index it.
Zittrain’s book is a very important work that outlines a sort of doomsday scenario for the internet. But it’s also a hopeful book, telling us what we can do to ensure this bleak potential future doesn’t come to pass. Read it, and act on what you learn from it.