I just finished reading the book, Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message.  Its all about how and why people are motivated to promote products and brands on their own time without any tangible incentive.  The book discusses many examples of how honesty and full disclosure lead to successful consumer interaction, and eventually a viral response far greater than the sum of its parts.  Being able to harness the power of these bloggers, social networkers and forum participants is a word of mouth marketing tactic that is only becoming increasingly important.

What in the world does it have to do with SEO? Well, many will say absolutely nothing.  They may say that even white hat SEO is essentially gaming the system and has no place among all this truthiness.  For those naysayers I have dubbed this kind of SEO “Pristine White Hat SEO.”  It is optimization for search engines that involves the creating of platforms and interacting with visitors that allows “citizen marketers” to flourish on a given website, and thus attracting the fresh content-hungry search engine spiders.  Build an environment on your website where consumers can naturally and honestly interact about a related topic, and the rankings will follow.