I get the analogy, but after quite a lot of time making websites, I'm still not sure what I should do besides what is mentioned in this doc to improve organic listings. Perhaps you can take a small area of that ocean and give me an example?
The #1 issue in SEO is acquiring links from sites other than your own, primarily links with the anchor text of the terms you desire to rank for. Google only alludes to this in their guidelines, and gives the topic about 60 words on two pages, with helpful advice such as "Know what social networks are." and "Reach out to people in your community."
Here's some actual helpful advice, for software companies: you should provide as many reasons as possible why linking to your website helps out the linker. There are as many ways to do this as there are ways to motivate people. One obvious one which non-programmers find difficult to duplicate is to provide some functionality for other people's websites via copy/paste code (called a widget), then promoting the widget. The widget contains a link back to the originating site, with anchor text that you pick.
For example, I have a client that produces something spiritually similar to help desk software. They should have a widget which lets you ask a question of BIG_CORP on BIG_CORP's website, with "[Help Desk] powered by $CLIENT." under it. The actual functionality is simple: submit a new issue straight into their help desk system. That's a triple win: BIG_CORP reduces support costs and gets higher customer loyalty, BIG_CORP's customers get a streamlined experience versus the traditional "email in a problem, get a ticket, pray a human sees it", and $CLIENT ranks higher for any help desk related keyword they care to target based entirely legitimately on their ability to convince BIG_CORP that they are the best help desk solution on the market.
From what I can remember, Google's SEO guides are more focused to on-site optimization; "design well and provide good content, the rest will come naturally".
While an SEO consultant might use this approach it is not quite the most proactive strategy. SEO comprises of so many things outsite on-site optimization.
I encourage you to read SEO Warrior, a book published by O'Reilly that covers different aspects on the topic.
We have also been using the #seo channel on irc.freenode.net in an attempt to build a collaborating SEO community. You are welcome to stop by and ask away.
