Every year SEOMoz puts out a great study of what factors top SEO experts believe to be most important in impacting your rankings.  Here is a link to this year’s study which puts a great deal of emphasis on the quality and variety of inbound links to your site.  As much as I value the information in a study like this, I’m struck by the fact that SEO experts still remain obsessed with the concept of how to drive people to a single site.  With all of the developments in social media content and services permeating the web we need to move away from our obsessions with our own site rankings and develop SEO models that are based on optimizing how we are found within the total search experience of the user.

What does this mean? It means you should put yourself in the searcher’s shoes. What is their experience like? What sorts of content, sites, services, dead-ends, confusions, or revelations do they encounter when they are searching for topics that relate to you? It may not matter much that your site ranks well for a given term if the search result pages are chock full of so many review sites, lead generations services, and aggregators that the searcher is more likely to be confused than engaged. Think about how searchers are likely to behave when faced with the options that search result pages present them with. How can you be present in those other options?

Here are some things to consider:

• Are there useful sites that aggregate data about businesses like yours that searchers are likely to encounter?  This is almost certain for most industries.  You need to focus attention on how you optimize your representation on these services.  Being listed is usually not enough to stand out when the searcher hits that service.
• What kinds of social content do searchers encounter (blogs, videos, forums, images, reviews etc.)?  How effectively are you represented in this content?
• What kind of content do they see if they search through maps or local search?  Businesses often pay less attention to these listings but the stats I have been seeing indicate that searchers are increasingly passing through these interfaces to get to you.
• What happens when people perform searches related to your services on non-search sites like YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter?  How can you create content that will be meaningful within the context of those sites (be interesting as opposed to promotional)?
• What other sites are embedding or making use of the portable, social content you are offering?  Can you work with them to help them make full use of all the content you have to offer?

Basically the issue here is that SEO practices have typically been focussed on your site instead of the searcher.  By including an appreciation of all the experiences that searchers are likely to encounter in your search optimization strategy, you can create a wider variety of key ways back to you than just your website’s listing on a search results page.  Search optimization programs that do not include this thinking are missing a big piece.