Difficult SEO Challenges and Creative Solutions

December was a surprisingly busy month for my email inbox, with questions on almost every SEO topic imaginable. In answering many of these dilemmas, one common theme emerged - that many marketers deal with SEO challenges, focusing on the most common/best practices rather than falling into a creative, imaginative mindset to find alternatives.

So here are six examples of problems I have seen where creativity could triumph over standard techniques:

No. 1 - Reputation management problems with high budgets

Several SEOs I know are currently dealing with high budget reputation management where a company, product or person is trying to gain control of search results for their name/brand. Most of the standard techniques involve linking to and/or creating positive or neutral content about the target in order to drive out the negative content.

A creative, alternative method could be to create diversity by introducing multiple brands/people with the same or similar names. For example, if a Mr. Thomas Thompson is trying to push down negative results for his name, you could try to raise the profiles/rankings of other Thomas Thompsons and create enthusiasm for them in order to get search engines to consider applying diversity algorithms to the results. Similarly, you could create fictitious profiles (pseudonyms) or characters for the same effect. Hollywood movies, television shows, short films, authors and actors may even be induced, through funding or other means, to name characters or products in a certain way.

No. 2 - Problems with indexing large e-commerce sites

A number of large e-commerce site marketers have had considerable difficulty in achieving deep content indexing. Common solutions include optimizing XML sitemaps, carefully creating internal navigation, and working on more links to deep pages, all of which are certainly recommended techniques, but they eventually reach a point of exhaustion.

My recommendations are often to try a few alternatives, including:

• The elimination of a large number of pages, especially multi-faceted navigation forms (accessible only to logged or cooked human users and using rel=canonical), but also products with very low search volume, no inventory, low margins or frustrating availability. By restricting your product catalog online, you can then achieve and build on full indexing
• Create product feeds, product category blogs and even category/product twitter accounts to send indexing signals to the search engines. A blog about each of your main categories with posts about a few products per day via a kind of tumblr blog can allow indexing of a few new URLs per day with a minimum of editorial effort. Over a period of 12-18 months, this can contribute substantially to the final result and can be reproduced. The same is true for Twitter and product feeds, although both need to offer real value to subscribers/consumers (perhaps "deal of the day" type content) to attract subscribers/followers and show search engines that they are not just empty scratches
• Rewrite or supplement the written content to a few hundred sample pages that are not indexed. I often find that what looks like a lack of PageRank/Link juice for indexing is actually a case of "not enough unique content". If the site is regularly crawled to pages that are not indexed, this is often a worthwhile exercise

No 3 - Generate unique content for a large number of pages

When you reach tens or hundreds of thousands of pages, all of which must be indexed separately, the resulting need for more "unique content" on each page can seem like an overwhelming task. The usual approaches are to either recruit/assignment/find in-house editorial writers or use user-generated content to increase the uniqueness of the content, but there are other approaches.

• Human work using sources like Mechanical Turk or similar services I have written extensively about in the past
• Create Google-style content - by aggregating the popular words, phrases and sentences that others use to describe them (with quotation, of course). For example, see how Urbanspoon quotes restaurant reviews or Rotten Tomatoes aggregates critic reviews. You could even add multimedia content using
• YouTube, Flickr or other sources. Just be aware that editorial content and review are still critical to ensuring that these sites add value, not just automatically scraped and reused
• Setting priorities. Many site owners seem to think that a project with unique content means that every page deserves the same attention, although in fact it is probably much wiser to spread 80% of the effort over 20% of the pages
• Identify the sites that offer real added value, add your content efforts there, and see the impact before moving on to the long tail

No 4 - Overcoming a competitor with a much stronger connection profile

I see marketers banging their heads and their efforts to build connections against a wall, trying to outeurize a competitor with a strong lead for a particular key phrase (or a small handful).

Instead of trying to beat them in their own game, why not work around the system?

• Try out alternative keywords that might reach the same audience before doing this particular high-conversion search
• View video content on major platforms and your own website (using the Video XML Sitemaps protocol) to get video rankings on the same page (which often generate as many clicks/visits as the first results)
• Create messages, blog entries and tweets to trigger the QDF algorithm and get alternative content types you own before the searchers and before the first "organic" result
• Win the social, branding and "mention" battle that often turns into links and recommendations over time and eventually brings you top rankings
• Influence search queries and content on the web through branding, news, social media, content creation, etc., so that Google's Suggest/Instant feature recommends more targeted search queries that you have in the rankings

No 5 - Earn natural, editorial links with optimized anchor text

Perhaps the most frequently commented complaint I see back and forth between a white hat and a black hat is that building links with a white hat never deserves an ideal anchor text. What nonsense!

• Profiles and biographical paragraphs are one of the best ways to earn the desired anchor text. My professional/event biography has found its way to dozens of websites, all of which link back in the way I want. These are 100% editorially designed white hat links, often from influential media or event sites
• Press releases that are picked up by the news media often leave the link anchor text that you
• Guest writing/guest blogging for a relevant publication often allows a link back to your website. If you are creative in designing this link, you can ensure that the anchor text is ideal (or near ideal)
• Widgets, badges and embeddable content have a fully controllable link anchor text at the time of creation - as long as you are not manipulative or appear as spam, the links will link back in the way you choose/created them
• Entitling products, pages, articles and essays with the keywords you are looking for means that those who refer to the work are more likely to use these terms/phrases in the links created by others
• Requesting a specific anchor text by quoting when giving away or licensing content is another way to ensure that you create an optimal link text
• If you find friends, family members, co-workers, colleagues, etc. who link to you, and directly request a change to the anchor text, this can lead to a considerable amount of optimized anchor text

And for posterity's sake, I'll venture a prediction here that an exactly matching anchor text for commercial terms will probably be much more scrutinized by Google next year (see my previous post on how this might happen).

It is true that in many cases, basic best practices are the right way to start, and may even be the right solution. However, more organic marketers will need to look beyond the horizon as traditional SEO becomes more competitive and dominant.