Lately, there’s been a need to look for alternatives to SEO, because many of the old tactics became less effective.  Consider personalized search, now the default for everyone, as one example of what’s changed recently –   New  Social Media & SEO Tactics are being employed, including optimizing the use of Google SideWiki.   Inclusion of real time updates from Twitter and Facebook are also changing the SEO game highlighting and clustering real time data, in some cases, over pre-existing, indexed content.

“….In Google’s version of real-time search, a section of its main results page will include a capsule that automatically scrolls relevant information within a few seconds after it pops up in the Web index.”

Yet another approach, popular in 2009,  is creating “content mills”, as highlighted in post at Read/WriteWeb – Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried focusing on Demand Media (I interviewed Demand Media this summer) as an example of what’s wrong with content driven media that focuses on SEO for traffic.  According to Richard MacManus

“…I started my analysis of Demand Media in this August post. I wrote then that Demand Media operates based on a simple formula for success on the Web: create a ton of niche, mostly uninspired content targeted to search engines, then make it viral through social software and make lots of money through ads. Demand Media has been heavily funded to carry out that mission, to the tune of $355 million. In short, it’s a well-funded, well-oiled page view generating machine.

The problem with this approach is the quality of the content, created in this way,  isn’t considered to be very good, even though Demand Studios is creating flexible job opportunities for a lot of people, a plus in this market.  In fact, last summer, when I wrote my post on Demand Media, I signed up, but I have never written for them.

” … From my analysis of Demand Media and similar sites, such content is very generic and lacks depth. While I wouldn’t go as far as wikiHow founder Jack Herrick and say that it “lacks soul,” it certainly lacks passion and often also lacks knowledge of the topic at hand. Arrington’s analogy with fast food is apt – it is content produced quickly and made to order.”

So Google, in particular, by creating a system that rewards backlinks and  facilitates advertising, encourages an ecosystem where companies thrive producing generated content, optimized for it.    What’s an alternative, if you wanted to still have SEO optimized content – but not play into content mills?   A Greater Town is one way to go.

I have  known about A Greater Town a local directory listing website, geared towards real estate, for a while.  A Greater Town‘s  founder and owner, Drew Knapp, is an old friend of mine.   Also, I have done a fair amount of SEO work for Architect sites, a few years back, and am familiar with the space.

For example, RealTown, a blog about Real Estate  talks about  adding the right noise for your listings blogs and community with AGreaterTown

” … The site seems simple on the surface but its power lies way below the surface – in one sentence: “Google Loves it…” The Index I ran was superb; and although the stats mean nothing to most of you, the visibility is fabulous…”

In another post by Sean Callahan titled Secret Resources for Google Traffic and SEO mentions how impressed he was with rankings from posts at AGreaterTown:

“…The first thing I noticed was that articles were indexed almost exactly as they are on DMOZ – the most important website to be indexed in on the planet, or close to it for Google.”

“I could never get indexed in DMOZ, so I found a group of other directories and indexes to build inbound links to my websites.”

Because AGreaterTown.com uses the same type of indexing system it makes this portal very friendly for Google SEO and also provides a link which is the title of the article and full of good keywords.”

I don’t know if that’s the real reason – I’m more inclined to think it’s the over way the information is structured that makes it easy to crawl and categorize, AGreaterTown’s strength – all content posted will tend to do well in organic listings because the interface forces the user to structure it.

Also, most of the listings that are doing well are Geo-Local, where there are less than 30,000 results in Google’s index – here’s some examples.

To be fair, this approach will not work as well with keywords or phrases where there is a lot of competition (over 50,000 search results, is my guess) but it’s perfect for a local listings such as “home buyer seminar montclair nj“. The more hyper-local you get – the more often you can leverage the small number of listings into a top position, and if you have a large number of listings like this – the aggregate traffic gain can be considerable, which is why some larger sites are beginning to look at www.  AGreaterTown.com as a possibility – it’s an easy way to get visibility in a any locality, quickly – due to its structure/taxonomy.

I suspect there are a few SEO companies experimenting with AGreaterTown as it provides an alternative way to post a listing that’s free, and, with the right strategy, does well.  Looking at a sample listing, it’s not hard to see why it might do well in organic search, and would be good not only for real estate, but restaurants, as well.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to surfacing quality content and Read/Write Web’s Richard MacManus pointed out that Google needs to wake up and smell the coffee …

” …. I can only hope that Google and other search engines find betters ways to surface quality content, for its own sake as well as ours. Because right now Google is being infiltrated on a vast scale by content farms.

If you thought it was bad enough that many professional blogs pump out 30 posts a day, often regurgitations of press releases or quick write-ups of “news” such as Twitter being down for a few minutes (note the irony of that tweet), this new type of Google gaming is on a far bigger scale.

What Demand Media, Answers.com and AOL are doing is having a much greater impact on the quality and findability of content on the Web.”

And one way to have better content is to structure it well, make it “flat” and make it rich and relevant – www.AGreaterTown.com structure almost forces this change – so one can say, structure follows function.

In fact, if we consider Twitter a modern success story, we have only go back to my LeWeb 07 coverage of Even Williams – Twitter to recall  what Evan said, in effect, that “less is more” …. that the restrictions of Twitter actually are part of it’s strength – and the restrictions of AGreaterTown, I suspect, are part of it’s strength, as well..

….. listening to Evan Williams talk about the constraints of Twitter (which is essentially a Blogging platform without a lot of features that go with Blogging – using SMS which had advantages and disadvantages (short message size but not having to develop applications to use mobile – and using mobile rather than desktop computing.  There are many applications one could build on top of Twitter, Evan suggested (and gave some examples).

BTW, I know of a survey I read about yesterday that claims that 6% of Americans use Twitter (but I know that Robert Scoble – who I could have bumped into at the Louvre yesterday) disputes that number and it seems high to me as well (I but the 6% is based on a panel which are often inaccurate).”

AGreaterTown.com is a work in progress, it needs lot custom work to facilitate  content syndication easier, a  connection to Facebook Connect and Open ID would help, too.

But the, in a real way, it’s limitations are also it’s strength.