While you may struggle optimizing your site and its content for competitive rankings on search engines for popular keywords there remains a very good opportunity in optimizing for search query phrases that come in the "question" format.
Yesterday Ask.com released its list of the top question of 2009. According to the announcement, "More than 50 million people visit Ask each month, where they are three times more likely to enter their queries in the form of a question than on other search engines." As you might imagine (if you've got your thinking caps on), this presents a great starting point for an SEO project related to answering questions.
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Look at a few of the questions on this list and you'll see what I mean. It's the "how," "what," "when," and "who" that consumers apparently use to find answers to their questions. Since you (hopefully) know the answers to questions related to the content of your site, therein lies the SEO opportunity. Just answer questions related to your product, service or niche - no matter how seemingly mindate - and you might be surprised at how well you'll rank.
I've listed a few sample questions below along with the start of each question.
Hopefully this will get your creative SEO mind working:
How much should....?
How much should you pay for SEO services?
How do I get...?
How do I get top rankings on Bing?
How many...?
How many blog posts should I write every day?
What is...?
What is asynchronous tracking?
What are...?
What are the best Internet tradeshows?
What can...?
What can I deduct on my business taxes?
What does...?
What does URL stand for?
When will...?
When will Google officially release its social search product?