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by revorad 5641 days ago
An additional meta thought: one key reason for the huge success of social networks is that they've accelerated the flow of information between people all around the world.

So, one heuristic for a good way forward is to look in places where information flow is still slow and broken. Embassies are a good example of that.
1 comments
ihavetoblog 5641 days ago
True, but when you search for keywords on Embassies, you directly compete with .gov sites that will always outrank you.

My idea behind the embassy section was to ensure that contact information was available when the sites go under, as they usually do, or cloak their information to not be bothered. Believe it or not, I actually made that database of 8000+ myself.

So, I have a great section that is useful, but hard to market. I rank least in embassy keywords even though my data is more up-to-date than other older sites.

I created an adwords campaign and managed to get $0.08 a click on my keywords with an average of 3 min/user to the embassy section, so I know it is useful. But organics are very, very low.

Plus, I don't want to violate the site with a bunch of adsense nonsense and the widget, which provides very little $$/lead has had 946 clicks in 6 months with 0 conversion

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revorad 5641 days ago
Have you considered hosting your embassy section on another domain name with the keywords? It will take some time, but you could probably rank with some organic SEO for phrases like "how to apply for visa to france from london" by blogging.

See http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/

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ihavetoblog 5641 days ago
I have, but, I would then have to make one completely no-follow to not get dilution from double content, right?

I can see how I can focus on that one niche and become profitable, but wouldn't that be spreading myself thin over two projects instead of one big one?

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revorad 5641 days ago
I'm not sure about the no-follow thing, but you are probably right. A simpler alternative to a new domain might be a more key-word rich url or sub-domain.

I can understand you don't want to spend too much time over this. Can't you automatically generate static pages listing the key information given the user's destination, origin and nationality? I'm guessing the embassy information doesn't change too often, so having static content will help with SEO and caching.

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