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Comment by revorad | Hacker News Reader

If you just focused on providing people with clear information about embassies and visa applications, that would be a HUGE help.

From my personal experience as an Indian with an Indian passport and lots of friends who don't have American or European passports, visas, even for holidays, are the biggest travelling pain. Suffice to say, I travel less because I hate applying for visas, not least because finding the correct information is really hard. If you took some of the pain out of that problem, you will get a lot of users.

I know it's not as sexy as making a social network for travellers who can check in to cool places around the world.

But, it's a real problem and will really help people.

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Well, the embassy section is the most developed part of the entire site as it is the oldest. Most of the date is kept up-to-date in terms of contact information for the embassies and we have a widget that provides visa information for free.

The widget will also take you to a service that will help fill out your visa application and deliver it. Their fees depend on the service you require.

I also constantly email all the embassies/consulates in the database for updated information because, and many people don't know this, embassies/consulates in smaller countries are usually the house where the ambassador lives. So when they change (and they often do), so does all the contact info.

That's awesome. Your embassies page is quite good.

You could make it even easier to navigate by adding a map.

Instead of listing by embassies in a particular country, you should list by embassies of a country. To give you an example, if I'm thinking of going to France, I'm looking for the French embassy's website, not where I am applying from. That second bit of info is also needed, but you could ask that in the second filtering stage or by guessing the user's location.

By map you mean a generic map with clickable countries to take you to the embassies of that country? I'll consider it. I'll have to see how size would play into the visible area of the page.

I have tackled the embassies in vs embassies of on the listing and quite frankly, I don't have enough points of reference to make a call. There is a nifty search box on the right that allows you to filter though

If you get a lot of visits to that section, then you could A/B test to choose which is the better way.

A simple alternative I could think of is to get rid of the list of countries and make the search form on the right the main interface. You only need to ask "where are you going?", "where from?" and "your nationality". Simple search boxes or dropdown menus with flags would be great.

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.

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

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/

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?

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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