tech tips - Paul Fleming - Paul Fleming - Flemo: Between Sydney, Philadelphia and the World Wide Web

I recently started using and checking out restaurant.com after hearing about them from a friend. I was amazed that I had not heard about them before as it seems like they’ve been around for several years so I went and checked out their website which may help to explain why I hadn’t heard about them. Quite frankly from basic SEO perspective it’s a mess. Their popularity however astounded me but it looked as though they relied heavily on affiliate marketing which makes sense and encourages other people to do the work for you. But boy are they doing a lot of things wrong with their website.

Let’s just have a gander a their search visibility. They have a great domain name so I assume that they would do well for “restaurants” and variations on the phrase. A quick search reveals #1 Google ranking for “restaurants” as anticipated.

That’s a strong keyword phrase with some 68 million broad global searches per month which should in itself yield some good traffic. Let’s have a look at what they do. Coupons would be the obvious selection here so “restaurant coupons” would be a no brainer.

I see a paid search result there and the top spot again which is great and a 450,000 search volume which should also yield some good traffic.

So let’s move to local searches which one would anticipate to be higher conversion phrases. Someone in my local area looking to dine out would go for “Philadelphia restaurants” for example. One would anticipate that with a valuable keyword phrase as their domain and obvious popularity that they would do well but I don’t see them for some reason.

So I’m seeing menupages.com and yelp.com and zagat.com but interestingly not restaurant.com. So I wonder why that is.

If I go to restaurant.com and drill down to the Philadelphia section i see this URL http://www.restaurant.com/rdc_site2.net/listings.aspx?PageSize=0&Page=1&sorting=Relevance&Zip=19146&SearchRadius=5&&attribute_value_string%7cCity=Philadelphia
Ok so that explains a lot. Why not http://www.restaurant.com/philadelphia/ for their URL? Sorry couldn’t tell you. Let’s have a look at their title tag then. “Restaurant.com – Dine out for less! $25 Restaurant Certificates for only $10″. Right, pretty useless there.

It’s pretty obvious that we’re now looking at a poorly coded web structure that’s going to impact their search results and little thought to SEO so they are without a doubt missing out on some low hanging fruit. Then again, it looks like a popular website with a strong affiliate marketing campaign and a search marketing campaign which I’m sure is costing them a pretty penny. One wonders at how much value an SEO consultant could be to them particularly for what appears to be a predominately online business. Maybe if they go their act together they would piss off their affiliates. Still, for someone who bases online businesses in SEO, it’s a good opportunity to demonstrate what not to do.

The old Chinese domain name scam seems to have morphed recently with a new intellectual property rights angle:

Dear Manager
We are a professional intellectual property rights consultant organization, mainly deal with the global domain name registration and internet intellectual property rights protection.
On May. 21st, 2010, we formally received an application from KangShen Technology Limited, they applied to register the internet brand ( ourcompanyname ) and some in China and Asia’s domain name.

During our preliminary investigation, we found that these domain names’ keyword is fully identical with your trademark. Therefore, we need to confirm with you, whether you consigned KangShen Technology Limited to register these domain names with us or not? Or, is KangShen Technology Limited your business partner or distributor?

If you have no relationship with this company, we assume that they have other purposes to obtain these domain names.

Currently, we have already suspended this company’s application temporarily due to the seriousness of this isuue. In order to avoid the vicious domain name grabbing, please let the relevant person make a confirmation with me via email as soon as possible. Thank you for your support to our work!

Best Regards!
Anne Ling

Registration Department Manager
Hong Kong NewName Net Service Limited
Tel:+852-3069 6940
Fax:+852-3071 7730

Email:anne@trademarkdns.com
Internet:www.trademarkdns.com

I’ve actually received a few of these recently, so they seem to be on the go a bit more lately. I’s be curious to learn stats about how effective something like this is. Always search for something like this before you pursue any further.

Having been a Sea Eagles fan all my life (I was born in Manly hospital), now being located in Philadelphia makes it a little tough to get to the games. Realistically, it’s just as tough getting to watch them as well which still amazes me, even when paying extra for the privilege. I’ve really been digging the coverage for IPL cricket games on Youtube and DirecTV (for free no less) and still find it quite unbelievable that I can’t get the same coverage for my NRL.

Currently, these are my options. www.AussieSport.TV (and it only works if you use the www….weird) show replays of the games (and highlights) a few hours after the game. The quality is poor and of course you can’t watch on a Mac and it’s around $10/month.

I recently discovered Omnisport.tv which looks a little more promising. I haven’t given it a go yet, mainly because it looks like they only offer live games which, when you take the time difference into consideration, isn’t always favorable so not sure why I would fork out the extra cash for games that I could potentially miss.

Can anyone help me out here? I’d be happy with high quality games that I can play through my computer (perferably mac) and view on my TV like I do with hulu. Anyone? I’d also be curious to learn why it’s so difficult (my guess is licensing).

Recently been using Jimojo Hotspot Internet at a hotel in Byron Bay and gotta say, it’s pretty painful stuff. To start with, we’re talking about 0.43 Mbs download speeds and 0.03 Mbs upload speed so not much faster than dialup and all for the princely sum of just over $10/day. It’s frustrating, and any attempt to contact them seems to go unnoticed. Amazingly, for how important Internet Connections are these days, these guys get a big FAIL from Flemo for their poor connection and their even worse handling of the situation. This would certainly make me think twice about which hotel to stay at in the future.