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Mani Dhillon• Long career in consumer and enterprise product development• Previously at Electronic Arts developing mobile and online

games, Cisco Systems developing consumer and enterprise networking equipment

• MBA, Northwestern University• Currently General Manager, Urbanspoon

Urbanspoon runs an online and mobile restaurant guide for diners and reservation system for restaurants

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Three friends set out to do a lot with a little . . . with the help of SEO.

EthanCreative Guy

AdamHacker

Extraordinaire

PatrickExpert in this

and that

Status

Brainstormed 20 ideas that they could take on as a small team and since they were all passionate about food they decided to focus on that. They followed the basics of SEO (clean topology, relevant to top searches, others will link to)

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Competing for major terms (Seattle Restaurants) was difficult. So they analyzed the searches that lead to the site and found that they could focus on neighborhoods and zip codes uniquely. Made landing pages for zip codes and neighborhoods and made profiles pages link to those pages.

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SEO Link Bait – novel ways to present our data that others wanted to link to. The following presentation got us a lot of press- Restaurants at Night- Bush vs. Keary and Steak vs. Sushi

Spoonbacks – Urbanspoon presents reviews from bloggers, critics and readers. Bloggers that participate in the Spoonback program get millions of users viewing their posts on Urbanspoon and then linking back to their blog. Another benefit is that both the blogger and Urbanspoon improve their Google Pagerank. Over 2,000 bloggers participate in the Spoonback program.

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