Friday 20 November 2009

Promoting a restaurant Website

Because of the economy being all over the place at the moment, it is now more important than ever to use your website as a tool to get new business. Because of this, many restaurant owners are now looking to expand their presence on the web rather than use it merely as a source for a menu or opening times. So how can you promote a restaurant online? Before I begin, you could maybe consider a couple of the following points to convert those web visitors into bookings:

  • Is there something special you can 'push' about your restaurant?
  • Are you able to offer discounts on orders found from the web?

You will need to decide which keywords you wish to be coming up for in searches. For example, 'Italian restaurant' is going to be far too vague if you've only got one premises. Maybe 'Italian restaurant Sussex' may be more fitting. (The county appended to the end is a commonly used search for local businesses). Of course, if you're a national business, then you may wish to be appearing at the top for 'Italian restaurant'. OK, let's say for arguments sake you chose 'Italian restaurant' as your main search term. In reality, you would usually choose two or three keywords.

Search engine optimisation is a term for collectively carrying out the following tasks, to get to the top for your chosen search term may however require working harder than some other keywords depending on the competition. This next stage is divided into two stages, on-site and off-site optimisation. This is by no means a comprehensive list but should get you off the ground at least.


On-Site Optimisation

OK, I'm going to summarise with bullet points here - in the previous example of 'italian restaurant' on-site optimisation would involve:

  • Sufficient use of H1 tags - with the keyword 'italian restaurant' in there. (Basically you want a relative heading which makes use of H1)
  • Ensuring the webpages load quickly - even it todays modern era - if it's taking too long, the Googlebot will leave without indexing any further.
  • Create a page specifically for the term 'italian restaurant' with 'italian-restaurant' in the url. It might be index.php?p=Italian-restaurant, it might be Italian-restaurant.html depending on your setup.
  • Now with some good thinking, fill the Italian-restaurant page with plenty of text about Italian restaurants. Obviously as a business, I expect you don't want to publicise other businesses - so why not do a page on the history of Italian restaurants?

Off-Site Optimisation

Now comes the tricky part! Google gives each webpage a value, for the purposes of example, let's say your rank value is 1, your opponents rank value is 4. If you're both competing for the same keyword, your opponent will rank higher as they've got a higher rank value for that keyword. To increase this rank value for your site, you need to build links to your website from relevant websites. Surprisingly, this process has been given the term 'link building'. So how do you build links? Today, I will just explain the legitimate, what we call 'White Hat' techniques for building links to your site.

  • Setup a signature link on any forums you post on.
  • Submit yourself to as many web directories (manually - avoid auto submissions).
  • Find 'eat out guides' and submit yourself to as many as possible.
  • Find review sites, submit yourself for a review.
  • If you regularly visit blogs always leave a comment with your URL.

One last thing to note - when you're building links try to always include the term 'Italian Restaurant' in your anchor text. For example, this may involve submitting yourself to directories with the name of 'Angelos Italian Restaurant' in order for you to get the relevant anchor text. Remember - with blogs, only comment if you feel you can add something of value to the discussion - and at least read the blog - that is somebody's website so don't be rude! So there it is - some site promotion tips, this should be enough to get you started at least. I wish you much luck in the promotion of your business.

Tuesday 3 November 2009

Google Pagerank... Gone!

OK, So Google recently announced they've removed the Pagerank stats from within webmaster tools. And today it would seem - they've taken down their datacenters. I tell you something, I feel all naked and unhappy within my shiny green bar at the top of the page!!!

Any comments?
Stick that on your power cord!