More About Restaurant SEO

Many restaurants are missing the mark when it comes to use of the Internet as an effective marketing tool. Effective marketing tools drive business. They make the phone ring and tables fill.

How are restaurants missing the mark? They either don’t have a web site or they have a web site that does not appear in the search engines for the proper ‘keywords and key phrases’. Keywords and phrases are those terms that consumers use to search for products and services in Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines.

There are databases of keyword search activity. This data shows that restaurants are among the most highly searched vertical markets on the Internet.

Top search engine ranking is achieved through a process known as search engine optimization or SEO. SEO is one component of Search Engine Marketing. SEO focuses specifically on gaining top organic or natural search results.

Search engines list sites in their results based on algorithms. These mathematical formulas are applied to the content of a site by the search engines. Web sites are found by the search engines via the process of ‘crawling’ or ‘indexing’. Software robots, also called ‘spiders’ crawl the Internet, finding and ranking sites based on the search engines criteria.

When a user searches for a term, they are presented with a results page. The results page contains both paid and organic results. The paid results appear as small ads at the top, bottom and right side of the page. The organic results that appear in the middle of the page are entirely based on search engine optimization.

The only way to achieve top organic search rank is through proper web site construction. This is important because web users typically ignore paid advertising on the search results page. 

According to a 2005 Penn State study over 80% of web users went straight to organic results – "Consumers have a bias against the links that businesses pay search engines to provide," said Jim Jansen, assistant professor in the Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). "By themselves, sponsored links appear not to be a viable business model and should be only one part of an online advertising campaign."

The number one organic position is the most coveted position for any business. In order for web sites to drive traffic (site visitors) they should appear in the Top Ten results for a given term.

Let’s say that you own a restaurant in Bethesda. There are approximately 6,000 searches a month for the term ‘bethesda restaurant’. As a restaurant owner, having these highly targeted potential customers see your information is important. They are effectively asking the question ‘Where should I go eat?’ Unlike traditional advertising, which delivers your message to a broad audience, SEO allows your information to appear to those customers who have already identified themselves as potential customers.

How does one get to the top of the organic search results? What factors impact search engine ranking? What should restaurant owners avoid? What are some of the fallacies around SEO?

Let’s start with the fallacies and the things to avoid.

• There are no ‘special relationships’ with the search engines. No one can get your web site to the top of the organic results in 48 hours. It takes time to build organic rank.
• It is not necessary to submit and re-submit your web site to the search engines. It does little good and in fact may be detrimental. If the search engine ‘robots’ can’t find your site as they go through the process of ‘crawling’ the web, it won’t get listed no matter how often you submit it.
• Don’t get fooled by offers to submit your site to ‘thousands of search engines’. There are only 3 search engines to be concerned with – Google, Yahoo and MSN.
• Many companies will tell you your site must be tweaked and changed each month in order to stay in the search engines. This is utter nonsense. While you are waiting for your new site to appear in the search engines don’t change anything at all. Do not change any tagging or critical site elements for the first year.

Factors that impact search engine ranking:

• Macromedia Flash. While Flash is a great program, it is not fully indexable by the search engines. While Flash sites may be graphically appealing they have little value as it relates to search engine marketing.
• Hosting environment – many people don’t realize that where your web site is hosted can greatly impact your search ranking. Search engines will often ban an entire block of IP addresses. If you are in a shared server environment and your hosting company allows adult content or spamming activities you run the risk f being banned.
• Redirects – or auto forwards. Some web development companies will employ redirects to automatically send users to another site. While some claim to be able to create redirects that will not harm ranking it’s a risky technique that can negatively impact search rank.
• Content- In order to maximize search engine ranking a web site should have between 350 and 400 words of text on the home page.
• Improper Tags – There are several tags (information within the code of your web site) that are particularly important including; title tag, description tag, keyword tag (yes, it’s still important) and alt tags. Your tags should be structured to properly reflect the way consumers search. A catering website should be built the term catering (800,000 searches a month) rather then caterer (120,000 searches per month).