Search Engine Optimizing Your Restaurant's Website
September 14, 2008
Optimizing your LetsEat.at restaurant website for the search engines is a simple process. While there are numerous factors involved in your restaurant's placement in search engine results pages, four tend to take precedence over the others: web address, page title, content, and quality of inbound links.
1. Your web address
The easiest way to improve your ranking is to pick a solid web address for your restaurant. Your restaurant's web address should be a fully spelled out version of your restaurant's name. In this case, your web address (or URL) is what you pick to follow http://www.LetsEat.at. For instance, if your restaurant is named Uncle Bob's Chicken Shack, a good web address would be http://www.LetsEat.at/UncleBobsChickenShack. Another good one would be http://www.LetsEat.at/Uncle_Bobs_Chicken_Shack. The following could cause you to drop a few spots in your search engine placement: http://www.LetsEat.at/UBCS. This would not be as good either: http://www.LetsEat.at/BobsChicken. On the other hand, if your regulars know your restaurant as 'Bobs Chicken', then that should be your address. You can change your restaurant's web address at 'My Restaurant » General Information » Web Address'.
2. Your Page Title
Page title is a very important aspect of your restaurant's placement. We have made it easy in this respect, as the perfect title for your restaurant is your restaurant's name and a very brief description of page contents. In this case, your restaurant's name appears automatically in the title of each page, and the description is set automatically on every page. Your home page title's description is the 'tagline' that you fill in at My Restaurant » General Information » Tagline. A good tagline could be 'Family-friendly Italian Cuisine in North Beach' or 'Welcome to our Official Homepage'. The former makes a good choice because of its abundance of solid keywords, while the latter makes for a good pick because it is more likely to get clicked on by people specifically searching for your website (don't forget that you are competing for clicks with other websites, including review sites and online newspapers).
3. Content
This is probably fairly obvious, but we can't stress enough that quality content is one of the most important factors in getting ranked well by the search engines.
Writing a comprehensive biography of your restaurant in the 'About' page ('My Restaurant » About » Restaurant Bio'), writing a couple of solid paragraphs for your home page ('My Restaurant » The Front Page') and posting your menu online are great ways to accomplish this.
A note about LetsEat.at menus: While we're not going to fault you for entering your entire menu into the 'description' box of your menus (as we've seen some people do), utilizing the menu system we've set up ensures the proper use of HTML header tags for better search engine optimization. Here is a quick step by step, in case you haven't checked it out yet:
a. Create a new menu ('Menus » New Menu') and fill in the menu's name and optionally, a brief description of the menu or what each item on the menu comes with.
b. Under 'Your Menus:' select the menu.
c. Select 'New Item' and enter the menu item's information.
d. Repeat for other items in the menu or select 'Return to main page' to create another menu.
Having a menu posted online is not only a good way to improve ranking for keywords, but will be greatly appreciated by your regulars.
4. (Quality) Inbound Links
This is probably the toughest thing to accomplish for your site, and we don't recommend dwelling on it too much. If either you, your family or your friends run a popular food, entertainment or restaurant-related blog, linking to your site with your name as the link (i.e. "Eat at Joe's Grill" as opposed to "Click here for good food") can help quite substantially in your page ranking. The more relevant the blog is to your site's content, the more it will help you.
Note: spamming your link in other people's blog comments and forums is neither useful, nor polite and we highly recommend against it. Unsurprisingly, it can actually cost you some page rank under certain circumstances, so even experimenting with it may lead you to some unwanted headaches. Please don't do it!
In conclusion, search engine optimizing your restaurant's website is not a complicated or difficult thing to do when you follow these tips. Of course, the other thing to remember is that site longevity tends to trump many other factors, so patience is the always the key with SEO. We hope you enjoyed this article. Keep checking back for more updates!