SulumitsRetsambew.org made recently really interesting article about ranking locally with your restaurant web site. Here is copy/paste from the sulumits site.
So your restaurant just got brand new web site and you want to rank locally on search engines in goal of getting more visitors and in the end real guests. Local ranking and restaurant marketing is usually easier to get and maintain since local competition is lower then global.
Beside regular promotion here are some things you should additionally do:
- Site directories – Insert your site not to business category but on regional section of the site directories. Beside region try to hit the city if available.
- Local backlinks – Visit local city sites and forums. Try to get backlink from them. Somewhere you can simply comment certain page or answer something on forum, but somewhere contact the administrator for backlink. You can give him romantic dinner for two in exchange for backlink.
- Buy banners on local sites which are pointed to your sites. Don’t worries if they are nofollow, Google insist that paid backlinks have nofollow attribute.
- This one is most important. Get listed on Google Local Business on this link http://www.google.com/local/add/analyticsSplashPage. This will ultimately list you at local search on Google and it will even show a map where your restaurant is located in the city. Do note that for this step you need to have address on given place since confirmation is done by real mail.
- Restaurant review sites – Use this list to submit your restaurant on review. Those guys will come test your restaurant, they will give you a grade and in their review backlink to your site. Try to impress them, since good review will mean more real visitors directed by those sites.
- Social Bookmarking – When you start social bookmarking campaign then always mention your city name in descriptions and tags.
Beside this steps, other steps are same as for any other seo job, make buzz, submit your restaurant related articles to article directories, comment on local people blogs with your restaurant name and link, be active on restaurant and food oriented forums…
Long time ago link directories were very valued by webmasters. It was the time when link directories provided big value in the term of traffic, link popularity, pr juice passing and getting new site indexed. Search engines liked link directories since every directory was a free link review company for them… They used directory links heavily for ranking… This leaded that people started overusing link directory niche, and quantity did not gave quality.
Now time is different, there are no more so useful directories. Some examples of good directories are Web Dir and Business Directory. How to decide which link directory is good for you and that its big probability you will get ROI back.
Follow this few points (however they are now guarantee until:
1. Does directory have any Google PR?
2. Is your picked directory indexed? Try searching on Google some of the deep directory pages or try using “site” directive to find how much directory is indexed.
3. Is “nofollow” attribute appended to every outgoing link from the directory? If yes then you have no value from it in term of SEO.
4. Does directory have any traffic? If no then there is no chance it will pass some traffic to you.
5. Is directory organized and how much there is site listed on every category listing. Smaller number the better for you, since everything with way to much outgoing link can imply it is link farm.
6. Does directory accept every kind of websites? If yes skip it.
If you filter your directory list by these criteria then you will find that a link directories submission actually still works, and that it’s a cheap way to boost your rankings.
Directory submissions are performed to help a website to get more back links and achieve better ranking. Now if you have been on the internet for a while you know Google is the most popular search engine right now. And if your website is on the first page for your chosen keywords then you will likely to receive many visitors. It’s almost like free advertising once the work. You should focus on more than just using the search engine to get traffic to your website. But if your website is new you probably want to submit it to directories to gain some initial boost of back links. These are the foundation of a successful SEO campaign. It’s not a fun task but it needs to be done if you want to achieve good results on the search engines.
Your primary goal of submitting to web directories is to get one way inbound links from other high ranking websites. You want to focus on directories that are established and have a high Pagerank. Because those that are new will not pass much value to your website, stick to the established ones to save you time and gain better results. There are two ways to submitting a website to directories. One is to do it manually by hand, one at a time on your browser. The second option would be to use a automatic directory submission script or software to automate all/part of the task. If you’ve never done any directory submissions in the past you might want to do a couple manually to get a feel of the process. You will understand it better and able to make better choices when using the automated option.
Some high quality directories will have captchas that require you to enter some numbers to verify that you are a human. And if you are using a software to do this, make sure it can pick this up and present it to you. This is why it would be impossible to automate the process completely, and you should avoid using one hundred percent automated software, instead use semi-automated ones as they can produce the same results as manual submissions.
If you are in the process of getting a website built then you need to look for a web designer who has SEO, short for search engine optimization, to work with. Because a website that’s not ranking well on the search engines is almost unless. A freelance web designer with SEO skill will able to do more work for you and advice you on the marketing side of your business. Of course, not every SEO web designer can or will, but you can ask! The point is, you will benefit more from someone with a SEO background.
First, you can leverage their experience in finding the right keywords for your site. Most of these design firms have worked with many different client businesses and have the experience to know which keywords to use in your site’s content. They also know how to identify the keywords that are on the “long tail” or, in other words, the keywords that are not as competitive. Competitive keywords are those used in the majority of searches. In order to speed up ranking within search engines, internet marketers will focus on the not-so-competitive words and gear content towards them.
Many freelance web designers have access to a list of talented copywriters who can take those keywords and create helpful content to fill your web pages. And they not only know how to create content that is helpful to users. They also know how to write the content in such a way as to be beneficial for site indexing in search engines, therefore your pages will rank higher and receive more traffic.
And since their core competency is web design, they can make you a website that will be a pleasant experience for your users. They know how to design websites that are compliant to the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The result of designing to standard is that you get a web site where the pages load faster, it is easier to navigate, and it is maintainable for the future.
I never experienced penalties from Google in all my online career. Maybe sandbox one or two times but that I don”t consider as a penalty. Since I never experienced them I never thought that penalties really exists or everything is coincidence. Yesterday I was on this thread and realized that this site maybe got -30 penalty for low quality backlinks. Cases are simply to similar. This page was on number 6 at Google, then I started link building campagn and asked my friends to give me backlinks. In the short time at least 15 people responded giving me massive amount of mostly forum signatures, few hours later my entry dropped for exactly 30 positions from position 6 to position 36. After that until now my Oes Tsetnoc entry flawed between positions 32 and 39, and this morning is on position 42.
Am I being paranoic or this penalty things really exists? How can webmaster control backlinks, if this is true then you can easily cause penalty to your opponents?
Or maybe this only work for new and young sites, which means that penalty if exists will be lifter? I am not sure what to do, to slow down linking process because of this
or to continue as nothing happened?
I would appreciate your words for this issue, since I am completely on a unknown territory.
