Get Your Restaurant Website Ready for Increase in Online Visitors
August 28, 2009
Recent article citing increase in online restaurant bookings: http://bit.ly/mMJ3W. Yes, I realize the article is about the United Kingdom and the main quote is from the COO of a major online reservation service, but the trend is real and it’s certainly not limited to the UK. Part of the reason Mindi and I settled upon food service as an industry was the incessant bitching we both endured from friends and family about the painfulness of finding restaurant websites and the sorry state of the sites once they got there. Yep, it’s true – for most of you owners and managers, at least – the general population hates your websites. And they hate trying to find your websites. And they want to do more research online, make more reservations online, and make more purchases online. You’re keeping them from doing what they want.
Now is the perfect time to get a redesign that focuses on usability and quality visitor experience, market your site so Internet users can find and enjoy it, and utilize social media and review networks to began establishing rewarding relationships with your diners. You have to accept and acknowledge the fact people are going to want to use the Internet more, not less. Believe me, those who heed the obvious and do the work will be reaping substantial rewards for years to come.
Blog SEO Advice from Google’s Matt Cutts
August 21, 2009
I had the opportunity to watch an informative and entertaining video of a presentation by Matt Cutts, Google’s Chief of Spam Police and oft-quoted guru of the SEO world. Cutts was addressing the WordCamp 2009 audience in San Francisco, so his speech focuses upon using the WordPress platform for success in Google search. Contrary to the techie stereotype, Matt is a funny and skilled speaker and the video is well worth the 45-minute investment. For those of you that appreciate CliffsNotes and Reader’s Digest, I’ve culled what I found as the top five tips from the clip:
- Write about what you love – if you are genuinely interested in your topic, you will write more, the post will be of interest to your readers and the content will garner links naturally from other bloggers. So, while you run a restaurant and blog about the happenings there, maybe you also love biking, the art of Ancient Greece or needlepoint. Find a way to include your other interests into your blog posts; you will enjoy the effort more and your readers will appreciate the enthusiasm with which your content is created. Please refer to this advice after you tire of the football references in my posts come September.
- Start small (The Katamari Philosophy) – Katamari is a Japanese game whereby a small creature called a Katamari can devour small objects and as he does so, he becomes bigger and can devour bigger objects until the organism is huge. Cutts’ point is sound; in search engine optimization as well as other pursuits, start with what you know (cooking, food or restaurant management, for example) and build from that point. We practice this philosophy with SEO. We focus pages on a website for highly-targeted but less-competitive search phrases (called long-tail search terms) as well as the high-volume search phrases, realizing that ranking a web page for a very competitive search phrase will take longer than ranking for the less-utilized keywords.
- Keep your website and its platform up-to-date - This was actually a plea from Cutts at the conclusion of his talk. Most likely you have a webmaster that is charged with keeping your website or blog’s platform (such as WordPress) current, however I recommend that you ask for details from him/her as to their upgrade philosophy and process.
- Use readily-available resources to improve your blog and/or website – He recommends using Google keyword tool to identify phrases relevant to your website content and to uncover related terms that you may be overlooking. You could also use this tool to discover new, yet related, content when suffering from writer’s block. Other resources to make use of in developing content include trade publications, newsletters and other blogs. The point is that there exists a virtually unlimited amount of resources just a few mouse clicks away; use the power of the web to your advantage.
- Keep feeding your website visitors what they like – Cutts suggests utilizing your website tracker to uncover the most popular content and building upon those subjects in the future. For example, if the most popular post on the blog features a recipe from the chef, try to create a series of posts that offer recipes or a video of a cooking demo from your restaurant’s kitchen. When developing correlated content, make sure to link to other content that may be of interest to the reader, either contextually or at the end of your post.
If you decide to watch the entire video, let us know what you gleaned from Matt Cutts in the comments of this post. We’d love to know what you think!
Twitter Integrating Retweet Into Platform
August 14, 2009
Twitter announced yesterday afternoon that they have launched “Project Retweet,” whereby they will incorporate a retweet feature into the user interface.
A retweet occurs when a user receives a tweet from someone that they follow and they in turn send the message out to their followers. The procedure to date has been to copy the original message and add to it a mention of the original sender (ex: @TwoTables) and an RT label, which looks something like this:
Even Twitter admits that the retweet procedure has been a bit clunky and that not everyone is aware of the protocol. While there aren’t a ton of details in the announcement as to how the new feature will function, the post does reveal that we can expect a Retweet selection to be added to the existing Reply and Favorite buttons that appear when one hovers the mouse over the right edge of a tweet, replacing the current three-step process with one mouse click.
I expect that this change will be welcomed by all of Twitter’s users, but especially so by those who use the site for marketing purposes, as it promises to make the sharing of information easier for all.