Top SEO Tips for Making Your Restaurant’s Website Easy to Find

Last month we discussed how keywords, content and backlinks are vital for improving your search engine ranking. But there are few other tips and tricks that can help too. Here are some more top search engine optimization (SEO) tips you might find useful:

1. If you are in the UK, get a co.uk domain rather than .com (and conversely .se if you are in Sweden, .nl if you are in Holland and so on) – If you don’t already have a website then it’s a good idea to register it with a co.uk domain. This helps the search engines to recognise it as a UK website, helping it to rank higher in the UK search results. But don’t worry if you already have a .com because you can still get a good ranking, it just might take a little longer.

2. Get involved in social bookmarking – When people find something interesting on the web they often use a social bookmarking service (such as Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit) to save its location and to share it with others. Persuading people to bookmark your site can be a great way of building up backlinks and traffic. The way to do it is to identify people interested in restaurant marketing and recommend their websites so that they notice you and, hopefully, return the favour.

3. Register website in business and local directories – There are lots of free business directories (such as Thomson local, freeindex.co.uk and Yell.com) in which you can register your business listing and get a free backlink at the same time.

4. Title tag – We touched on HTML tags in a previous post on SEO. HTML is the coding language that makes up the pages of your website, and some of these are important for search engines to understand what your site is about. The Title tag is the most important one to worry about as it appears as the headline description in the search results. Writing a good headline that includes your keywords is great for SEO and can attract more people to click on your listing at the same time.

5. Description tag – It’s debateable whether the description tag is still important for SEO. But this is used to provide a description that appears below your website’s Title tag in the search results. So, again, a well written description can attract more people to your website and increase traffic in one go.

6. H1, H2 and H3 tags – These are used to create different sized headings in your web pages and blog posts. These are great for breaking up large chunks of text into more easily digestible chunks and tell the search engines what your web pages are about at the same time – so remember to include your keywords when using these tags.

Remember, an estimated 62% of people will search online to find a restaurant. So making your website easy to find in Google, and the other search engines, should be a vital part of your restaurant marketing strategy.

By Magnus Hultberg in Blog, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)