I have worked in the restaurant industry as a marketer as well as a server, so I’m pretty well versed about restaurants and their inner workings, as well as seeing how they set up their websites and their social media. As a restaurant, you are catering to many types of guests with many types of needs. As for your website, your users have specific needs as well. They want to find your phone number, your address, a way to make reservations (be it by phone, email or online), your menu, daily features, specials and bar happenings such as happy hour times.

• Phone number – It shouldn’t be embedded in Flash or as an image in your header. It may look like text, but I should be able to select it and copy it. The reason for this is that I, and many others, have a smart phone that is able to recognize phone numbers. This makes it easy to click on the number and make a phone call simply from your website. If it’s part of your Flash or as a part of an image, I can’t copy it and make the phone call. Also, many smart phones can’t render flash, which makes your website useless for the mobile generation.
• Address – Again, this shouldn’t be a part of a Flash element or an image. It should be in text, and even better, a link to a map on how to get to your establishment. It makes it much easier for your users, whether mobile or not, to map and find your restaurant, along with passing on the information to their friends.
• Menu – Make your menu easy to get to and don’t make it a heavy PDF with lots of images. As a matter of fact, why don’t you just make it a simple HTML page? It’s easier to get to, I don’t have to open another tab, or even navigate to a PDF that is too large and takes too long to download. Plus, for a restaurant, it’s easier to update.
• Daily Features – There are several ways of doing this. You can have your social media connected to your site like Twitter or Facebook, or you can always update your site with your daily features.
• Happy Hour Times – These are pretty standard. A lot of people want to know what your Happy Hour times are and the features that you are offering like special drinks, 1/2 priced drinks, bar menu and live music.
• Reservations – Have a phone number, email or online reservation application that is easy to use to make reservations. The harder you make it for your guests, the more you will lose their patronage.

Essentially, you want to make your website idiot proof. Make sure that you have maps, phone numbers, email addresses and the like easy to find on your website. The harder it is for a user to find the information that they are looking for, the more likely you are going to lose their business. Flash and images are pretty, but make sure that you have actual text on your site.

If you are using social media for your Social Media Optimization, you need to use these tools carefully. Once you start using Social Media, you can’t stop. It’s a conversation that you can have, you can listen to, and that you can optimize. But, your dirty laundry can be aired out as well. Make sure that you have standards in place for this. I will go more into Social Media for Restaurants a little later.

I know that these are elements that people want to see on restaurant pages, what else do you want to see that would make restaurant sites more user friendly?

I am now posting this from my TV using the new Google TV Logitech Revue. I got this for my Christmas gift and I am so excited!!

Not only do I have the new Google TV, but I also have the new Google Cr-48 Chrome netbook, too. Yay! It’s late and I do need to find a way to get to sleep. But, all my thanks to Michael Tucker from Magic City Dojo.

We all can see that the word FUN is in functional, but is your “fun” website really functional and utilizing search engine optimization techniques properly?One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone comes to me and says, “We want to have a fun site. We want it pretty and have a flashy banner or home page.” My general comment to that? “So, you want a useless site that will have no presence in the search engines, right?” That’s when they start to back pedal. I’m not against a fun site, or pretty graphics, but what I am against is when that’s the first thing that they think about. You can have a pretty site, a fun site and a functional site, but if you leave out functional, there is no way that your site is going to survive or get the presence it needs in the search engines to garner traffic, leads and an ROI.

As new technology comes available, more functionality is added to websites as Flash becomes less and less used. One site, 20 Things I Learned About Browsers And The Web, showcases the great ability of HTML5. The entire site uses CSS, HTML, HTML5 and text. This functional site is not only pretty and fun, but it has all the ingredients to make it successfully functional.

So, what can you do to make your site functional, but still have that edge?

• Make sure that you’re using Alt Text for your images, and make sure that your site isn’t one big image. Just because there are words in the image doesn’t mean that the search engines can read that. Search engines are blind visitors, so make sure that you are naming the images and using text in your site.
• Links – stop using CLICK HERE. Please. Where is HERE? Use what we call link text. Link text is the highlighted text that uses keywords to link to another page.
• Content – content is STILL king. Use it. Don’t be afraid of it. But one place to be careful about where to use your text is your home page. That page should quickly and easily answer the 4 staple questions -

1. What is this?
2. What can I do here?
3. What do they have here?
4. Why should I be here and not somewhere else?

• Talk to your visitors, tell them what they want and need to know. Don’t go off about yourself or your company, but rather guide your visitors and potential leads to what they are really at your site for.
• Flash is great, but use it sparingly.
• Web 2.0 is dead. Stop talking about it and move on to Real Time Web Development. Real time Twitter, Gowalla, Foursquare, Facebook, Blog Posts, and constant content generation.
• Keep in touch with your visitors using Social Media Optimization – get them to sign up for newsletter, RSS feeds, follow you on Twitter or have them “Like” pages or become a fan on your Facebook page.

These are just some of my Search Engine Optimization, Functional Web Development and Social Media Optimization techniques to make your next web development and design a success.

I wrote a post on Facebook earlier today about a tip on how not to over-stuff yourself this Thanksgiving.  Since many of you will be eating turkey or tur-duck-ens, or any sort of other birds that are stuffed, this is how to keep the bird stuffed and not you.

Many houses or restaurants have a buffet style layout, and many will have a couple of different sized plates available, too. If they aren’t available, simply ask for a smaller plate. Here is where you are going to ask, “Why would I use a smaller plate? Isn’t that just for the salad?” And here is where I say, “It’s all about illusion.”

How many times do you go to a buffet, take the large plate and proceed to fill it up with as much as you can? How many different types of fabulous foods can you fit on one plate? And, when you’re done, how many of you leave much or some of it behind? We all do that from time to time. So, this is where the smaller plate comes into play. Choose the smaller plate, take smaller portions and enjoy a smaller plate of what you really love, rather than over-eating or over-indulging. If there is something you haven’t tried before, take enough for 2 SMALL bites, rather than 4 large ones. In this manner, you’ll eat less, enjoy more of what you love and waste less, too.

As you enjoy your Thanksgiving, make sure you have a nice full glass of ice cold water and keep drinking it. For every 16 oz of ice cold water you drink, your body will burn 17.5 calories (Discovery Health – Does Drinking Water Burn Calories?). Steer clear of sweet drinks and sodas if you’re really counting calories. Treat them as treats, not a staple. I live in the South and Southerners LOVE their sweet tea, but it’s LOADED with sugar. And they are generous with their sugar (to me, it tastes like flat root beer syrup). Rather than having several glasses, have one, and drink water. Also, water will help keep you fuller so you don’t eat too much.

Keep the alcohol in moderation and consider this – light beer has fewer calories because it has less alcohol. So, rather than indulge in lots of light beers, choose a higher gravity beer that’s full of flavor that will go well with your Turkey Day food and share them. Drink them slow, savor the flavor, just like your smaller plate of food.

And, if you want more after your smaller plate of food, remember this – vegetables make great seconds. They are high in fiber and  minerals (assuming you’re eating them fresh) and will help keep you full without adding a whole lot of calories. If they are saturated in butter, fat and salt, beware, though.

And that’s one other thing. As you’re cooking your food, be considerate of the amount of salt you use in your food. I once had some Thanksgiving food from a very Southern Country family, and I thought that all I was eating was salt disguised as food. Salt will also make you retain water and add to that bloated feeling.

So, those are my healthy tips for this Thanksgiving. Happy Eating, and Give Thanks for everyone and everything.

I’m having a great day at WordCamp Birmingham. Lots going on, I made it on time, and my presentation went quite well.

If you weren’t able to make it today to WordCamp, you can see my slideshow that I presented on Search Engine Optimization. I’ts more of a step by step process on how to do your keyword research to how to build out the architecture of your website.

Feel free to ask me any questions!

I will be speaking at WordCamp this year on a panel with Wade Kwon (moderator), Lisa Isbell and Karla Porter called My business website needs…

I look forward to seeing everyone there and I hope that you have registered to join in on this outstanding opportunity to learn all things about WordPress, your business and learn about where our favorite open source software is.

This is a great opportunity to meet enthusiasts, bloggers, podcasters, developers and business owners to learn how they have used WordPress and the web to gain business and notoriety.

My part in WordCamp this year is to be the SEO professional and teaching/preaching how SEO can make you dominate the search engine ranking results pages.

Search Engine Optimization professionals don’t carry magic wands with them and they don’t have a magic potion to make your site gain visibility in the Search Engines Ranking Pages. Many companies have lost sight of what SEO truly is. Search Engine Optimization Professionals have gotten pegged into a corner that make them look like magicians that magically pass a wand over a website and “bam!”, rankings are there, leads are coming in, ROI is up and sales are coming in. I hate to let you know something, this is in no way true. Search Engine Optimization, and even the marketing side, takes time. Included in this time is research, development of site architecture, development of content, internal links, obtaining external links, and looking at over 100 points that are involved in making a website an SEO success.

SEOs aren’t sitting back in a dark corner waiting for you to hand them a website. Rather, a Search Engine Optimization professional is more along the lines of a project manger, regardless of where the project starts. Whether it’s a new website or one that is being redone, the SEO has an instrumental position in how the development process moves forward. Gone are the days of the SEO being handed a completed website as minor on and off page changes aren’t going to yield the results that they used to. The process of SEO is now a complete, fully run operation that begins with in-depth keyword research and continues itself through the whole web development project until one of two things happen – the client has decided not continue with the monthly retainer, or the site is down. It’s an infinite process that has only a beginning and really no end.

There is a backwards way of doing SEO and a forward thinking way of doing SEO. The backwards way is to design and develop a site and then send it off to optimize it. This means that the keyword research is done at the end of the project, the content hasn’t been thought out properly, and generally, you have pages that wont’ be filled with content for months on end.

The forward-thinking way of creating or recreating a website has a process that looks like the following:

1. Keyword research
2. Silo the research
3. Create general architecture of the site
4. Wireframes
5. Development
   1. Design
   2. Programming
   3. Content
6. Optimization continues
7. Testing begins
8. Testing ends
9. Site is soft launched
10. Testing
11. Site is hard launched

OK, it seems complicated, but here is the other scenario. The site is designed and developed, tested and all is good. But, what about the marketing? What about the interactivity of the site? And more importantly, what about the SEO? So then you have the process that goes from design and development, and then the content is added. Everything is done linear, rather than being done in a quality-check, non-linear process as proposed above. The linear process has it’s defects as you will have to go back to Step 2, then to 4, back to 6, over to 10, back to 3, up to 5… it becomes a mess. Why? No research was done, no wireframes were done to create the architecture, and the silos of information haven’t be considered.

All-in-all, Search Engine Optimization and Marketing are a very big part of the management of web development. Landing pages have to be considered, research has to be considered and the overall architecture of the site has to be considered before a site is designed and developed. No matter how new or old the site, a good process with checks and balances, consistency in development and research into the site architecture will make or break your site.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I’d love some input!

Some of you may have different thoughts on this matter, but from a Search Engine Optimization and Marketing standpoint, it’s not a brochure.

The other issues that I have seen when websites are built is that everyone wants it to be “pretty” and all about 2.0. Two things – stop thinking ‘pretty’ and start thinking functional and toss that whole. 2.0 idea out. That was so 2005. This is 2010 and things are in “real time.”

Now, for my real issue, other than the fact that your website is NOT a brochure. The way things seem to go is that websites are being given to designers who know ‘pretty’, then over to the programmers who know ‘functional’ with lots of ‘cool’ coding, and the content is then allowed to be written by the marketing and PR departments and then when all is said and done, the SEO/SEM gets a hold of it.

Why is this a problem, you ask? Well, no thought as to how the website should be parsed out into sections was done. Keyword development hasn’t been done yet, either, and the overall navigation hasn’t been set up. Basically, the site was built backwards. The Search Engine Optimization and Marketing person (like me) should be a part of the beginning of the website and be the manager through the entire process of the build of the website. Keyword research is key for the beginning of any website and will usually lend itself to bringing to light what the navigation and silos of information will look like and help with cross-referencing and internal cross-linking.

Once that is all done, then the design and coding processes can be understood within the current standards of web development. While the design and coding is being done, the marketing and PR areas can start in on the content since they will have references to keywords that will be used within the site.

Too many times are websites considered an online brochure which is one of the main factors why websites are built backwards. So, remember, your website is Not a brochure, but rather an extension of your business to gain customer loyalty and recognition.

If you’re stuck in the “brochure rut,” feel free to contact me.

Happy website building!

OK, so I have used both of Google’s Traffic estimators, the one IN the Google Adwords campaign and the one outside of it. Both yielded different results. The one outside of Adwords was two times more than the one that was in Adwords. Here are my thoughts as to why this is:

Using the Google Traffic Estimator IN Adwords will yield lower estimated costs because they are going at it from a high Quality Score and that will get you a campaign that will cost less but have higher clicks and ad positions.

Using the Google Traffic Estimator outside of Adwords by regular people will probably generate higher costs because you aren’t:

So, I am working with another campaign and trying to figure out what the overall costs are going to be. We took the lower valued campaign estimate, divided it by thre and came up with a general number. Granted, this is a messy guesstimation, but it’s the best that we can come up with. The reason for this is that the campaign is running in one metro area, with the possibility of some surrounding cities. Our other campaigns that have had high campaign estimates never reached those estimates. And, for the content network, one of our campaigns running in that area with image ads was about 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of the text ads on the search network. Even the CPCs were about 1/2 to 1/3 of the text ads. So, for that campaign, we took the cost of the text ads on the Search Network and just cut it in half and proposed that as an estimate.

So, I’m hoping that by taking the lower estimate, dividing it by 3 for a local metro area will help us get a better idea on how to esimate our clients’ ad campaigns that run in very limited areas. And from that, to guesstimate the Content Network cost, we took the new estimate from the Search Network and divided that by half.

This ought to be interesting to watch.

Well, Spring has finally hit and it is time to get out riding again. This last weekend I held an impromptu ride to the Birmingham Botanical Gardens (Twitter: @BBGardens) with some friends. 2 of us rode, one followed in her car. Now, I have to tell you this, the last time I rode was back in June ’09. I then had a major shoulder injury that curbed me from riding. But, I was bound and determined to get back out riding this year. So, I got my insurance on my bike Friday night after work was all done and was ready to go on Saturday.

What a gorgeous day it was! Windy, but beautiful. My friend rode down on his ’08 CBR 1000 and we got ready to go from my place. I got all my gear on and started up my little ’06 Ninja 250. It took a little bit to get her up the hill, but heck, it’s been almost a year. I managed. Crested the hill and then it was on. We stopped to get a little gas and then headed out on the 280.

Mind you, it’s been since last year that I rode, and the only time I was on the 280 was for about a tenth of a mile to go meet a friend and then head back home. This time, I took the 280 like a courageous kitten on my little 250. It was a bit challenging at first, but I relaxed, headed forward and enjoyed my ride. I do have to tell you, though, riding on a motorcycle while it’s windy out is quite nerve-racking.  The fastest I have ever gone on my bike is about 40-45mph down Valleydale. This was a whole new experience.

I was in the lead since I knew where we were going. I pushed myself just some and accomplished this great ride. The 3 of us that went looked like the misfit trio. Roberta in her miniskirt, Carcel the 6’2″ country boy on his Honda CBR and black leather jacket, and me, the short n’ spicy noob with all my glorious Scorpion and Icon gear on. Talk about a totally mismatched trio. But, Oh! Did we have fun!

After we got through the gardens we decided to ride up to the Village Tavern for lunch. After lunch, one of the servers, Jessica begged us for a ride. Since I am a noobie, I let her use my helmet as she hopped on to the back of Carcel’s bike. About 10 minutes later, a wide-eyed Jessica and a smiling Carcel came back. Fun times!

We came back to my place. Well, correction, I didn’t mean to, but I left Carcel and Roberta at a light as I rode through a yellow. Oh dear, now I was on my own. Carcel finally caught up with me and we all safely got back to my place. We stretched out, I took off all my gear (that all probably weighs a good 20 lbs) and we watched some TV.

Later that night, Roberta and I decided to head out to On Tap so I could see some friends. I parked just right in an open parking spot next to a handicap parking spot. Well, someone decided that they wanted the same parking spot and knocked over my bike. Note, did you remember that I just got my insurance THE NIGHT BEFORE? Yeah. Lucky me. I called the police made a report and he made fun of me for not driving like a bat out of hell. Um, yeah, why would I? He decided that I was no fun as he would never be able to pull me over. Hah!

Well, luckily there was someone there to help me out. We unbent the handle bar and the shifter, he tested her out, and I was good to go home. However, she is looking a little rough around the edges to say the least.

I rode today to work, though, as I had to take my little girl to the shop. Beautiful day, too. Again, I traverse the 280 for the 3rd time in 4 days. You can say either I’m nuts, or just that I’m tenacious in getting used to riding. Probably both. Well, regardless, she’s at the shop and getting checked out. Hopefully, it’s not too bad, but I suppose we shall see.

All-in-all, I have had a good couple of days riding for this year. It’s beautiful out. So much so that it’s nice to finally be back on my bike.

If you ride, be careful out there. Most of us have had our bikes up for the winter and may be a little rusty. Take it easy, ATGATT (all the gear all the time) and make sure you enjoy 10% of your ride when you can and pay full attention 100% of the time. The other 90% of your ride, just make sure that you stay visible to those idiots that forget we’re out on the roads!
Best Wishes!

Rebecca Lynn Morrow
SEO Guru & Strategist of Birmingham, AL
And avid motorcycle rider