restaurant-website-SEO
Lecomte Sophie

Consultante éditoriale, Sophie Lecomte aide les PME à attirer plus de clients et augmenter leurs revenus sur Internet.

To improve your restaurant website’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERP), we recently discussed how to find the right target keywords for your search engine optimization. But how can you optimize a page or an article for search engines using your selected keywords?  This checklist should help you. It applies to both your blog articles and all your Web pages. These principles also apply to your online ordering site’s product pages.

  • Choose one primary keyword per page

The main error made by SEO beginners is to place as many keywords as possible on the same page. This is called keyword stuffing… and there’s no good to be gained from it, to say nothing of the fact that it will turn away your visitors. So forget about creating pages and articles that contain dozens of references to “restaurant in London”, “london restaurant”, and “London restaurant”.  Instead, choose one target keyword or one expression per page when optimizing your content… and insert it sparingly. 

  • Create a single heading for your page

Each page or article on your site should have a single heading. Insert your primary keyword in this heading, ideally near the start. The idea is to stay attractive to visitors; a good alternative is to slightly modify the heading that will appear in the Google results pages using a plugin such as SEO by Yoast (if you use WordPress).

  • Optimize the page’s URL

URLs are the addresses of your pages (the ones you see or enter in your browser’s address bar). Give preference to short, descriptive URLs, and make sure you include your keyword. For example, if your target expression is “vegetarian pizza recipe”, you could go for the following type of structure: yoursite.com/blog/vegetarian-pizza-recipe

  • Structure your article and optimize your textual content

To make it easier for search engine robots/crawlers (and visitors for that matter) to understand your content, structure your articles and your pages so that they can be “scanned”, and according to a set hierarchy. Use subheadings in keeping with the following tag order: <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, etc. Try to insert a synonym of your primary keyword in these subheadings rather than the expression in question. In the body of the actual text, SEO optimization means using a lexical field that will confirm and develop the topic targeted by the keyword… and the subject of your page or article.

  • Add internal and external links

Ideally, a blog page or article should contain two types of links: internal links (that refer to other articles on your site, ideally within the same category, or even directly to the page’s “parent” category), and outgoing links, which are all too often neglected, but which play an important role. Create links to reliable sources and sites that deal with the same topic: this will not only help your readers, it will also underpin your SEO effort.

  • Describe your images

Since robots can’t “see” your images, you must indicate what it is these images represent. For this purpose, name your images before loading them on your site. These names should describe the images and, when appropriate, include your keywords. Do likewise with the “alt” tags of each image. If you use WordPress or an online ordering site such as LivePepper, you will easily see where to enter these tags.

  • Bonus: Create attractive meta descriptions to increase your pages’ click rate in the SERPs

While this action is not a direct SEO criterion, it serves to increase traffic to your site (without necessarily changing its ranking). These descriptions concern the results shown when an Internet user runs a search on Google. Create headings and a short description to show users that your page corresponds to what it is they are searching for and, above all, incite them to click! While these descriptions do not, in themselves, represent SEO criteria, a good CTR (Click-through rate) will help to boost your site’s ranking.

Conclusion

This checklist should help you to better optimize your pages and thus improve your referencing. Remember that the content you publish is intended for real persons, and that SEO involves much more than just a few on-site tweaks. Want to find our more… or go back over the basics? Refer (back) to our SEO guide for restaurateurs. It’s free, and will help you to better understand how to gain in terms of organic visibility. By all means post any questions you may have below. (c) photo, modified for the article: Flickr