Restaurant Internet Marketing - It's Not Your Father's Yellow Pages

As a restaurant owner or manager are you taking advantage of all the opportunities offered up by the Internet or are you still counting on word of mouth and a traditional print marketing program to get diners filling your place? Are you even aware of what the Internet marketing can do for you? If you're not you're giving up business to your competition.

Take a moment to Google your type of restaurant (Italian, seafood, deli etc) and the name of your town and see what comes up on the first page. Do you see your name? How many competitors do you see? Now ask yourself "How many potential diners are going to come to my restaurant based on these results"? The answer of course is nada. Can you afford to give that business to your competition?

Location, location, location

Many local small and medium sized businesses have discovered the value of having an internet presence but it wasn't always that way. Most local businesses thought the internet best served big companies. On top of that, most small local businesses simply didn't have a clue how to participate effectively and they were too busy running their businesses to learn how.

The fact of the matter is that 72% of all searches are related to a search for local content. Nearly a year ago the monster search engine Google changed their algorithms so that local results show up on a search inquiry whenever appropriate. That means your shop can be just as competitive as a national restaurant chain when it comes to being found in search.

The difference between search and traditional advertising

So why is search such a big deal? The reason it is so much more effective than traditional marketing is that it responds to a specific need at a time when the potential diner is interested in the information. Unlike a weekly flier that's dropped in the home mailbox every Thursday, search doesn't clutter up a prospective diner's life but rater provides relevant information when the diner wants it not when the USPS delivers it.

When that potential customer is thinking about where to go for lunch he or she is going to search "pizza san pedro, ca" to find what's available in the area. In other words search delivers the information when the searcher is most receptive to it.

But wait there's more

Search by itself is reason to have a presence on the internet but the benefits certainly don't end there.

How would you like to be able to:

- Notify all of your customers what your daily specials are every day automatically.
- Invite your customers to place their order in advance so they don't have to wait for their food and do it without spending any time on the phone.
- Accept and confirm reservations electronically.
- Run promotional campaigns without spending a dime on advertising.
- Build solid customer relationships that will strengthen your word of mouth referrals.

And that's just the beginning. A professional internet presence will cost you significantly less than you are currently paying today for marketing. What's more, professionally managed internet presence keeps on giving even when you stop paying. Can you say that about your Yellow Page listing or print ads?

Online Reputation Management

There can be a potential dark side to this whole internet thing. You live or die on your reputation and it is important that you manage that reputation online. Never has the consumer had such an easy way to post anonymous comments for all the world to see. If you have a customer who has a bad experience don't be surprised if he or she posts it to a blog or a forum or gives you a bad review in the business directories.

Speaking of business directories, you already are on the internet even if you didn't know it. These directories scrape information out of Yellow Pages and other sources and add it to a business profile. You have a right to claim those listings and they are actually a great way to promote the business. But registered visitors also have the right to post reviews and if the only review your store has is from that disgruntled customer...your rep is shot.

There are just too many reasons that you have to get involved with the internet marketing. To not do so is to pass up an incredible opportunity for new business and to cement loyalty with regular customers. It's effective, inexpensive and essential if you want to remain competitive.

WebFrootz is an internet marketing agency, Baltimore website design, and Baltimore web development company MD specializing in comprehensive marketing solutions for small and medium business including branding, Website design and development, graphic design, copywriting, and SEO.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Restaurant-Internet-Marketing---Its-Not-Your-Fathers-Yellow-Pages&id=6498349

Complete SEO Services Introduces Affordable Content Writing Services for Effective SEO

Complete SEO Services, one of the UK’s leading search engine optimization companies has introduced an article-writing service for effective SEO. The UK based SEO company who has a vast amount of knowledge of how professional content can help with the improvement of traffic and search engine rankings have put that knowledge together with their professional writing team and launched a content writing service for effective SEO.

The new content writing service is aimed at helping marketing companies and website owners achieve their SEO goals. Content is king is a popular saying with professional website marketing companies and the saying has become even truer with all the changes that popular search engines have made to the way they rank websites. Offering quality articles that are well written and engage the target audience will not only help drive more traffic to the website and keep people on their for longer, it will also encourage search engines to rank the site higher.

A spokesman for Complete SEO Services said: “For SEO to be effective the website needs to have quality content. There are a lot of companies out there who offer spinning articles that can damage a website. A site needs to have up to date content that has been professionally written to keep visitors returning and to help improve search engine rankings.”

The SEO Services Company writes articles for companies all around the world from small businesses to large companies, but providing the same quality service no matter what size business they are.

Website owners have seen how all the recent changes with popular search engines have changed the way their sites have been ranked. With search engines now concentrating on sites that offer quality content, it is important to make sure websites have up to date content that has been written by professionals to help with positive SEO.

Source: http://digitaljournal.com/pr/1973692

Why I Use an Anonymous Web Proxy Service

I've been using an anonymous web proxy service for some time now and I don't think I would ever go back to ordinary surfing.    It's not that I am some sort of shadowy cyber criminal with some secret online life, no I pretty much surf the same web sites as everyone else, I certainly don't go to illegal or criminal sites.

If you want to know why, it's simply because I value my privacy and I know what data is stored in the average organisation and how it is protected.   Take your ISP for example, they logs pretty much everything that passes through them - every single request, every web page, every email and even every image is logged.   The vast majority of this traffic is in cleartext so the majority of it is instantly readable and can be matched to your address. 

It's amazing what these logs can tell about people you can build up a lot of information about someone from what they do on the web.  So do you know who has access to these logs at your ISP, what controls are in place, how is this information stored ?

If you don't know your not alone but after 25 years working in IT, I'll pretty much bet you wouldn't like to know the answer anyway.  This is the problem with much internet communication, it's so completely open - occasionally you'll obviously use a secure site to type in your credit card details.   Yet up to the point all your information is flying across the internet ether completely unprotected and accessible to anyone who has the will and the knowledge to intercept it. 

Believe me there are plenty of people who do have an interest in your information

Why do you think a European Directive was recently passed - Directive on Mandatory Retention of Communications Traffic Data.   It's  a bit of a mouthful but what it's  actually doing  is forcing your ISP to keep a record of every email sent, every internet session and web site visited for two years.   So think back at every web site you've ever visited for the last two years and it's on record and can be matched to your own little electronic profile.

How does that make you feel?

Even if you've done nothing wrong it's bound to make you feel a little uneasy after all why do Governments want all this information about us?   If you want to feel a little more uneasy, many Governments are looking at the UK Governments idea who are going to store all this information in a central database accessible to certain organisations.     Fear not US citizens you'll not be left out - the FBI are pushing hard for similar data retention facilities.

Storing data is dangerous

If you store data you have to be prepared to take good care of it.   All the privacy erosion concerns aside, the more personal data is stored about us, the more people will have access to it.  How thorough do you think is the vetting procedure for an ISP Technical engineer ?  Who potentially has access to huge amounts of this data.    Even if implicitly trust our govenrments with this tremendous invasion of our privacy - fraudsters, identity thieves and others can create mayhem with this sort of information. 

These logs are gold dust to anyone trying to steal our identity for example - they can match up users, with web sites, pick up password and all sorts of personal information.  Even  though a small part of this information is encrypted when you're actually using a secure web site (with the padlock below) there's plenty of other personal information available to compromise your usernames, password etc.

An identity thief can pick up huge amounts of data about the average person all ready, an hour or two picking up all your web traffic and they'll also have where you bank, what web sites you visit and logon to and a whole heap more.  This unfortunately is the tip of the iceberg and I suspect you'll see many, many people protecting  their privacy online soon from identity thieves, hackers and even our friendly snooping governments.

Everything I do online is private, I use a fast professional service that anonymises my connection and encrypts all the data.  My web logs sit next to yours in a server room at my ISP however mine are all completely encrypted and unreadable by anyone, whereas yours are in clear text.

One thing I should warn people about is the use of free anonymous web proxy services which you see all over the web.   Be very, very careful about these and think why are they supplying a very expensive and resource hungry service for free?   Remember also that by using one of these free proxies you are redirecting your traffic via this server whose owner can capture and log your data himself.   Many of these are owned and run by Eastern European Hacking groups as an easy way to gain peoples traffic, so be careful.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Why-I-Use-an-Anonymous-Web-Proxy-Service&id=1679289