Being a restaurant owner means you are always interested in getting more people into your restaurant, whether that be return customers or new customers, hopefully always a mixture of both. Fortunately, the Internet can help you in your marketing goals and not cost you a lot of money. However, since you will be marketing your particular restaurant, even if it is a chain, you will need to include a lot of locally specific information.

Tip #1 – Directories

A great way to increase your traffic is to focus on local directories that focus on area restaurants. You can provide your information, menu, pricing guide, directions, and other pertinent information so when individuals are searching online, whether locals or visitors they will come across your link. This will allow you to reach more people than otherwise and always put your restaurants name in people’s minds when they are considering where they want to eat.

Tip #2 – Links

Links are great for driving traffic, regardless of whether you want local traffic or not. For local traffic you will need to get your link on a lot of other local web pages to increase your area exposure. It does not matter where your links are as long as you have them when it comes to search engine statistics. If you have a lot of links you will get better search engine rankings.

Tip #3 – Keywords

Keywords are also important for your restaurant to get more business. Evaluate what keywords describe your restaurant and services and be sure to include your location in city and state. This will help your information to come up when people are looking for a specific type of restaurant in your area.

Tip #4 – URL at Restaurant

Another interesting tactic that works well is for you to include your domain name on your paper napkins, menus, mints, and anything else that people will see when dining in your restaurant. They will realize you have a web presence and will be able to visit the next time they are considering eating out. They can use your website to book reservations, place a takeout order, read the menu, or simply get directions. This is a great way to keep new and return customers informed and returning.

Now that you know how to get your restaurant promoted online go ahead and start today. You don’t want to lose anymore business to the competing restaurants that already have an online presence. Get started immediately and enjoy your increased traffic and sales. Once you see your results, you will wonder why you waited so long to get your restaurant online.

It amazes me how many small business owners who come to me for Search Engine Optimization for their already existing website haven’t done one of the simplest things, one thing I consider to be a first step in building your business’ online presence.

As a business owner that is always looking to reach new customers your website is a very important part of making yourself available to servicing your customers needs. But if nobody knows about your website then it isn’t being effective in bringing in new customers.

In the old days a brick and mortar type business would set up shop and invest in an advertisement in the local phone book to bring in customers from the surrounding area. To be honest, not much has changed. Sure, you may not have a physical business location but the popularity and terrific potential of the local phone book is still a massive customer building option.

Phone book advertising can be expensive. The costs of printing and delivering hundreds of thousands of phone books to every residence have to be paid and those costs are pushed onto the business owner looking to make a decent return on their investment.

But on the internet publishing costs can be minimal, allowing the major phone book companies to give away free phone book listings.

That’s right Free!

Why? Because they want to have a useful web presence to keep visitors coming back and because they want to know about your business so they can attempt to sell you on upgrades and more expensive packages.

In the mean time your business name, website address and maybe even phone number are getting out there to potential customers looking for your type of service or product at no extra cost to you.

The best part is that there are only four major Business Directories which make up the largest segment of online traffic and they all offer free listings for your small business website.

They are:

AskMrYellow.com, BizWeb.com, SuperPages.com and YellowPages.com

I can’t recommend Yellow Pages enough. It has shown me a great customer response and it is the only Free Business Directory that creates a backlink to your website which is indexed by the search engines.

And as any business website owner should know generating backlinks is imperative in search engine placement and ranking for your business related keywords. To add icing to the cake YellowPages.com is a Page Rank 8 website.

So if you are online to make money and expand your existing business by exposing yourself to new customers then the free business listings with the phone book directories can not be ignored.