We apologize for the less than perfect transcription. We are testing out Dragon’s Naturally Speaking Software. This is a transcript from a recent episode of our Restaurant Marketing Podcast.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the restaurant marketing podcast.  Today’s topic is going to be back linking secrets.  A lot of restaurant owners and managers are looking for ways to drive traffic, not only into their restaurants, but also driving traffic to their sites. One of the best ways to do that is to make sure that you’re very visible on search engines. One of the best ways to make sure that you’re visible on search engines is to make sure that other websites are linking to you and thats what back linking is really called.  so here’s today’s topic, its gonna be 18 back linking secrets for your restaurant website.

The first one is really pretty simple and basic concept.  Target sites that have great content related your own.   That sounds obviously pretty easy but you’d be surprised how many companies, how many businesses, how many blogs, how many websites just go out and target the wrong website because they think they’re popular.  For instance,  a restaurant owner really doesn’t need to be focusing on a company like Walmart for instance to get back links from. Yeah, it would be really great to have a back link from Walmart but at the end of the day, you’re much better off having a back link from something relevant to your industry like Food Network for instance. So the first  and most important thing is to target sites that are relevant and have great content.

The next secret is to participate in web 2.0 sites. so a lot of people might not know what a web 2.0 site is and really what the point is. So creating content is obviously going to be important throughout any stage of driving traffic to your website but building these, building content on sites like squidoo, or infobarrel or hubpages, which are considered Web 2.0 sites can be very powerful and can drive a lot of back links not only to your site, but also drive some traffic to your site based on the content that you publish there.

The third secret really isn’t too much of a secret,  but a lot of people still don’t do it.. is make sure you share the content from your website on social networking sites like Facebook, like Twitter, like LinkedIn.  Make sure your sharing that information and the combined force of these will actually drive a lot of traffic to your website.

As we’re building these back links all throughout the web we want to make sure that we pace ourselves.  So the fourth secret is actually build back links slowly not quickly.  Google will actually penalize you if they see that you haven’t built any back links to your website over the past year and a half and all the sudden within the next 30 days you have four thousand backlinks pointing to your site… they are gonna think some kind of Software built them or that something is really fishy.  So you want to pace yourself.  That doesn’t mean you cant get started building back links today, but it means they need to be consistent, and if you’re gonna build 30 backlinks, do it over 30 days, consistently, or do it over 30 weeks consistently and don’t stop at that point. So if your building a link a day, thats great, but make sure you do it for a couple months so that Google doesn’t think its to fishy. To have ninety backlinks pop up tomorrow would be very fishy and in the eyes of Google.  You also want to make sure that you’re not going on any spammy websites to build these back links, you want to do them on relevant websites.

The fifth secret is to make sure that when you’re building a back link that you’re using the proper anchor text and that you’re using diversity in your anchor text.  So back linking really is is having again, a link pointing to your website from another website.  Most times you will see these links include what is called anchor text. Anchor Text for a restaurant might be something like the name of your restaurant, or the head chef of the restaurant, or say great Italian food and have the link pointing to your website and really what happens is that that text is highlighted that points to your website, and thats what anchor text is.  So if your companies or restaurant’s name is you know, lets call it John’s pizza, I don’t want every single anchor text link that I create, lets just assume I create 100 text links, I don’t want them all to say John’s pizza. I want some of them to say my name, John Smith, I want some of them to say just John, I want some of them to say just Pizza Restaurant, I want them to say John’s pizza, I want them to say all kind of different things because if all my links are the same again Google is going to look at that link and say hmm why are all 100 of these links the exact same thing, is it fishy? Probably!

When you think about something imagine your best friend, if you refer to your best friend 100 different times to 100 different people chances are good that you wont refer to them the exact way.  Youll say this is my buddy, this is my friend, this is my pal, this is John,  this is John Smith, this is a guy I know from school, this is a guy I know from work, a lot of different ways that are being referred to that individual. Well your anchor text links need be done the same way, hopefully that makes sense, but if don’t understand that, feel free to reach out to us.

The sixth back linking secret is guest blogging. Now guest blogging means that you’re writing an article for somebody else’s website and providing them with content that provides a link in that article back to your websites. So really what you’re doing is you’re going to find another food related company that has a website, providing a relevant article for them to post on their blog or on their website that links back to you.  Now obviously thats not going to work for everyone not everybody is of a blogger, not everybody is a great writer but you can actually find help you find people that will write the blog for you or write the article for you and you can use guest linking is your or guest blogging as a great strategy.  This is becoming more and more popular as Google penalizes websites for bad link building techniques guest blogging is becoming really really important.

So the seventh secret is commenting on authoritative blogs. Now one of the best ways to generate back linking links is obviously not just by writing articles but actually commenting on those articles on different websites so if you find a relevant and important website like food network that that might not interested in a guest blog from you, but you can comment on the article or on a blog post that somebody else did and a lot of times what you will see on listing for your name, listing for your email address the listing for your website now the name is gonna come up as anchor text so you don’t want to put your name every time specifically as John Smith for example. I might just put John sometimes, I might put Jon Smith, I might put John Smith of John’s Pizza, I want to mix that up… Now I don’t want to spam it, and make it see like it’s not relevant when they are asking for my name so I don’t want to put Italian restaurant, but I might say Italian restaurant critic John Smith, or Italian restaurant chef John Smith as my name.

And again, the website you want to have it linking directly to your website. And it doesn’t mean it has to go to the homepage so if you are talking about Italian restaurants, or you have an Italian restaurant, and you have an article that you wrote or a blog post about an Italian recipe for, an Italian food recipe for lasagna, like my other’s best lasagna recipe… You can actually link directly to that page, and if you find another website relevant to lasagna, then it makes more sense to link directly to your lasagna recipe than it does to your homepage. And Google will actually like that you’re going deeper into your website finding something relevant, so when doing these comments make sure its on something relevant but something authoritative as well. Authoritative just means that somebody is credible in the industry, and make sure that your comment provides good value dont just spam out some junk, make sure you read the article, give good and relevant feedback or comment appropriately on that blog, and make sure that you drop a link the way that I just mentioned and it will generate good quality links for ya.

So number eight of the 18 back linking secrets is video marketing. Video marketing is becoming a huge player in back linking strategies and the reason being that youtube is the second largest search engine in the world. The reason that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world is because of its popularity. The reason Google likes it,  is because Google owns YouTube. So make sure you create a channel for yourself create a bunch of useful videos and link them back to your blog or website. Now when I say useful videos, that means something thats relevant to the audience. So if its recipes, don’t be afraid to walk somebody through your recipe, if you want to show somebody how to properly carry a tray, thats useful information to an aspiring waiter, somebody thats really uncomfortable carrying 13 different platters on a big tray. You know, its got to be something that’s relevant and interesting and again, make sure let at the end of that article, or video that you put in who you are and what and where you are and where you come from, your companies name website, but also in the description of the YouTube content, make sure you drop a link in there.

The ninth secret is never ever ever buy back links! Never ever ever participate in link exchange programs. These are just nasty nasty things that Google has penalized and blacklisted websites for, so make sure you dont do it.

So the next secret is secret number 10 and its create infographics. If you’re not familiar with infographics yet, then you should go onto Google and type in the word infographics and you’ll get a feel for what I am talking about.  Chances are pretty good you have seen them recently and you may not realize that primarily what they are is a link building tool. what happens alot of times is if you create an infographic, people will link to it from other websites because they think it’s great, another good idea is to share your infographics with authoritative sites and just and just ask them for a link pointing back to your website as the originator of the content.

The 11th secret is to run contests on your blog or website and basically what you want to do is when you create that contest, you will find that people will link to it and tell their friends, whether it be on Facebook, whether it be on their websites, they will obviously tell people about your contest if it is a good contest.  Don’t just say “hey, win a five dollar gift certificate to my restaurant.” Nobody wants that!   At the end of the day, its a nice gesture, but people aren’t gonna to talk about that. Give it something that’s newsworthy something that’s remarkable something that people want to talk about and they will link to your website for that.

Another great secret for building back links to your restaurant website is creating a slide share presentation. SlideShare is becoming increasingly important platform for sharing content and also for link building. if you’re not familiar with what SlideShare is, again, Google it.

The 13th secret is to make sure that you’re posting images on Flickr or Instagram or other image sharing social media sites. These all provide links back to your website and especially if you are providing very  beautiful dishes and you do a great job on presentation in your restaurant. This is a great opportunity to have those images shared elsewhere.

The 14th secret, I really love this one, is create a podcast for your blog or your website. Podcasting is becoming ever more important in creating traffic to your websites and it is a great way to drive links as well and one of those great links that you can do or create is from Apple. It might not always be relevant but Apple is a very authoritative website and it is a great powerful website to generate a link from and you could also establish very strong relationship with your audience because now they cannot only read what you are saying but they can hear your voice and if it becomes much, much more personal experience.

The 15th secret is to answer questions and the best way to answer questions is to go on a website like Yahoo Answers or Quora and answer the questions. Now with those, it is a very simple strategy, just go in and type in something that is relevant to what you know about or you feel you are an expert about and if you see a question that you can answer then by all means answer it and drop a link for your website.

The 16th strategy or secret is actually something that I just talked about with giving away answers is giving away something completely totally free.  Now again, this is not an often situation where if you sign up for my email or if you sign up to my Facebook account, I am going to give you something free. Just do apply by the good of your heart. If you have something special like a new book that you have written then by all means give that away. If you have a contest that is good to promote that but what I would say is “Hey, I am going to give away no contest, no need for an entry, I am going to give away a free meal to the 100 person that walks into my restaurant this month.” And just talk about it. You will be surprised how many people will talk about that and how fuss worthy that becomes.

The Number 17 secret which probably should be number 1 hindsight is create wonderful content. And what I mean by this is don’t give content that you think is relevant and it sounds great in your eyes. What I want you to do is talk to other people, ask them what kind of content  they think would be valid. The reason I came up with this list here is because I ask other people what they thought was important to help market their restaurant and something that they wanted to do is drive traffic. One of the great ways to do that is increase your backlinking capabilities. So that is why this topic came up. Now, that is again what you want to do.  You want to make sure you are creating valid and epic content that is relevant  to your restaurant.

The final tip that I want to provide, this secret is start creating content. With that means is walk around, look at the people in your industry, look at their blogs, look at their websites, and if you think that it is important that you should share that information with your audience, even if it is a competitor, share it. You would be surprise how many people love to link to places and websites that they have mentioned on. So, if you find a relevant website promoting good information, hopefully like https://appetizingsites.com, don’t be afraid to talk about it on your website and drop a link to the other person’s website. You will be surprised to how much trust that builds with your audience that you are not afraid to share other people’s information, other people’s websites with them. They will establish that trust and credibility that you have such good information and that you can share it with other people that you know they will come back.

So, hopefully this information has been helpful to you. As always I am here to help you with your marketing needs on your restaurant as well as help you with your website needs.

So, if you have any questions or comments, please reach out to us. Thanks so much for reading and have a great day.