Posting your name first in title helps Google rank

I think the change I made last week posting the name of the compnay first in the url for the homepage readlly did work for Google ranking.

I changed from
About the Restaurant << The Black Rat Restaurant, Winchester
to
The Black Rat << The Black Rat Restaurant, Winchester

And now I get a reasonable rank on google for 'the black rat' on its own, 4th on google.co.uk. I think that is quite respectiable as the site does not have any PR yet and there must be millions of pages about real rats, 6,300,000 to be exact.

So quite pleased with my results at the moment.

Offline is a good boost

The other boost the site stats the local county newspaper did one review and one interview and then posted them on two of their websites. So the traffic jumped to double the highest point for a day on friday when it hit the news stands. See if it drops off again this week or not.

Another quick tip:
Put the url in plain text in a post on your blog as Google News tracker seems to like that more that in an a tag when reporting on wordpress.com stats. Not sure if it helps more than that. But it could be why my blog ranks over the main site?

Taken over the google top 10 for brand terms but main site not top

Well I am all over my keywords now on google now some of the backlinks and reviews are kicking in I hold 8 out of the 10 places on google.com and .co.uk for:
the black rat winchester
black rat winchester
black rat restaurant

Now I know they are not big terms but that does not matter they are my key brand terms for this site. The only problem is the main site is now no 3 or 4 as sub pages are showing on the search. Now all the pages seem to have 0 or unranked PageRank but this blogger account is from a bigger domain and then a review site and then the host site. Now my view is the domain with the keyword should come first but I guess bigger and older sites are still more important.

I have made a couple of changes and will watch next week to see if I can get the restaurants site to be first on the list. But anyway I am pleased with my results as I have not worked too hard to get those words. I am working to get into restaurant winchester and the more generic terms that I am low in.

As they say there are always about 80% more non brand terms you can get search traffic for than brand terms (will quote the report when remember it)

Second: Hit the directories

Next it was off to take the search results and generate back links on any restaurant directory I could find.

All offer slightly different listings so I thought I would show our listing where it is live. Some sites review the posts so you have to wait a few days. Some like Google Local even call or send you a card to your address to prove it is real.
I'll write some more about getting listed and what results the sites gave soon.

http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter?hl=en-gb&gl=gb
- Found this page by a random route on the google.com/local homepage but not listed if you just search from the main site.
- The other way I found on to the map is by creating your own maps in google and then the results come up in web searches, which is nice.

www.information-britain.co.uk

http://www.touristnetuk.com/SO/hants-n/food/winchester.htm

www.virtualtourist.com - add a forum post and review
http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/ed00c/49efa/2/

wikitravel.org - wikipedia's travel site, not many there which is good.
http://wikitravel.org/en/Winchester_%28England%29#Eat

http://www.foodfever.com/owner/207131/

http://www.touchsouthampton.com/business/list/bid/3930622

http://www.tripadvisor.com/pages/getlisted.html

http://www.restaurant-guide.com/uk+list-your-restaurant.htm

http://www.thomsondirectories.com/internet_advertising/addamendlisting.asp

www.upmystreet.com uses www.thomsonlocal.com results
http://www.upmystreet.com/findmynearest/add-listing/l/so23+9qf.html?fmnLoc=so23+9qf&fmnCatTerm=the+black+rat

http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/ed00c/49efa/2/

http://www.dine-online.co.uk/review-your-favourite-restaurant.htm
http://www.dine-online.co.uk/the-black-rat-restaurant.htm

www.freeindex.co.uk - This has a nice interface to add description of the business, using a fill in the blanks on existing sentences
http://www.freeindex.co.uk/addyourbusiness.htm?p=ca3

http://www.scoot.co.uk/assets/business/advertise.php

http://www.restaurantspy.com/node/65

First SEM: Preview post before site live

The first good think I did was right a preview about the restaurant opening in this blog on Blogger. That was good in two ways. First the owner of my borothers restaurant was not sure he wanted to pay for a site. We showed he needed one buy the fact that my one post got position 1 on Google for 'the black rat winchester' in a few days. This showed that no one was going to find them without my page and I even got personal emails of people trying to book dinner. So found that that works as a good example but I guess it was because we have an open market on the name. Everything else is for real rats or a black rat drink in america.

So even though I think The Black Rat is a bad name for a restaurant but for SEO it is kind of good as there is no real competition on the name. Unlike say "The Royal Hotel" or something common.

This ranked page still is the top referer after google. And when they had a website up I linked this ranked page. Even this related post will help the rankings, though it would be better on food not SEM activity.

Tracking the growth in site rank of a new blog/website

I have had the theblackrat.co.uk website live for I guess a month now. The work was done arround the 1 August but as it was never not live to the web I forget the exact day. I then started SEM work about 2 weeks ago. So I want to watch how much work I do effects the ranking and traffic of the site.

The site:
A worldpress.com free blog with extras paid for (CSS and own domain). Now it is a blog site but they are not going to use the blog for a while it is just about seven page straight website. I customised the css template a little.

Short falls:
The domain has to now www. but apart form I think that www. looks nice does not matter. I can not edit the template html and can not add any javascript (so nice google map embeded). Also anoying is no Google Analytics as they use it internally at WordPress so you get very basic stats. And can not edit or have any meta tags, which would be nice for the description tag.

My work:
I then worked my way through directories to get some back links and google ranking for my keywords. I took my first 5 terms ran the searches on google took all those sites and tried to get links. Also WebCEO software gave me some good links in Partners and also Google related: on sites of other winchester restautrants gave more links.

Google Maps now list user results from MyMaps

I have just noticed that Google Maps is now listing the data added from My Maps (google users saved public maps).

I noticed this when I searched for the restaurant I just did a site on and the results include the cutom map I had made for their website, and my result is first for the user content.
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=the+black+rat,+winchester&amp;ie=UTF8&z=13&om=1

So at the bottom of the Search results for Local business matches there is a link for "See user-created content" and you get a list of all pins added by users that match the search.



So Red pins for Google and then click and see blue pins from users



This makes another great SEO/SEM option to get exactly the copy you want into the local restults and AT THE MOMENT the only things commonly listed are people giving driections to friends. I.e. Small coverage and not so specific, and as we all know that makes a good target to give good data.

At the moment you do have to click to this extra content, but there are few results and maybe other searches on google services mix the results on the same page?

So off to create map locations of all the sites I work on and key locations for their content....