In today’s online world a modern business must have a Web presence that communicates its brand and basic information to target audiences.  Despite that 89% of Internet users research restaurants online, thousands of restaurants still have little or no online presence. It’s essential that Riverside restaurants develop and maintain a basic website.  You may say that your business does not need a website, that it’s too expensive or you don’t have time to create or maintain it.  But when the purpose of a website is to deliver value to your customers, who in turn generate business, a website is essential.  In the same way you satisfy customers when they visit your restaurant, you should satisfy their informational needs online.  For the Riverside restaurant owner or manager, there are many benefits of having a website.  Here are a few:

1. To generate awareness, exposure and extend your brand. Your website lets people know who you are and gives potential customers a feel for your restaurant, menu and atmosphere. You also have the opportunity to demonstrate to customers why your restaurant is the right choice for them in Riverside.  Remember, first impressions count.  A smart, simple design will help you convey the professional-yet-appealing image you want.

You have options when it comes to creating a website.  The least expensive method is to (of course) do it yourself.  With some software, a reference guide or two, and your dedication, a person with basic computer skills can have a simple website up within a week or less.  You can also decide to use Innovate we can handle everything from domain registration and renewal to hosting, site design, development and maintenance.  We also use search Engine Optimization best practices when we build our sites which will help improve the search results placement of your site once it launches.

2. To provide basic information such as hours of operation, payment methods, and location. While you most likely aren’t available 24 hours a day to answer these questions, your website, aka your ‘virtual storefront,’ is always there to address visitors’ questions.

3. To enhance your competitive advantage. There is a good chance that other restaurants in the Riverside area have websites and are luring your potential business because they can be found more quickly.  Many potential customers like to “comparison shop,” researching several restaurants online before making a decision about where to eat.   Without a web presence, your restaurant may no longer be considered an option for them.  You may also miss out on being listed in local online directories that feature your competitors.Before building your website, it is a good idea to check out what your competitors are doing online.  It’s a great way to get inspiration and ideas and think about ways that you can differentiate yourself. Innovate can offer a thorough competitive analysis.

4. To improve internal efficiency and customer service. Does your staff repeatedly get bombarded by the same requests over and over again?  A great way to cut down on time spent fielding issues is to publicize that information on your website.  Rather than having a potential customer call for driving directions to your restaurant, they can be downloaded by the customer from your website, saving time and hassle for both your staff and the customer.

5. To promote products or services. Many Inland Empire restaurants offer products or catering services in addition to their general restaurant operations.  But many of your customers don’t know this!  Assign prominent areas of your website to address the full breadth of your restaurant’s offerings and you will build greater awareness and generate more business.

6. To publish timely content such as events or promotions. What do customers love?  They love a good deal or promotion.  When you publish simple promotions, such as a downloadable coupon on your website, it keeps your restaurant at the top of your customers mind, and keeps them coming back.

7. To serve the press. In addition to serving customers, your website functions as a public relations tool.  With tight press deadlines, media professionals writing about your restaurant need things like high-quality imagery and text about your restaurant.  By making this information available on your website, you can make lives easier for the press and increase your chances of free media publicity.

8. To build a relationship with customers. A website is a great place for capturing customer feedback through comments and surveys. In addition, a clean website with regularly updated content and promotions is a place where customers return again and again – just like they will return to your restaurant.  You can cultivate and maintain a one-on-one trusting relationship by publishing a regular email newsletter that offers unique, interesting content and special deals to your subscribers.

9. To save you money. Having an online presence 24 hours a day is less expensive than printed advertising, TV Spots, mailers and nearly any other form of promotion.  And unlike the aforementioned materials, websites can be updated as often as you like.  The only type of promotion you’ll need once your website is launched is…promoting your website and Innovate can help!

10. To increase your business. Despite economic difficulties, customers still are going out to eat.  They are just being more careful and analytical in their restaurant selection.

As you may realize, a website is not something that you simply publish online and then ignore for several years. The Internet is ever-evolving and new opportunities, from online and mobile ordering to more sophisticated marketing ideas come up almost daily that can benefit your business.  It will benefit you in the long run to invest in your restaurant’s online presence.

The social toolbar is accessible on Shoptivity.com website and is aimed at enhancing its consumers’ online shopping experience by linking them to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The toolbar serves to connect Shoptivity.com’s online community shoppers to its fan page on Facebook where they can discuss their favorite products, best buys and find out the latest offers.

Founder of Shoptivity.com XXX said, “We are incredibly excited about what a great reception we have received on our Facebook fan page. Now we have a Shoptivity.com community on Facebook with whom we can connect meaningfully to better understand their need.”

With daily postings featuring a wide range of products on its Facebook fan page, ranging from camping chairs to ice cream makers and from movie DVDs to Lego Star Wars sets, Shoptivity.com has attracted thousands of ‘likes’ from fans who have signed up since its launch in May 2010.

Shoptivity.com’s fan page has attracted a varied and diverse group of fans from different cultural backgrounds who share something in common – their passion for shopping and browsing online for the best bargain and latest offers.

Other than utilizing Facebook as an alternate online tool to inform its loyal consumers about the latest product offers, Shoptivity.com has also received heavy traffic to its site through its fan page on Facebook.

The constant updates posted on its Facebook fan page have attracted keen interests of retailers and brand names that have also linked their pages to Shoptivity.com’s on Facebook. The sixteen retailers and major brands on Shoptivity.com fan page including Levi’s, Nike, Macy’s Oakley, Best Buy, RVCA, ALDO Shoes and Burberry, have shared the page’s popularity and have attracted significant attention from Shoptivity’s fans.

By connecting to Facebook’s thousands of fans, Shoptivity.com has charted a significant milestone by strategically positioning itself as the prime online comparison shopping website for savvy shoppers all over the world.

Shoptivity.com is America’s leading online comparison shopping website that offers free information and price comparisons on a wide range of products such as clothing, shoes, computer, electronics, home appliances, office equipments, cars, sports gears, video games, jewelry, watches, musical instruments, books and toys. To date, Shoptivity.com has featured millions of products offered by more than 11,000 retailers or stores at its site and has become the key website where savvy shoppers go to for information on the latest offerings and best buys in town.

SwoopUp is an attractive solution that was created to make shopping online easier for everyone. On this site you will find information about a wide range of products and online retailers, as well as you will be able to make use of a significant quantity of benefits. For instance, in case you are interested in coupons and deals, as well as discounts or promotions, this will be an attractive site where you can find all of them together in on place.

If you are an avid online shopper you are going to find this site highly beneficial due to the fact that you will have the chance to get a wide variety of immediate discounts at the most important internet retailers. The site was actually created by people that have an extensive experience by working on the e-commerce. In case you want to learn more about this site give it a visit at Swoopup.com and you will be benefited with a variety of highly convenient advantages.

SwoopUp was created to make shopping online easier for everyone. We’ve partnered with thousands of online retailers and have combined all of their coupons, deals, discounts and promotions in a single destination. As an online shopper you’ll easily benefit from instant discounts at thousands of the top internet retailers.

Google late Wednesday announced that its search engine was now running on “Caffeine,” meaning search results would show more recent information posted on the web as the technology behind it indexes results in seconds rather than weeks. But the allure of Caffeine isn’t just the actual real-time search engine, it’s the secret infrastructure sauce that Google uses to make a continuing real-time index of the entire web possible. That technology involves custom-built hardware and software that plenty of startups or business analytics companies would love to get their hands on.

I’m not going to be much help in telling folks anything on the hardware side because Matt Cutts, Google’s search guru, was fairly tight-lipped in an interview with me. He described the new indexing process as a cache and batch process job, whereby files aren’t stored for long before they’re indexed. Such an effort, especially on the scale of petabtyes as Cutts described, would involve bringing the memory close to the physical compute, likely through SSDs and faster interconnects on the hardware side.

But even though Google’s custom-built hardware is a source of speculation, it’s the software that’s making it possible to exploit the power of commodity parts in Google’s custom gear. And it’s the software that really gives Google the advantage. Cutts admitted last year when the company first announced its Caffeine efforts that the software underpinning it all was a next-generation version of the Google File System dubbed GFS2. From a report in The Register written last year detailing the changes in GFS2:

But GFS supports some applications better than others. Designed for batch-oriented applications such as web crawling and indexing, it’s all wrong for applications like Gmail or YouTube, meant to serve data to the world’s population in near real-time. “High sustained bandwidth is more important than low latency,” read the original GPS research paper. “Most of our target applications place a premium on processing data in bulk at a high rate, while few have stringent response-time requirements for an individual read and write.”

The GFS2 that underpins Caffeine has multiple masters and slaves so it can scale out and offer redundancy. It also breaks up the amount of data stored in each file from 64MB to 1MB, according to the information cited by The Register. Cutts explained to me that the Google Caffeine allows for a better ability to annotate smaller amounts of data and attach it to relevant files. It’s only logical that shrinking the overall chunks of data makes for more granular information retrieval, but it can also make updating only certain aspects of a site possible, by extension reducing the amount of time spent processing and being sent around the data center.

Google’s solutions for scaling up to deliver information and web services cheaply and quickly everywhere have influenced the way coders have built their own webscale services, even though Google has kept code like BigTable proprietary. As it seeks to optimize its code for the real-time web — and reduce latency across all products — it may continue to influence folks, even as startups like Twitter, Northscale, Facebook and others are seeking ways to stay on top of the real-time flow of information and offering their own efforts to the open source community.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com

“We help people save time and money. Our goal is to make the online shopping experience easy and pleasant. Users of Shoptivity.com continually tell us that they love the site because they love saving money. We value our customers and are dedicated to providing accurate and reliable information and service.”

Leading online comparison shopping site, Shoptivity.com, recently launched a dynamic social toolbar on their e-commerce site. Accessible from the homepage, and handily available throughout the site, the toolbar allows customers to quickly and easily connect with Shoptivity.com on major social networking sites including Facebook and Twitter along with an exciting array of additional user options.

Key features of the toolbar include allowing site visitors to:

• Like the Shoptivity.com business page on Facebook;
• Transfer information;
• Email a friend;
• Bookmark a page;
• Print;
• Bookmark via Delicious;
• Vote via Digg;
• Bookmark via Google;
• Visit the Shoptivity.com Fan Page on Facebook;
• Follow Shoptivity.com on Twitter;
• Join live chat.

With the toolbar’s implementation, Shoptivity.com has simplified their customers ability to find the site across social networking platforms while offering customers an additional array of social media tools to enhance their site visit experience. With the prevalence of social media in consumers daily lives, the tool is a logical site enhancement for the popular online shopping portal. Conveniently located on the bottom of each page, users will find it unobtrusively offers an array of features including but not limited to; social sharing, email and chat. Interaction with Shoptivity.com and their customers’ preferred social media tools is a mere click away.

Savvy customers have come to rely on Shoptivity.com as the online destination for all comparison shopping needs. The free integrated toolbar is a site feature that users will quickly come to value as an extension of their browsing and shopping experience. With the addition of the toolbar, Shoptivity.com continues to demonstrate to site visitors a commitment to making the shopping experience both easy and pleasant. With a current count of over 3,500 Facebook Fans, Shoptivity.com boasts a loyal following who will quickly embrace the benefits of this robust new offering.

About Shoptivity.com

Shoptivity.com is a cutting-edge online comparison shopping website offering customers access to shop and compare millions of products throughout thousands of stores. The site affords customers the opportunity to save time and money while making the shopping experience easy and pleasant.

Websites that are considered trustworthy and authoritative are visited more regularly by Google. The Google cache data therefore reveals how much Google trusts your website by period of time before your website is revisited.

It stands to reason that we need to keep an eye on how long it is before Google bot revisits the website, this will give us a view of how Google is rating the website in a smaller time period rather than waiting for the PageRank toolbar update every three months which gives us a broader indication.

Wall writes the popular blog SEObook and is a frequent speaker at the Search Engine Strategies and PubCon conferences.

Referencing or link popularity being the way the search engines work out how popular a page is and rank it accordingly. With Tweets, retweets etc it’s important that the algorithms such as PageRank are adjusted to take this growing trend into account.

Google and Bing will both be developing their search engines to deliver the best results whilst incorporating this factor, this will probably be one of the major battle grounds in the coming year in terms of displayed results.

• North American Search Engine Marketing expenditures are expected to nearly double from approximately 13.5 billion in 2008 to 26.1 billion in 2013.
  • Spend and Growth will be Driven By:
    • Increasing advertiser focus on accountability and ROI
    • Increase in small-to-midsize businesses using SEM

• Surprisingly (to me anyway), the top SEM objective for advertisers was Brand awareness (63%) not sales (61%).

• For the first time, most advertisers allocated new funds for SEM programs. Where’s that money coming from?
  • Top 5 budgets being reallocated to SEM (in order):
    • Print Magazines
    • Direct Mail
    • Print Newspaper
    • Web site development
    • TV Advertising

• Everyone loves the idea of Behavior Targeted Advertising, theoretically.
  • Advertisers on average would pay about 10% more for both demographic and day part targeting, and 13% more for behavioral targeting.
  • While advertiser interest in behavioral targeting is very strong and virtually unchanged from last year, actual investment is still low.
  • 2 in 5 advertisers said they are not currently targeting or re-targeting searchers but plan to in the next 12 months.
  • Over a third (34%), said they are not currently targeting or re-targeting searchers and do not plan to in the next 12 months.