Food Blogging and SEO: What You Can Do To Make Google Give You More Love
If you want to be a serious food blogger and you get no love from Google, then you are in for trouble.
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is an integral part of writing for the online medium. Generally, people believe that if they liberally drop keywords in a piece of writing, it is going to create an SEO friendly post. This is certainly not the case.
The ease with which you can make your blog SEO friendly depends a great deal on the blogging platforms one uses. For example, with Wordpress, a simple plugin will do the job. It’s often not the same with Tumblr and Blogger.
Since not many food bloggers use Tumblr, I'm keeping this post more aligned to the Wordpress and Blogger users. With particular emphasis on Blogger.
While we were migrating a few blogs from Blogger to Cucumbertown, we noticed that an overwhelming number of them had very little search traffic. Most of them had under 10% search traffic.
Microdata, hrecipe and SEO
The primary focus of most food blogs is the recipe. And when Google crawls your blog, it needs to understand the recipe. When you are writing a recipe on Blogger or Wordpress without the SEO plugin, it becomes hard for Google to understand your recipe, even if it is the best in the world. This is where things like microdata and the hrecipe format come into play.
Both microdata and hrecipe help Google index your recipe, elevating its chances of coming up higher on the search results. From my research, I haven’t been able to find any way in which you can add schema microdata to Blogger. There are several plugins for Wordpress.
This is how microdata is used on Cucumbertown. The RecipeWriter looks something like this.
Once the recipe is written, it looks like this:
In the back end, the code makes it easy for Google to understand what exactly each thing is. Meaning what is the ingredient, what the cooking time is, what the cuisine is and so on.
This clearly organises everything that has been written, into structured data. However, like I mentioned before, there doesn’t seem to be a tool to help create recipes in this format for Blogger.
With hrecipe, there is more luck for users of Blogger.
Basically, it identifies foodstuffs and ingredients. The hrecipe format not only helps you in getting the attention of Google, it also makes it easy to use the recipe in meal planning apps and websites. This in turn creates backlinks to your post, which again increases the significance of your blog or post in the eyes of Google.
Now, on it’s own, there is no provision in Wordpress or Blogger to write recipes this way. But there are some popular plugins available which does the trick. Since this post is more for the users of Blogger, RecipeSEO is one of the popular applications that helps you create recipes with SEO in mind.
Once you have entered all the relevant information into the app, then you can use the code which it comes up with on your blog.
All this may seem like a lot of effort. But the bigger picture here is that using tools like this will increase the chances that your recipe will show up as a rich snippet on Googles search. This is what it looks like:
It’s easy to see why this is a big deal. Of course, simply using these two are not going to ensure that the recipe attracts Google’s attention. But they can make a difference.
At Cucumbertown, we were initially using hrecipe, but then discovered that we had greater luck with Google while using microdata.
Using Keywords Intelligently
In the opening statements in this article, there was a reference to blatant overuse of keywords in a blog post. Initially, it may have worked, but Google is too smart for such gimmicks. Now there is a filter for Keyword Stuffing. So if you are mindlessly inundating your post with keywords without any rhyme or reason, then more harm will be done than good. Posts like the one below are exactly what should not be done while writing any blog.
Instead of concentrating on keyword density, which reportedly has come down in significance, there are ways one can come up with posts which do use keywords. But this is more in the planning stage than anything else.
The Wicked Noodle, a prominent food blog encourages the use of Google Adwords Keyword Planner. What the author advises, is to basically use this tool to eliminate competition to a certain extent when you are planning on your next blog post.
So if you were planning to make a pasta bolognese, and ran a search on Google, this is what you would get:
That’s 22,60,000 results. That’s your competition. The chance of your pasta bolognese appearing on the search results is marginal at best. Instead if you were to chose Spaghetti Bolognese, search results would look like this:
That’s 11,80,000. The number is still huge. But it’s half of the previous competition. What the tool mentioned earlier does is, it sifts out the best possibilities based on a keyword you have entered. So if what you entered was pasta bolognese, the Keyword Planner would tell you which is the most likely recipe to give you a heads up in the search results.
This tool evaluates competition and you can find recipes with a high search rate but low competition. These would be the ideal ones to work on.
This kind of advice is golden especially for new bloggers. They can start off with low competition recipes. And if their recipes are written with structured data in mind this can help them create a presence on Google from the get go.
Another important thing to do is to use keywords in the heading itself. There are ‘head terms’ which is a single word that would describe the most significant content about your post. So if the post is about Chocolate Cake, Cake would then become the head term. Then there are ‘longtail terms’. These are phrases that would be used for searches. Like, “how to bake a chocolate cake”.
It is advised that both head terms and longtail terms are used in the post for the benefit of SEO.
Link Building
There is more to getting your recipe featured on another blog or online publication than just ego stroking. When a link to your blog is featured on another blog, this gets Google’s attention. And if you are lucky enough to have been featured on a blog with high traffic and traction, with clicks to your page, then this will definitely help you with SEO. Food bloggers will generally comment on other food bloggers’ pages and leave a link to their page.
This will usually result in clicks to that page and an ongoing relationship is built between the bloggers.
Things to Keep In Mind While Creating a Post
While there is no way that you can create good content if you are only writing with SEO in mind. But there are certain things that one can do to increase your luck with SEO and it will actually improve the quality of your content.
The first thing to do is to place the best photograph of your dish, right at the beginning of the post. In Cucumbertown, the RecipeWriter was designed in such a way that this would always be the case. This way there are greater chances of your image showing up in Google Image search.
The next thing also relates to images more than the actual text. Name your images. Don’t leave the images with names converted from the camera; DSC145678 does not in any way help with SEO.Name the photo based on what it actually is. If it is Chicken Tikka, call it that.
If you are lucky enough to have someone want to feature your content in their blog or publication, do not give away all of your content. Allow them the feature the image with links to your own blog. Duplicate content is not good for SEO, and without people clicking through to your blog, backlinks are not created.
The other thing to do is to keep your titles consistent throughout your post. So if your title is Chicken Tikka Masala, this should also be a part of the tags and the URL. At Cucumbertown, this is automated. In Blogger and Wordpress, you can do this yourself and customise tags and the URL too in some cases.
Make sure there is just one recipe per page.
Make sure there is a meta description. This is the little bit of text that shows up on Google search results immediately after the title.
While adhering to SEO is not easy, the results are certainly worth it. Even after you have forgotten a recipe, Google will remember it and give you traffic consistently. And there is no greater joy for a blogger than seeing a recipe from two years ago, still bring in visitors every single day from Google.
To hear more from the Cucumbertown Team, connect with us. We would love to know what you think!
