Recipe SEO
Recipe SEO. The holy grail of food blogging: getting your recipe #1 on Google.
But how does it work?
It turns out that it’s both easy and hard.
The easy part is that getting your recipe #1 in Google is about the same amount of work as getting anything else to #1 on Google.
The hard part is, that can be hard!
First, something you need to know: there are no recipe formatting WordPress plugins which will increase your search ranking all by themselves. This isn’t my bad news, this is straight from Google, check out what Google says about recipe formatting:
(Note: Marking up your data for rich snippets won’t affect your page’s ranking in search results, and Google does not guarantee that markup on any given page or site will be used in search results.)
Darn. That seems like a bummer, but it’s really not. It means there is no silver bullet, and good results come from – as usual – basic recipe SEO.
Let’s take a look at some basic recipe SEO first.
Recipe SEO – the basics
Recipe SEO is much like every other kind of SEO, the same rules apply. You need these five principles to get started:
- Relevant URL for recipe: Your post slug is critical. Read more about WordPress post slugs for blogging SEO.
- Great blog post title: Almost as critical as your post slug.
- Keywords for recipe: Tell Google what your recipe is about by writing about your recipe.
- (Geek alert) Appropriate web page structure: your WordPress theme should handle most of this.
- Internal and external links: Write about your recipes everywhere. Don’t just write it up and forget about it. Your blog is like a garden, and your recipes are like seeds. Water your garden and your seeds by writing and talking about them elsewhere.
If these are new to you, mastering these five principles will take you past most of your competition.
If these are old hat to you, no worries, I’m sure you have a number of your own SEO tricks up your sleeve.
That said, using hRecipe can help.
How hRecipe plugin helps
Here’s a few ways:
- Google wants to have happy searchers, and when your recipe is nicely shown as a snippet, everyone wins. People searching for recipes can see the recipe “at a glance.” You could well get a click through from search… by not being #1… if the #1 result doesn’t have any recipe snippets.
- Remember: Google can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants. In the future, Google just might make recipe snippets rank better. Doing this little extra bit now may reap huge rewards in the future.
- (Geek Alert!) Well-structured recipe page makes better search engine friendliness. Google doesn’t give you brownie points for having hRecipe, but it hRecipe will automatically structure your recipe in a way that Google likes for plain old SEO stuff. And that’s cool.
- (Super Geek Alert!) For various technical reasons, when your recipe is microformatted, there is a lot of very cool things you can make the computer do. Like recompute quantities for different serving amounts, automatically. Let’s not go there yet. Later. For sure.
If you’re up for sharing any of your own tips and tricks for recipe SEO, or if you have questions, please leave a comment.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
← Previous Comments
Are you planning on supporting or moving entirely to http://schema.org/ micro-tagging. This would work for more search engines than just google ?
Anders,
Long term I plan on supporting http://schema.org/, definitely. Possibly by end of 2011.
It turns out all this semantic web technology is a decade old, or older, it’s just not caught fire yet. It’s still quite an uphill battle, too, as it’s a lot of work which is very tedious, and people won’t do it without seeing an immediate benefit.
Just to be clear, speed of implementation is directly proportional to amount of funding.
I have just installed the latest update for hrecipe in wordpress. When I select the recipe icon in a new post it opens a blank white popup page with “Add an hrecipe” at the top of a box. There is no content on the page and nothing to link to. Can you help me with what is wrong? It was working perfectly before.
Thanks heaps.
Lisa, your email bounced, I have no way of communicating with you other than through these comments.
Sorry Dave..
Yes, there are very good printing plugins for WordPress! I recommend using one which suits your fancy. Thanks for using hRecipe, really appreciate it, and the horse pictures are great!
okay, thank you!
I have formatted a lot of my posts with this plugin, none yet showing up in Google Recipe results but that may take time.
I’m concerned because when I look at the Google “Rich Snippets Tool” I get LOTS of warnings to do with the way the plugin generates the microformats…
Example: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.realepicurean.com%2F2011%2F08%2Ffettuccine-allamalfitana%2F&view=
This is based on my post: http://www.realepicurean.com/2011/08/fettuccine-allamalfitana/
Happy to donate…but can you re-assure me on the above, please?
Yes, and Google plainly states they reserve the right to not use snippets if regardless of the markup. It’s a lose-neutral game, we can’t really “win” but we have to play to not-lose.
Your snippet is working mostly.
Your time values do not have the correct ISO time specification attributes:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=173379
I do not know why this is, these attributes are specified in the hrecipe code here:
https://github.com/doolin/hrecipe/blob/master/js/hrecipe_format.js#L241
These attributes should not be removed from your elements.
The hfeed errors and warnings are a WordPress problem, there is nothing I can do about those.
Hi,
Just to make you aware, the attributes insert fine IF inserted in the HTML editor. If I insert in the Visual editor / switch to this later, the attributes are lost.
Any suggestions?
I just sent you an email on this.
In short: WP uses the visual editor to make it easy for users to NOT have to understand markup. This ease-of-use requires limiting what users can do.
I’ll see what I can do about this. However, modifying the visual editor is far outside my interest area, tedious and time consuming, so it will be more like next month instead of next week.
In the meantime, perhaps just use either the visual, or the markup, but not both.
I’m now using the HTML editor and it’s working fine.
I’ve tweaked Wordpress to fix all the hfeed issues – perhaps you should include a guide on that with the plugin (a readme?) since it’s necessary if users want to have validating rich snippets articles.
Finally, as a small response to other people, I have a cracking piece of JavaScript which prints just the contents of a single div (in my case, the “hrecipe” div) – therefore making a really easy feature to print the recipe itself with no extras. Perhaps similar code in the plugin would be very handy? I’m sure people would love the functionality?
I wants it.
I wonder about the heading levels in HRecipe. (I’m going to use brackets instead of greater than less than symbols here so you can see the markup).
[h2]Recipe[/h2]
[h4]Ingredients[/h4]
What happened to h3? Heading levels should be in order, and not skip, otherwise, they are being using for presentational purposes, not in a semantic manner.
Usually I don’t care about this, but I do occasionally have more than one part in a recipe, and mark it up as such:
[h2]Recipe[/h2]
[h3]Ingredients[/h3]
[h4]Part 1[/h4]
[ul]
[li]something[/li]
[/ul]
[h4]Part 2[/h4]
[ul]
[li]something[/li]
[/ul]
[h3]Directions[/h3]
[h4]Part 1[/h4]
[ol]
[li]Do something[/li]
[/ol]
[h4]Part 2[/h4]
[ol]
[li]Do something[/li]
[/ol]
Hi,
Is it possible to make some corrections or make some adds with hRecipe editor ?
Thanks
Thanks for the plugin ! I do have a question on how to set this up properly. I did read before, so I hope I’m not asking a question that’s been answered before. When I liik at my recipes on Google none of them have pictures associated with them. I looked at this via
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.KitchenCollisions.com%2Fcream-of-tomato-soupsoup%2F&view=cse
I think the images have a big impact on clickthrough and would like to find out what I’m doing wrong. If your able to look and see, I’d be greatly apprishated.
Scott
KitchenCollisions.com
Scott, there is nothing on this: http://www.kitchencollisions.com/cream-of-tomato-soupsoup/
Hi there,
I was wondering how you can use hRecipe and integrate it with your recipe picture so that is shows up next to the description in search results. Does hRecipe even do this?
Thank you,
Peter
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