Food blogging is fun but if you are not able to get visitors to your blog, then all that fun dies off in a year. One of the biggest problems of most bloggers today is, Generating Traffic. If you too have a problem of traffic to your website, then you will like this free eCourse on traffic generation.
In a series of posts to come we will be discussing about how to generate traffic to your food blogs. In this post today we are going to touch upon one of the methods and a simple technique used in this method.
Most of our traffic is in the form of Organic searches. By “Organic Traffic” we mean, the traffic that comes from search engines, primarily Google.
How does this happen?
You search on Google for something. Google shows you a series of results. You find one relevant result and click on it to be taken to the page. This is called an organic search and the website you just visited gained a visitor using Organic search.
Now, the obvious question in, “How do you get featured in those search results”?
We can discuss the details of this in another post. But in this post we are going to talks about a nice little simple strategy.
Appearing in Google Recipes Searches
If you have ever searched for a recipe on Google, you would have noticed that the results are displayed in a nice grid with pictures of the recipes and many handy information about it, just like in the below image –
These are called as “Rich Snippets”. But how do you get Google to display recipes in the form of Rich Snippets?
In order for Google to display your recipes using Rich Snippets, your pages need to be marked up for the recipe information. If technical information is Greek to you, then let me put it in simple terms.
Your blog posts need to have a specific kind of code which will help Google identify that your post is about a recipe. This code will help capture information like ingredients, method of preparation, preparation time etc. and Google uses these information to display your recipes in the form of Rich Snippets.
Now comes the more difficult question. How do you insert this code into your recipe posts?
If you are on WordPress, then thankfully there are a number of plugins that help you do that. In other words, instead of manually inserting the codes into your posts, all you need to do it install the plugin and follow the steps there. And your recipe posts are ready to show up in Google Recipe Searches.
WordPress Recipe Plugins for Rich Snippets
While there are a number of plugins that can help you insert the required markups in your recipe posts, there are a few that we have used and recommend. But you are free to choose whichever you want.
Easy Recipe Plugin
In our recipe posts you would have noticed that the recipes are displayed in a beautiful grid towards the end of the posts. It even has a print option in it. This is done using the “Easy Recipe Plugin”. This is one of the best plugins that we have used for this purpose and if you can spend $25 for its premium version, then you get numerous handy options as well. You can find this plugin here.
Yummly Rich Recipe Plugin
We discussed about yummly which is a nice recipe post aggregator and collector website, in our last post here. They have a nice little plugin that does everything that you will need to show up in the Google recipe searches. It adds the required markups and also adds the “YUM” button to your recipes.
Recipe Card from Yumprint
The recipe card from yumprint is another good option if you don’t want to pay for a plugin. It is free to use and has a lot of options including some customizations. But we had to discard it for Easy Recipe Plugin because of its features. Yumprint recipe card is available here.
If you are starting off with your food blog, we recommend using one of these from the beginning itself. If you don’t, then you will end up with the same problem that we had to go through, which is to edit all our old posts and add the required recipe format to it. This can be a pain if you have a lot of recipes on your blog.
We hope you liked this post. Don’t forget to share it, if you liked it.
