In its continuing effort to keep low quality content out of its search results, Google announced this week that it would be supporting “authorship markup”. Authorship markup is essentially a couple of specific pieces of code you can add to links that would designate you as the author of that content.
a way to connect authors with their content on the web. We are experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results.
Since Google introduced their Recipe View it was only a matter of time before the WordPress community rose to the occasion with plugins to help non-code-geek bloggers take advantage of the development.
So far I’ve found 3 plugins that will help make your recipes Google Recipe View friendly. However based on what I’ve read online, you will also have to submit your site to Google and then you are in for a wait as to whether they actually include your site in their Recipe results or not. It seems to be a laborious process and skewed heavily in the favor of major players like Food Network et al. I would imagine they will smooth out the process eventually, but who knows when? In the meantime I suppose it doesn’t hurt to get your blog nice and ‘microformat’ ready.
The 3 plugins I tried are hRecipe, EasyRecipe and RecipeSEO. They are all easy to use and quite similar, although there are a couple of important differences I will highlight.
For testing purposes I used a recipe for Avocado on Toast with Truffle Salt from Dorothy Reinhold’s Shockingly Delicious (although I made up some of the info such as cooking times, calories etc for testing purposes).
After implementing one of these plugins you can use Google’s Rich Snippets tool to test how your recipe would look in Recipe View. It will alert you if information is missing or if there are errors. I found that there seems to be a bit of a discrepancy between what Google states as the minimum necessary info to generate a preview, and the reality. They say:
“In order to generate a preview, at least 2 of the following fields are needed: prep time, cook time, total time, calories, rating, review count, or image.”
However during testing I found that I sometimes needed to add more than 2 of these fields to generate a preview, such as adding a calories field in addition to prep and cook times.
It’s that time again folks! Time for another WordPress training workshop to initiate more beginners into the WordPress family.
Have an idea for a business or blog and need to get a website up and running at minimal expense? Or perhaps you or your company have an existing WordPress site but you have no idea how to use it!
This hands-on WordPress training class will provide step-by-step instruction for using self-hosted WordPress and plenty of hand-holding where necessary. Get all your questions answered in a friendly,comfortable environment. I work with individuals on a daily basis, providing training & coaching in WordPress and online marketing. I specialize in working with beginners and non-techies!
I’ll not only guide you through the nuts and bolts of WordPress but you’ll also benefit from my years of marketing experience.
It’s true that there can be many confusing intricacies to the science of Search Engine Optimization, but what’s also true is that most people get tripped up on the basics, before they even get to the complex stuff! In working with many entrepreneurial and small business clients, I’ve come to see a few common trends in the way that people look at SEO and why they are often not getting the results they want. Improvement typically begins with some fundamental shifts in the way you think about the process.
1) Forget Sex, Specificity Sells!
Lack of clarity about your business offerings and target market will lead to lack of clarity in your search marketing efforts and you will either attract clients that aren’t a good fit, or you will have trouble converting your web traffic. Your search engine strategy should be based on a clear picture of who your ideal client is and exactly what you can do for them. Then make sure that you are effectively communicating that on your website.
You’ve set up your blog, now what? How will anyone find you? How will you attract the targeted traffic you need for your business? Search engines are one of the most powerful sources of traffic if you know the basic principles. This class will teach you the fundamentals of search engine optimization so that you can develop a thriving and effective business website or blog.
This class is designed for those with little or no understanding of search engine optimization, or anyone who is not getting the results they expect from their SEO. The examples will skew toward self-hosted WordPress users in terms of implementation, but the principles and techniques apply to all types of sites.
Saturday April 9th, 1:30pm – 3:30pm, $40
If you’ve Google-d for a recipe lately you may have noticed a new feature Google has launched, which is a recipe-specific search – they call it Recipe View. It allows the user to search results specifically designated as recipes, and also to narrow searches by ingredients, prep time and even calorie count. You access it via the “Recipes” option in the left menu bar on search pages.
It seems pretty useful for web searchers, but what does this mean for food bloggers? Well in order for your recipes to show up in this special search, Google is looking for you to use special markup i.e. code, to designate your content to be recipes. It’s called a microformat, which is a specific set of code tags used to designated content as recipes, with special parameters such as prep time, ingredients, reviews and more. Click here to see all the gory details