Elise Bauer's blog

Cooking advice from the master, my mom

2008-05-10T01:28:08-05:00

My mother is one of those intuitive cooks in the kitchen. 73 years old, and having raised six kids, she doesn't follow recipes anymore. If you watch her while she cooks, the timing just appears to happen seamlessly. Whereas I'm good for only making one dish at a time, mom can coordinate a whole meal for 8 - a main course protein, one or two veggie sides, a starch, and a salad - without getting remotely flustered. She's always tasting whatever she is cooking, and adjusting the seasonings. She cooks from memory and a well developed sense of what works together well, and how flavors come in balance.

If you ever get the chance to meet my mother you'll quickly learn that she loves nothing more than to give advice. About everything. If you work with her in the kitchen, she'll continue to give you the same advice, over and over and over again, until it is clear to her that you have learned what she wants you to learn. Or perhaps it's just me that she needs to give the advice repeatedly to, since I'm a typical daughter, my mother can't tell me anything.

What are some of the salient words of cooking wisdom my alchemist mother has taught me over the years? Here goes:

1. Taste. Taste everything. Taste while you're cooking. Taste when you think it's done. Recipes are only guidelines and to achieve the right balance of flavors you have to taste and make adjustments.

2. Do not be afraid of using salt, sugar, or fat in your cooking. Everything is okay in moderation.

3. Balance acidity with sugar. When you are cooking a tomato-based sauce, tomatoes can be acidic, you may need to balance the acidity with a little sugar. You can either add a teaspoon of sugar to the sauce, or you can start the sauce with sautéed onions and or carrots, which are sweet and will bring balance to the tomatoes. Same goes for salad dressings. If you are making a lemon juice or vinegar and oil based dressing, add a little sugar to balance the acidity of the lemon or vinegar. (This is some of the best cooking advice I've ever gotten from anyone.)

4. Salt your food while cooking it. It will bring out the flavor of the food better than if you only add salt at the end.

5. Use whole, fresh ingredients whenever you can. By the way, if you use whole, fresh ingredients you don't have to worry about too much salt, because most of the excess salt we get in our diets comes from packaged foods.

6. Buy what's in season. It will taste better and be cheaper. If you don't know what's in season, learn. Ask your grocer.

7. When you buy lemon, lime, orange or grapefruit, try to pick the heaviest one of its size. That one will be the juiciest. (This is one of the first things my mom ever taught me about food, I can still remember being a kid of 7, picking out the heaviest oranges from the bin.)

8. Use a separate cutting board for cutting poultry, and wash thoroughly everything that the raw poultry touches - your hands, counter, knives, cutting board - after you're done.

9. Vary your meals from day to day. If you have chicken for dinner one day, have pork, beef, or fish the next. Do not eat the same foods every day. Our bodies are designed for variety.

10. Save bones from a chicken meal to make stock. Put the bones in a plastic bag in the freezer until you have the time, and enough bones, to make a batch. When you make the stock, if you let the fat settle at the top, when you refrigerate it, the stock will last longer because the fat layer acts as a protective barrier against bacteria.

11. A little bit of bacon fat is great for flavor, as is chicken fat, and of course butter. Do not be afraid to use these fats (in moderation, of course).

12. Grapeseed oil is the best oil to use for frying foods; it has a high smoke point and is high in Omega 3. The only two oils you need are grapeseed oil and olive oil.

13. If you keep cheese (cheddar, jack) exposed to a bit of air in the refrigerator, it will get a little dried out, but it will still taste good and it won't get moldy. If your cheese does get a little moldy, just cut away the mold.

14. Buy and use a pressure cooker. Don't be afraid of them. The new ones have all these great safety features.

15. If the food smells bad, don't eat it. Throw it out.

Being the dutiful daughter, of course I showed mom this list before publishing it. And of course she launched into a lecture about chicken stock. "Tell your people that they need to save the necks and backs." This list could easily go on, actually. Mom can talk for hours, in an informed and intelligent way, about why fat is good for you, the best way to brown meat, how to tell when a steak is done, how there is no one-size-fits-all diet for anybody, etc. etc. She's 73. She's beautiful, curious, kind, strong, happy and healthy. Everything I know about food and cooking is inspired by her example. One doesn't get luckier than that.

How to Build Blog Traffic - Search Engines and SEO

2008-01-06T21:21:09-06:00

This article is a part of a series of posts on How to Build Blog Traffic (see Intro).

One of the key ways that people find your site is through a search engine such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Placing highly on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) when someone is doing a search will almost guarantee lots of traffic of new visitors to your site. In fact, search engine results placement is so important for the business models of thousands of web-based companies that an entire industry of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) professionals exists to advise people on how to score better in the search returns.

The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, and MSN, with Google taking the lion's share of searches. The search engines' (Google especially) primary objective is to return the best results possible for people conducting searches . They use proprietary algorithms to determine which pages rise to the top of search results based on several factors. Early on Google in particular gave a lot of weight to the number of other pages that linked to a particular page. So, if your site was popular and several other sites linked to it, Google interpreted this as a good indication of quality and ranked your page highly in the search results. Although inbound links are still important, in recent years Google has been giving less weight to them because they can so easily be rigged by scammers. Google has also cracked down hard on sites using paid links and Pay-per-Post.

To understand how search engines work, you first need to see what a search engine sees when it spiders your site.

What search engine spiders see when they search your site

Open up a browser and go to your blog. Now do a "View Source" from your browser. In Firefox click on "View" in the toolbar and scroll down to "Page Source". The text that you see is exactly what the search engine spider sees. The spider searches the text between the html tags to determine what the page is about. The spider also looks at the header section of the html on the page to see what the title of the page is, and the description if there is one. If you post a video, but without any accompanying text, the search engine spider won't have much to go on when determining what the page is about. If your page is text-rich, the spider will have lots of clues. If you use a lot of Flash, the search engines will have a difficult time finding you. So to be found and indexed well in a search engine, make sure your posts have plenty of text.

How to place better in search engine results

Here are some tips for how you can tune your blog for better SERP placement safely, without incurring the ire of the search engines.

Keywords in title and text - Once you've written a post, determine what words people would use in a search on Google or Yahoo if they wanted to find exactly what you had written about. Make sure those words are in the title of your post and in the text of your post. Refrain from "stuffing" your text with keywords, as that behavior will get you into trouble with the search engines.
Link out - Having several natural (not paid) inbound links from other websites is a great way to boost your visibility in the search results. The best way to inspire others to link to you is to show that you are paying attention to them first. Find bloggers who write about the same stuff you do and start linking to them.
Site links and anchor text - Link generously within your own site to other pages within your site. When you link, make sure that the text in the link is a keyword you want that page associated with. For example "Click Here" means nothing, the search engines have no idea what that link is about if all it says is "click here". Instead of "Apple Pie, click here", write, "See our apple pie recipe".
Avoid duplicate text - Depending on how you archive your posts, you could be generating many pages of duplicate text, which could get you penalized in the search engine results. Either publish only an excerpt or headline in your category and monthly archives, or place a no follow robots tag in the meta data header section of your category and monthly archive templates so that search engines do not spider those pages. The tag looks like this: and it goes in the header section of the html.
Be careful who you link to - If you link to a known spam site or link farm, you may be penalized by the search engines.
Maintain your site - If your page is filled with links leading to pages long deceased (generating 404 errors) that doesn't look good to the SEs and your quality rating will go down. Keep your links fresh and working.

And the most important tip of all?

Focus on building a quality site! - The thing to always keep in mind is that Google and the other search engines are trying to deliver the best possible search results to their customers. If you aren't scoring as highly in the search returns as you would like for a keyword, look to see what the sites that are scoring higher are doing that you aren't. Are they using compelling images, that load quickly? Are they getting to the point and staying on topic? Is their site easy to read and easy to navigate? Have they been around longer with a more established reputation? Learn from what others are doing and work on improving the quality of your content. To consistently score high, you have to present consistently better content that others for the same keyword.

A note on Bounce Rates

One of the potential metrics that search engines have when evaluating where a page should be placed on the SERPs is the "bounce rate". For example, when someone does a search and your site comes up in the returns, if the searcher clicks on it and decides, "no, that's not what I want" and clicks the back button, that is considered a "bounce". If your page has a low bounce rate relative to other sites for that search term, what does that tell the search engine? That your site is better meeting the expectations of the searchers. Although the SEs haven't publicly admitted that they are using bounce rate as a factor in determining SERP placement, many SEO professional believe that they are tracking that metric and I would be very surprised if they weren't. In fact, from where I sit evaluating my own site and the SERP placements of many of my pages, it looks very much like the search engines are indeed using this metric. High relative bounce rate = bad, low relative bounce rate = good. Moral of the story? Create a compelling experience on your pages, so that when someone is looking for something that you have, when they find it on your site they don't immediately click the back button. Structure your site so that it is easy to easy to load, easy to read, and easy to navigate.

Links:
The Blogger's Guide to SEO from SEObook.com
Vanessa Fox recap of her talk at BlogHer Business 2007 on Search Engines - at Google Webmaster Central
3 part series on the power of Search - again from Vaness Fox, posted to her personal blog
Elise and Vanessa BlogHer presentations, including resource links for building blog traffic

Contributing Editor Elise Bauer blogs at Simply Recipes, Learning Movable Type, and several other blogs as part of elise.com.

Happy Pig? Lucky Pig.

2007-09-12T19:03:19-05:00

Growing up a city girl in Los Angeles, I was always fascinated by farms and orchards. I still have vibrant memories of picking pears and hunting rabbits in Antelope valley with my dad. Such a different world of nature than the manicured lawn of our home in the city. In our hectic modern lives we don't often stop to think where are food comes from. Who grew this tomato? Where did this chicken live, and how was it (she) housed?

Happy Pig*

This pig in the photograph lives in Thornton, Iowa, on the farm of Paul and Phyllis Willis. It's a happy pig, spending its days running around the pasture with its brothers and sisters, digging up roots and what not, chewing on grass, eating corn, and wallowing in the mud. This pig, like the others on Paul and Phyllis's farm, leads the kind of life that domesticated pigs, raised for human consumption, have been leading for thousands of years.

It's also a very lucky pig, to be born of a sow on the farm of people dedicated to sustainable agriculture and the ethical treatment of animals. More than 80% of the 20 million or so Iowa and North Carolina pigs being raised today for our consumption never feel their feet touch the earth. They are raised in confinement, in long buildings called CAFOs, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, where they are kept in such crowded conditions that the sows don't even have enough room to turn around in their pen. They are fed antibiotics constantly because in such crowded conditions they are prone to fast-spreading disease. Their urine and feces fall through slats, which are then collected into manure ponds, which instead of fertilizing the land (what happens when pigs are raised in open pasture) pollutes it.

CAFO along a highway in Iowa*

Bonnie of The Ethicurean blog quotes an article on major polluter Smithfield farms:

manure from porcine CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations, is an unprecedented ecological disaster for North Carolina and other hog-harboring states, causing severe health problems for nearby residents, poisoning streams and groundwater, decimating fish life, and turning surrounding farmland into a toxic-waste dump.

Paul Willis calls what's happened over the last 20 years "the chickenization of pig farming".

Paul Willis on his farm.*

Because of our fear of animal fat, we've bred the fat (and therefore the flavor) out of pigs. Pigs need a layer of fat to live outside and endure cold winters. Pigs need to exercise to work the muscles that will not only be more flavorful meat, but also get more fat marbling in them. So pigs raised in confinement are lean, and their meat so light that the Pork Board calls pork "The Other White Meat". Ever see raw pork from a heritage breed, a breed with fat? Check out this hunk of Berkshire pork. It's not white.

Because they are breeding pigs so lean these days, you have to brine pork, or inject it with water, just so it doesn't get totally dried out when you cook it. It has so little flavor, you have to smother it in sauces.

Piglets, a few days old.*

Back to our happy pig in the photo. I recently toured the Willis' farm in Thornton, Iowa, with fellow food blogger and BlogHer CE Alanna Kellogg. You can see the whole Flickr set of farm photos. Besides the heart-opening, mind-blowing experience of holding a day-old piglet in my arms, the main impressions I was left with on the farm was that here the pigs were happy, curious, playful, and unafraid. I was warned by someone knowing I was going to visit an Iowa hog farm to "hold my nose", a completely unnecessary warning as the farm didn't smell. Everyone that day came away with similar impressions. And we haven't been the only bloggers visiting this farm.

Diane from Sustainable Table relates the story of her visit:

The first thing that really surprised me was that a group of 15 or so people, including energetic children, didn't scare the animals. They were so friendly that they actually came up to us to say hello (I got slimed a couple times â€“ in a very friendly way thoughâ€¦). The hogs run around the pasture, play, socialize and simply are what they are.

Diane's entry includes this great YouTube video interview of Sarah Willis, Paul and Phyllis' daughter, on what brought her back to the farm.

So where to buy pork if you want to make sure you are buying meat from sustainable farmed, ethically raised pigs? Paul and Phyllis are part of the Niman Ranch collective, which holds all of their pig farmers to high, sustainable standards. You can find Niman-branded pork at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. The Fatted Calf in the SF Bay Area sells charcuterie made from locally raised pigs. Do you have a local pork purveyor from sustainably raised pigs in your area? Please let us know about it in the comments.

One more blog deserves mentioning. US Food Policy frequently writes about hog farming and public policy.

* Photos in this article are by Elise Bauer.

Home Cooking is Cool Again

2006-12-29T15:37:18-06:00

The New York Times recently ran a piece by Julia Moskin on the current trend away from glorification of celebrity chefs and back to regular home cooking. (See Food for the People, Whipped Up by the People.)

It's about time the media noticed that most of us are more interested in how to get good food on the table every day than we are in spending days preparing gourmet meals with ingredients only found on other continents. "If I want fancy, I'll go to a restaurant. I am interested in American supper food that I can make from ingredients in my cabinets." pretty much sums up this national trend, and why such Rachael Ray and Paula Deen are so popular.

Given that one in three meals American children eat are from Fast Food restaurants, and one in five meals Americans eat they do so in their cars (according to Michael Pollan in Omnivore's Dilemma), I'm delighted with any indication of a trend back to home cooking. (The next time you hear someone insulting Ms. Ray, remember the above statistics.)

In her article Ms. Moskin notes that "Some of the yearâ€™s most-visited cooking blogs were by home cooks and based all over the globe", and gives well deserved nods to BlogHer food blogs 101 Cookbooks, Chocolate and Zuchhini, and Pinoy Cook. What Ms. Moskin failed to note was that by far "Most" not "Some" of the most popular food blogs are by home cooks, and that there are more than 2000 food blogs in the world right now, with more coming on every day. (See Kiplog's List of Food Blogs for the ever growing list.)

Customize Your Google Search

2006-11-05T18:00:28-06:00

Google recently released a very cool new feature. Google is now letting us create our own custom search engines, based on a list of websites that we choose. I've started playing around with it here at FoodBlogSearch.com. I often like to link to other food blogs in my posts on my recipe blog and this custom search makes it easy to search the food blogs I frequent.

Google is also letting us put the search bar, and the results of the searches directly into our own websites. I have an example of that working here at my list of food blogs. Susan V has also incorporated this feature in her list of food blogs on FatFree Vegan Kitchen.

You can set it up so other people can contribute to the list of sites searched. You can include a little Google widget so that people can add the search bar to their personalized Google home page.

It's not perfect. It returns results based on page rank and not the most recent entries. It usually takes a week or two for new entries to show up in the Google index so you usually don't get the most recent posts. But I have already found it quite useful. The link to create your own custom search engine is http://www.google.com/coop/.

Providing a focused search engine on your site can be a benefit to your readers, if your content is focused on a particular area.

If you create your own custom search engine for your blog, please let us know about in in the comments.

Enjoy!

Chef Shuna Fish Lydon's Podcast from BlogHer

2006-08-18T21:38:02-05:00

At the Bird of a Feather food blogging gathering at BlogHer, pastry chef Shuna Fish Lydon was interviewed for the Chris Pirillo Show. Articulate and insightful, Shuna offers her perspective on the food industry, community, blogging, and the great community of food bloggers. Listen to the MP3 here.

Contributing editor Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes and Learning Movable Type thinks Shuna Fish is the bee's knees.

Happy Birthday Julia

2006-08-15T20:26:57-05:00

Julia Child almost single-handedly introduced America to the art of French cooking, and taught a generation of women to cook in her PBS series, The French Chef. She would have been 94 today. In her honor, Lisa Morgan of Champaign Taste has kicked off an Annual Julia Child Birthday Celebration, encouraging food bloggers to cook a recipe from one of Julia's several cookbooks. Lisa kicks off the event with a Julia menu to drool over:

Cream of Zucchini Soup
SautÃ©ed Chicken
French Green Beans
Garlic Mashed Potatoes
CrÃªpes Suzette

Participating in the event, Amy of Cooking with Amy has whipped up some crepes and recalls how delightful it was to watch Julia on TV. " She wasn't pretty, she wasn't graceful and she wasn't phony. She was the real deal." Julia's show makes the Food Network seem like tinsel in comparison.

Ivonne of Cream Puffs in Venice makes Cantuccini Italian cookies, just ready to dunk into a hot latte.

There are many more partaking in this happy Julia day. To see them all, check Lisa's post which she is updating as the day goes on.

Happy Birthday, Julia! We miss you.

Contributing Editor Elise Bauer is still struggling to master Julia's method of making a French omelette. She blogs at Simply Recipes and Learning Movable Type.

How to Build Blog Traffic - How do people find your blog?

2006-07-27T02:47:39-05:00

This article is part of a series of posts on How to Build Blog Traffic (see Intro).

If our goal is to increase our blog traffic, the primary question we need to ask ourselves is, how do people get to our blogs in the first place? Understanding how people learn about our blogs, and make their way over to visit them, will help us better understand how to use technology to increase our visibility.

So, how do people find out about us?

Someone else's website - Someone - friend, colleague, or stranger - knows about your site and is linking to it from her website. If you are just starting out, and you have lots of friends, this is probably where much of your traffic is coming from.
A comment on someone else's website - You've left a comment on someone else's blog, and now that person and her readers are clicking through the comment link and finding your site.
Google or other search engines - The search engines spider the world wide web looking for sites and indexing them. Somehow they found you and have your site in their index. Someone has made a search on one of the search engines and has found your site in the search results. The longer your site has been around, and the more other sites link to it, the higher your site will be placed in the search results and the more people will be able to find your site that way.
You're bookmarked - Okay, maybe this isn't how someone found you in the first place, but it might be the way they find you the second time. If you change your URL structure, the directories or path names to your blog entry, you will invalidate all those bookmarked pages on the sites of readers who want to come back to visit again. The longer your blog is around, and the more popular, the bigger an issue this becomes.
Newsfeeds - Newsfeed readers such as Bloglines, MyYahoo, and Personalized Google promote popular and/or interesting feeds. You can make it easier for your readers to add your site to their favorite newsfeed reader, increasing your chance of being one of the more popular feeds.
Social bookmarking tools - Social bookmarking tools such as Del.icio.us, Digg, Stumbleupon keep track of what people link to, and then highlight the most highly linked posts.
Someone emailed your URL to someone else - You can help this along by providing an "send to friend" form on your blog.
Press - If you get picked up in a story in print media, that can bring lots of people to your site, especially if that print media also has an online presence. Want press? Find out what journalists are covering your space and send polite emails of introduction, offering to be a resource for any article they might want to write concerning blogs.

Those are the main categories that I can see. Am I missing something? How do people find your blog?

Next up, Google, Search Engines, and SEO.

Contributing Editor Elise Bauer blogs at Simply Recipes, Learning Movable Type, and several other blogs as part of elise.com. This series on building blog traffic is cross-posted at Learning Movable Type.

How to Build Blog Traffic - Community

2006-07-25T21:04:37-05:00

This article is part of a series of posts on How to Build Blog Traffic (see Intro).

When I first started blogging in 2003, I viewed the exercise mostly as a way to express myself. I didn't know what a "blogroll" was, nor did I care that much when I learned. Over the last few years I have found that the main distinction between a blog and any other website, other than diary-like entries, is the interconnectedness with other bloggers who care about the same things I do. It's being part of a community of other similarly interested people that make blogging so compelling.

Engaging the community of people who care about the same things you do can exponentially enhance your blog's visibility. The following tips are obvious to me now, but weren't when I first started blogging:

Link!

The first bit of advice I give to people just starting out their blog and wanting to increase their readership, after the obvious advice on content (include photos! spell check! focus!), is to actively link to other bloggers who share their interests. Why? Well, most people will find your site because 1) someone on another site has linked to you or 2) they found you through a search engine, a search engine that finds out about you because other people are linking to you. The best way to get other people to link to you is to link to them first. You don't need to ask for link exchanges. All you need to do is have a blogroll - a list of links in your sidebar - to other blogs of similar interests, and to generously link to other bloggers in your posts. That's it. Bloggers watch their stats. They notice who is linking to them. If they like your site, they'll start linking back. (If you want to keep track of which blogs are linking to you, claim your blog at Technorati.com.)

Linking out to other blogs is the essence of the spirit of generosity that is needed to have a vibrant online blog community. In general, I will only link to another site, or add them to my blogroll, if the site has a blogroll on its front page that links to other blogs in the community. I don't care if the site links to me or not, but if it doesn't link to anyone, that tells me the blog owner really doesn't care about the community and it is highly unlikely I'll link to them.

Comment!

Next to linking out to other bloggers is to start reading other blogs and leaving comments on their blogs. If you want a loyal following of readers, and you are not a known celebrity, it helps to be a loyal reader of blogs by people who share your interests. Leave the kind of thoughtful, insightful comments that you wish other people would leave on your own blog. Leaving comments on another person's blog is like saying, "I'm paying attention to you." Physical-world communities - our circle of friends, neighborhood associations, etc. - operate through an exchange of attention. It's no different in the online world. I check the website of every single person who comments on my blogs, don't you? I find fabulous blogs this way.

It is worth noting that leaving comments per se will not help your search engine rankings. Blogging services have incorporated a "no follow" attribute in the links that get published when you leave a comment that includes the URL to your site. Basically this means that search engines don't care about comment-author URLs in comments. This is a good thing, as it discourages spammers.

Plan and Join Online Events

A couple of years ago a man named Alberto started a little online blog cook-off called Is My Blog Burning? and requested that food bloggers cook some soup and write about it on their blogs on a certain day. Since then, the food blog world has never been the same. Is My Blog Burning turned into a monthly event (now in its 28th month), each month hosted by a different food blogger. Now we have an event calendar that is filled with blog cooking events - Sugar High Friday, Weekend Herb Blogging, Hay Hay It's Donna Day, Wine Blogging Wednesday, to name a few.

A similar phenomenon has being occurring all across the blogsphere in the form of blog carnivals - online blogging events on practically every topic known to blogs. Like Is My Blog Burning, blog carnivals have a topic and a host; people write about the topic in a certain time-frame and the host compiles the links to all the participating blogs.

Memes. There are more blog memes out there than one can easily count. Like chain letters, blog memes are ideas that get replicated through throughout the blogosphere. Someone writes up "20 things about me" and then "tags" (tag- you're it!) four or more other bloggers, challenging them to write up their own version of the meme and then tag more bloggers. To see how this can play out see The Cook Next Door meme at Delicious Days. The map at the bottom of the post details all of the connections between blogs.

Along the same theme as carnivals and memes, Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net frequently instigates online writing events. Check out If I had to Start My Blog Again for an example of a well organized group writing project.

Contribute to the Community

The last point I would like to leave you with regarding community is that communities thrive from the generosity of their members. If you want a healthy, happening blogging community, do the kinds of things that will make that happen. The best example of this spirit of generosity I know is Food Blog S'cool, a blog for food bloggers who share and learn from each other's expertise. Food Blog S'cool was started and is maintained by Sam Breach, who is also a contributing food editor at BlogHer. A strong and vibrant community helps everyone in it. When you volunteer your time and expertise to help other bloggers in your community, you raise up everyone, including yourself.

Links:
How to start a Blog Carnival
Traffic is generated by participating in the community; not daily posting - by Eric Kintz

Making Focaccia Bread, Homemade Red Wine Vinegar, and more

2006-07-22T12:14:47-05:00

Interested in improving your cooking knowledge and skills? Come along for a visit through the food blogosphere for this month's round up of tips and methods.

Nicky and Oliver of Delicious Days compare the use of dry yeast versus fresh yeast in their baking of Focaccia Bread.

Many of us are familiar with preserved lemons used in Moroccan dishes, but what about spicy Indian Lemon Pickles? Manisha of Indian Food Rocks walks us through a family recipe.

Have some leftover red wine that you just can't finish? Roseann Hanson of Three Martini Lunch makes Homemade Red Wine Vinegar using live culture from Bragg's cider vinegar.

Many a summer recipe calls for roasted bell peppers. Debi of Dejamo's Distracted shows us how easy it is to roast a bell pepper on a gas range.

JenJen of Milk and Cookies in Sydney gets a pasta machine for her birthday and wows everyone with her Egg Pasta Ravioli.

Finally, once you start making your own pie crusts, you are spoiled forever for the ready made versions. These Pie Crust Revisited tips from pastry chef extraordinaire Shuna Fish Lydon of Eggbeater will help take your pie crusts to a new level.

Contributing Editor Elise Bauer also blogs at Simply Recipes and Learning Movable Type. The Learning to Cook series is cross-posted at Simply Recipes.

How to Build Blog Traffic - Content

2006-07-19T13:08:20-05:00

This article is part of a series of posts on How to Build Blog Traffic (see Intro).

Everyone knows that if you want a successful blog you have to start with great content. But what does it mean to have great content? Your friends and family will read your blog because they know you and like you. To reach out beyond your social network to a much wider audience you need to provide something valuable, something a reader can't easily get elsewhere, or can't easily get all in one place. Here are some things to consider regarding what goes on the pages of your blog:

Be Useful, Entertaining, or Timely

The most successful blogs are useful, entertaining, timely, or a combination of all three. Of these three, probably the one that will have the most legs is "useful". When you present something that's useful, people will return to it over and over again. A blog like Darren Rowse' ProBlogger.net is filled with practical advice for bloggers. You can spend hours going through Darren's archives. The addictive Life Hacker blog recommends ideas and software to help us all become more productive. A new favorite is Lara Ferroni's Still Life with... blog about food photography. With each of these examples, the content doesn't expire the day it is written, but remains valuable to readers for months or even years.

You don't have to write about celebrity gossip to be entertaining. One of the most popular blogs on the planet is Heather Armstrong's Dooce. What Heather writes about (constipation, Mormon jokes, her kid) is hardly useful, nor even timely, but it is highly entertaining. The same could be said for Cute Overload, Durham Township, Post Secret, and ZeFrank.

Regarding timeliness, I would argue that sites like Engaget and Boing Boing succeed not only because of the breadth of content they deliver, but the fact that usually you can hear it from them first. They get the scoops on interesting products and net happenings. Blogs covering news, sports, and stocks all rely on time-based information. Political sites like Wonkette are timely as well as entertaining, and if politics is your life, probably useful as well.

What should you emphasize - utility, entertainment, or timeliness? It all depends on what you like to do, what you are good at doing, and how much time you are willing to commit. To have a successful blog that relies on timely information, you need to devote a lot of time to updating your content, probably several times a day. I read somewhere that the guy from Engaget starts his day at 6 am and puts in at least 10-12 hours a day in front of his computer. To be entertaining, you have to be, well, really entertaining. Some people are talented writers, most are not. Some people are brilliant and looney and you could watch them all day, most are not. Some people are wickedly creative. Personally I don't like to write and I don't even pretend to be entertaining, so I stick with the third category, usefulness.

Focus

Blogs become popular by attracting the attention of other bloggers with similar interests who link to them. The more you focus on a subject the more likely you are to attract readers and other bloggers who care about that subject. If you care about building an audience, it's better to have a blog about gardening, and only gardening, than it is to have a blog about gardening, movie reviews, political commentary, and astrology. Unless the movies, political commentary, and astrology entries are actually about gardening. (When the moon transits Venus later this month, Aquarians will be advised to plant tulips.)

Post Frequently, But Not At The Expense Of Quality

Conventional wisdom states that one should post a new blog entry at least once a day. I don't agree with this. For the most part, frequent posting is better than infrequent posting, but not at the expense of the quality of the posts. We all have limited time and most of us would rather spend it reading things worthwhile than entries with little substance that were obviously put up just to fulfill some arbitrary "post everyday" rule. Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks updates her blog once or twice a week. 101 Cookbooks is a gorgeous blog, well written, with beautiful photography. Heidi gets thousands of visitors each day to her site, and she is one of the most highly ranked food blogs in Technorati. If you only post once a month, don't expect thousands of readers. But unless you have a blog that depends on producing timely information, e.g. a news blog, you simply do not have to post every day. Actually, when I start feeling pressure to update my main blog every day it sort of takes the fun out the process and the blog begins to feel burdensome. I know when I start feeling resentful of my blog that it's time to take a break. Usually a few days away does the trick.

Posting more than once a day may actually have a negative effect on blog popularity. As Erik Kintz discusses in his Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore post, too much posting can lead to "RSS fatigue". People remove you from their feed subscriptions because they are tired of sorting through all your posts to get to the good ones.

Use Images and Photographs

This may seem like a trivial suggestion, but let's face it. We are visual creatures. We respond well to beautiful images. Even the Wall St. Journal now has color and photographs throughout its pages, for a reason - people want them. Graphics and photos can help to accent or illustrate your points. They also break up the monotony of text, and give relief to eyes tired of reading online. If you use graphics or photos, make sure they are high quality. Don't take them from other sites unless you have clear permission from the site author. Invest in software (e.g. Photoshop) and a decent digital camera, preferably an SLR (i.e. the Canon Rebel or the Nikon D70). Take as much care with the quality of your images as you do with the quality of your writing. Which reminds me...

Write Well

Writing is a craft, a skill that improves with practice. Some people are great writers; most of us struggle to be simply proficient. Help your readers by not rambling - get to your point. Punctuate. Capital letters exist for a reason. Check for spelling and grammatical errors and typos. Proofread before you post. After you post, read it again, just to be sure, and correct then any mistakes. Keep it simple.

Consider Headlines

Most professional marketers-turned-bloggers I know promote the use of imaginative, eye-catching headlines in blog posts. Personally, I think this tip is overrated. I'm more concerned that the headlines contain keywords in them that will be picked up by the search engines (more on that in a future post). In most situations, I want the headline to clearly indicate what is in the blog entry. If however, your blog is more oriented toward being timely and entertaining, and you aren't particularly concerned about traffic from search engines, then a snappy headline makes a lot of sense.

Make Us Care

As I mentioned in the introduction post to this series on building blog traffic, your blog needs to be about something that some people, somewhere, care about. No one's going to give a hoot about your blog unless you care passionately about it first. When you feel passionate about your subject, it will be reflected in your writing. It is the energy, care, and attention that you bring to your subject (or anything for that matter) that will inspire others to take notice and to come back.

How to Build Blog Traffic - Intro

2006-07-17T17:00:25-05:00

You spend hours, days, weeks, months writing, photographing, uploading, editing your blog. At the end of the day you hope that someone (or more than a few someones) takes the time to read it. One would think that it is pretty obvious the steps one must take to build an audience, or build traffic to one's blog; you have to have great content, right? But less obvious are the roles that community and technology play in increasing your blog audience.

In preparation for a workshop I'm leading at BlogHer '06 I'll be writing up a series of posts about all the different things you can do to increase traffic to your blog - content, site traffic - what it is and how to measure, the stats you should care about, how people find your site, Google, search engines, and SEO, site design, RSS, community, and tags. The three main themes that we'll see over and over again are content, community, and technology.

Content
If you don't start with good content, you can pretty much ignore everything else. But what defines "good content"? Do you really have to post every day, or even several times a day? If you are just starting out, what should your blog be about?

Community
The number one thing you can do to increase your audience, after producing brilliant content of course, is to engage the community of people who might possibly care about what you are writing. By the way, engaging a community doesn't mean asking for link exchanges. It does mean actively linking to, commenting on, and participating in events on the weblogs of others who share a common interest. This linking becomes even more important when we dive into technology and the role of search engines.

Technology
Your blog traffic consists of people who already know about your blog and have visited it before, and people who have found your blog somehow and are coming there for the first time. Understanding and properly using technologies such as RSS, SEO, and tags can greatly accelerate the number of people finding your blog for the first time. If they like what they see, they'll come back, especially if you make it easy for them. But they do need to find you in the first place, and using available web technologies appropriately can help this along.

Passion
Your blog needs to be about something that some people, somewhere, care about. And no one's going to give a hoot about your blog unless you care passionately about it first. If you have something to say, say it well, and concern yourself about not only the blog but the people reading it too, the strategies that will be reviewed in this series will help you grow your audience. Otherwise, who cares?

Other articles in the How to Build Blog Traffic series
Content
Community
How Do People Find Your Blog?
Search Engines and SEO

Links to other online articles on this subject:
Unsuspecting Secrets to Fast Blogging Success by eMoms at Home
ProBlogger.net - this whole site is filled with great advice.
Elise BlogHer presentations on Building Traffic to Your Blog

Don't forget to eat your flowers, dear!

2006-06-11T15:47:16-05:00

Well, the warm weather is finally here and plenty of flowers are in bloom. If you've ever had an inkling to include some edible flowers in your salads or cooking, Barbara from the exceptional food blog Tigers and Strawberries has an extensive post on the subject. The first step, of course, is to make sure the flowers you want to eat are not poisonous. The next is to avoid flowers from the roadside (infused with car exhaust) or from a florist (sprayed with pesticides). The best is to grow your own. Barbara displays many of the edible flowers in her garden, such as nasturtiums (pictured above), pansies and violas, lavender and roses.

Contributing Editor Elise Bauer also blogs at Simply Recipes and Learning Movable Type.

A del.icio.us Cookbook

2006-05-21T23:18:26-05:00

If you look up lots of recipes online, and then add them to your favorites, sooner or later your favorites list can get a little unwieldy. The solution? Check out the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. I recently started using del.icio.us to keep track of promising links from other sites, as well as indexing almost all of the recipes on Simply Recipes. My "virtual cookbook" (http://del.icio.us/elisebauer/recipes) has over 300 recipes and new ones are a breeze to add.

There are several advantages of using a service like del.icio.us. One benefit is the extensive tagging capabilities. You can categorize, or "tag", a link with any category you want, whatever makes sense to you. In a way, you are building a subject index for all of your links. I often tag recipes with their main ingredients, so if I want to look up all the recipes with blueberries, that's easy to do. Another cool feature is to see what recipes other people find interesting enough to include in their del.icio.us bookmarks. Here are some of the more currently popular dessert links on del.icio.us.

Getting set up with del.icio.us is easy, and free.

1 Sign up at http://del.icio.us. The sign-up procedure will walk you through the easiest registration on the planet.

2 Click on the "post to del.icio.us" and/or the "my del.icio.us" images and drag them up to your browser's bookmarks bar. It should end up looking something like this:

Now if you find a great recipe online, just add it to your del.icio.us collection by clicking on the "post to del.icio.us" button in your bookmarks bar. Assign it some tags. It's as easy as that.

3 Most people who use del.icio.us use it for more than just recipes, clearly. So as to not mix up the recipe links with other links, create a tag "bundle" for your recipes and bundle your recipe oriented tags under that bundle. I also take the additional step of tagging all of my recipe links with "recipe" and "recipes".

Enjoy. The more great food and cooking links we bookmark, the more delicious del.icio.us actually becomes!

Cross-posted at Simply Recipes

Contributing Editor Elise Bauer also blogs at Simply Recipes and Learning Movable Type.

Calling All Web Designers

2006-05-15T13:24:05-05:00

As Lisa Stone mentioned several weeks ago, Six Apart is hosting a style contest for Typepad, Movable Type, and Live Journal styles. If you are a web designer, or aspiring to be one, this contest is a great way to gain exposure for your work. There are over $17,000 in prizes, including a $4000 grand prize. Check out the styles that have been submitted so far.

The submission deadline has just been extended to June 5, 2006.

Contributing Editor Elise Bauer also blogs at Simply Recipes and Learning Movable Type.