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Welcome to the liveblog of the BlogHer Food '10 panel "Vocation -- SEO for Food Bloggers (Beginner Level)."
Here's the description:
In that ever-more-crowded food blogging world, SEO has become a critical component to stand out from the crowd and bring new visitors to your site and everything you have to offer. Publishing great food-related content that’s SEO-friendly (but not stilted or stuffed) doesn’t have to be complicated. SEO is all about understanding the details (and potential impact) of keywords, search engine semantics, why variants are important, and knowing what will work for your blog.Improving your SEO can have direct impact on your bottom line. Join Wasabimon, Stephanie Stiavetti, and Stephanie Manley for a straight-forward discussion about SEO that is specifically geared towards food bloggers and their particular needs and content.
Your liveblogger is Denise Tanton. Check back during the panel (3:00pm - 4:15pm October 8) for the liveblog!
Can't make it to BlogHer Food? Get the virtual conference pass and don't miss a thing!
SS: I blog at Wasabaimon and I am also an SEO consultant.
SM: I blog at CopyKat and have a book coming out.
You can find a copy of this presentation at SEO for Food Bloggers.
SS: What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization?
It's a way of writing so that search engines can find and classify your content. When people search, SEO is a way to make sure your site pops up when they search for something you write about.
People give SEO a hard time because they think you can't write good content and make it SEO friendly. There is a way to combine creative writing and make it findable by search engines.
Keywords
SS: Keyword is a phrase or term that people search for.
"Gluten-free" is a short keyword.
"Quick & Easy Gluten-free recipes" is a long tail keyword.
People now search using three, four, eight word and longer keywords.
People more often use long tail key phrases/words because people are trying to avoid getting results for product sales etc.
Google says "try refining your search by adding more words" - 40%-60% of the search words on Google are long tail phrases.
SS: People say SEO is bad, you can't write for search engines and be compelling to readers - that's not true. David Leite is the king of writing good posts that are SEO friendly.
Keep your keyword phrase in mind while writing. If you write about pork chop recipes, keep it in mind as you write.
Synonym search terms are also important. Cooking, cooks, cooked - keep this in mind when you write your posts.
Keywords should appear in the post title. This is the most important thing on the page, according to Google.
Keywords should appear once in the first sentence of the post, and once in a primary header.
Keywords should be used several times throughout the post, in key locations.
SM: (All In One is a good plug-in)
SS: All platforms are a little different, the wysiwyg editor allows you to select different types of headers. Google is looking for the keywords in H1 or H2.
Question: I thought H1 is the title of the post. I'm titling recipes with H3.
SS: Title is title tag. Put title of recipes in H1 or H2.
Question: Some of us don't understand what H1 or H2 means.
SS: A header tag is a block of text that looks big and bold on the page. Look for a header drop down menu.
SM: I handcode, if you're in view mode and see big text then you're in header tag mode.
Question: Does it matter if you're in wordpress.com or wordpress.org?
SM: Even before wysiwyg editors, header code was used.
Question: Is it possible to see that?
SM: Yes, we're going to go through an exercise later but you can come to us later.
All search engines work a little bit differently but most of your traffic is going to come from google and they all work similarly enough. The stuff we're talking about today is the most basic and you should go home and start doing this now.
Google weights stuff at the top of the post heavier than the stuff lower in the post. Heavy hitting sentences should come early in your post. Keep the good stuff at the top.
What is meta-data?
It's the info about the post that shows up on the search result page. Keyword phrase should appear in both the metatitle and the metadescription of your post. These fields might be different on different blogging services - in some you may not be able to change this.
The
