SEO for food blogs is not any form of sorcery.
It takes hours and days of consistent efforts to create Long-lasting, needle-moving results, along with good development of user experience, quality services for WordPress and useful plugins to improve performance.
So why SEO for Food Blogs is it so confusing and frustrating and time-consuming?
Food blog SEO, in essence, is dual. Each day you’re supposed to do a thousand things right while holding your focus on the big picture as well. Throw in life and regularly create new incredible recipes in the mix, and de-prioritizing SEO is incredibly easy while all of that.
To make it easy for you, here we are with 25+ outstanding tips and tricks, which you can use in the SEO Recipe for your Food Blog. We have divided those trips into two major categories:
- Beginners SEO Tips
- Advanced SEO Tips
So that you can first master the beginner tips first, and tackle the advanced later on!
The New Approach
Like any recipe you’re testing, SEO for any food blog requires time, effort and commitment to see through the process before you can enjoy the fruits of your labour.
Professional and editorial SEO is not a quick solution or a perfect science, and your willingness to execute and test concepts, monitor and interpret data, as well as your commitment to producing compelling food data that responds to the query of a searcher, matters a lot.
There’s been a lot of fuss about keywords for food blogs in the past. Using the right long and medium tail keywords today for the niche of your food blog is just half the battle.
A tremendous amount of food blog SEO occurs off the post (or website) and under the hood making SEO strategies such as mobile site speed and page size, interface design, crawl usability, good category structure, and properly set up plugins, effective and important.
Beginners SEO Tips
1. Install Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a gold standard and a free and easy way to start basic SEO. Once the Yoast SEO plugin has been installed, pay particular consideration to the configuration settings of the plugin as follows:
- Search appearance > General
- Search appearance > Taxonomies
The settings should be modified to match the material and taxonomies of your page.
2. Enable SSL
A safe and secure address of the website which begins with https is a must. Reliable, trustworthy & professional web hosts offer free SSL certificates such as candy so don’t wait to switch. If you have a dashboard or cpanel that you can access from your web hosting service, you may be able to enable SSL yourself. Otherwise, hop with your web host on live chat and ask for SSL to be enabled
Log in to WordPress > Settings > General once SSL is enabled and replace https with https in the fields of WordPress Address and Site Address. Look out for mixed content afterwords.
3. Submit Your Entire Siteman To Google Search Console
Sending the sitemap of your food blog to Google is a very basic but a very crucial task for optimizing the search engine.
Following our guidance, you can set up the Google Search Console for your food blog in less than 10 minutes Go to Index > Sitemap and submit the sitemap of your food blog.
4. Install & Configure A Trustworth Recipe Card Plugin
Relocating your recipe information into a plugin for a recipe card gives you the Google Kingdom keys. Structured data, in particular, JSON-LD Schema Markup, opens a long list of opportunities for the content of your recipe. Rich snippets are just one of the many big wins for your recipes.
Which plugin is the best and easiest to use recipe card?
Now you must be wondering which plugin is the best right? Well, in short, we back:
- Create by Mediavine
- Tasty Recipes by WP Tasty
- WP Recipe Maker by Bootstrapped Venture
All of them are pretty amazing and do something different than others.
5. Fill Out All The Plugin Fields
Consistency is crucial when it comes to organized data success. The task of entering a recipe card plugin ingredients, instructions and more are probably a bit tedious, but in this case of SEO, every short-term pain is a long-term gain. Be thorough, it’s going to pay off.
6. Fix Broken Links (Both Internal & External)
Well, the Internal links are links to your site from one post or page. These are beneficial to the visitors of your website and search engines because they help them find more stuff on your site. On the other hand, the external links are when you connect any outside sources to your website via an URL.
Poor user experience, bouncing back of visitors, and hurdles in SEO ranking are some of the results of broken internal & external linking on any food blog.
Pro tip: Reader comments are a secret source of broken external links. Be proactive in accepting comments from your reader and always verify the URL for a hidden or junk URL in the comment body.
7. Handle Re-directs With Caution
Mis-managed redirects are a major reason for spammy links and 404-page errors impacting SEO. The redirect that is most frequently used is 301, which indicates that the redirected page has passed permanently.
Lean on a credible plugin to help you implement your redirects before you change a URL or delete a post before you remove the date from your URL!
8. Test the Website Speed
Google announced that they were rolling out mobile-first indexing in the spring of 2018. A quick, practical mobile user experience is a must and a significant factor in Google’s ranking. If you would like a ranking shot on the first page of Google, your site will need to load in 3 seconds or less.
Quality optimization is a challenge in the best possible way. If there is a tech and SEO support area worth every penny, that’s it.
We agree that if you can calculate it, you can boost it so that you can check the pace of your mobile site and know what your chances are.
9. Hone In On Your Subject Matter Area Of Expertise
Have you got an area of expertise like gluten-free, dairy-free or vegan recipes? Perhaps it’s planning meals or making-ahead meals. It’s important to send Google clear signals about who exactly you are, what exactly you’re doing, and what you’re a trusted authority in.
Build your knowledge and experience into the structure of your category, your editorial calendar and the user experience of your site. Google wants to provide user queries with the best possible answers and results, so if you’re a plant-based diet or dessert authority, make it crystal clear.
10. Get Rid Of Unused Plugins
This is simply because, if not all most of the unused plugins can have a negative impact on the load speed of your website, which is an important factor for SEO ranking.
It is easy to overlook the deactivated or unused plugins, which is why we suggest that every few months you should review your plugin list and delete unused items.
11. Optimize & Compress All The Images
Site speed and reliability is significantly affected by optimally optimized and compressed images by lessening the size of each image in a post or on a website while still providing high-quality images at the same time.
Download an image compression plugin immediately if you have a collection of uncompressed files. However, not all plugins for image compression are created equal. Be careful while choosing the right one!
12. Use an H1 Tag
An H1 or heading 1 is an HTML tag that basically shows search engines that the heading on the webpage, or on any blog post is the key heading! Only one H1 tag is required for each page or article. An H1 (as well as H2, H3, etc.) is a header that gives a page or post meaning.
Good website design for user experience will automatically include an H1, which will enhance user experience.
13. Use an H2 Tag As Well
If additional headlines (i.e., H2s) are missing from your post’s body, you’re missing some key opportunities for optimization.
H2s are a great way to enhance the reading experience on mobile devices. Remember, many users of the mobile Internet skim through content. H2s are an excellent way to break information into individual chunks, making it easier to read sentences and paragraphs.
14. Be Picky About The Images You Use
Images are one of the most influential tools to communicate the appeal of a recipe for food blogs. Using pictures in a post is also a great tactic to increase the impressions of display ads and can help keep your readers for long on your website.
But it will take longer to load a food blog with too many pictures (and ads too!) or images that are too large.
Compression of the image is important. It is also handy to resize full-width images, say 4000px to 1600px width, particularly if the image quality is exactly the same.
Also, the seconds really do matter on the mobile; with the amount of finished recipe and process shots you use in a post, be careful. If possible, use between 5 and 7 photos in your blog posts!
15. Take A Look At Your Competitors For Keywords
Well, doing your keyword research is an essential and significant part of every food blog’s SEO strategy. Yet, after initial keyword analysis, far too many food bloggers quit.
Go an extra mile and look at the content already created by your competition. The competition is the food blogs that appear on Google’s first page for the keywords you’d like to try.
If the first page is owned by Bon Apetit, Allrecipes, Delish, The Food Network, The Kitchn, and other big-name publishers, well, you should consider going after some other keyword.
If you think you can compete and possibly exceed the giants or another food blog over time for a keyword opportunity, inspect their post’s content and structure. To win a top spot, your post and recipe will need to be as technically sound, thorough, descriptive and closely matching search aim.
16. Include External Links In Every Post
By linking to another food blog or useful resource, it creates a signal to other sites and creators of food content that you are a willing participant in the natural web linking system.
Generally speaking, the only link to a secure site (i.e. https) and a site that is not riddled with ads and pop-ups displays.
If you want to be selective about the food blogs that earn or don’t earn a backlink from you, no-follow tags can also be easily applied to specific links.
17. Comply With Industry Regulations (Use No-follow Links)
Compliance is not the sexiest thing, but it’s an important one. Under the rules of the Federal Trade Commission and the Canadian Competition Bureau, if you:
- Create any form of sponsored content
- Use affiliate links
- Review Free Products
A no-follow sponsored tag must be applied to external links that link back to the website, products and social media accounts of the sponsoring company.