I'm almost on my 3rd year blogging and have some tricks to help optimize my food blog for search engines and increase my google page rank.
I use blogger and unlike Wordpress blogs I've had to find ways to optimize my food blog, since blogger doesn't supply plug-ins like Wordpress.
This widget works on Wordpress.com, Blogger or Tumblr.
For the next few weeks I will share tips and tricks I've learned to help you to make your food blog more SEO friendly.
This week we are going to go over recipeseo.com.
I like recipeseo.com because it makes formatting my recipes easy and adds recipe mark up to help search engines know this is a recipe and not a craft tutorial for example.
Using Recipeseo also makes my blog compatible with Pinterest's Rich Pins so when someone Pin's one of my recipes a list of ingredients appears under the pin so users know what ingredients are needed to make the recipe without searching through the recipe on my website and allows me to partner with companies like Ziplist.com who allow readers to save recipes to a box and create shopping lists.
As you can see in the picture above Recipe Seo is pretty easy to fill in the recipe format.
The one problem I ran into with using Recipe SEO is where it says time if you run it through Googles Rich Snippets Testing Tool. I was consistently running into Error Message: Cooking Time should be in ISO 8601 Format.
I ran a recipe with the incorrect format for an example pictured above.
After you enter your ingredients and instructions into recipe seo you have the option of expanding the widget under instructions called more options.
If you expand the recipe you can enter Author, Photo URL, Prep Time, Cook Time and Total Time.
To avoid the Error Message seen above, you'll need to add the times in the following format.
PT___M for minutes or if the recipe is hours it will be marked PT____H or for hours and minutes you would make it PT__H__M.
As you can see I marked my recipe above PT20M because my prep time is 20 minutes. My total time is marked PT1H because the recipe takes 1 hour total.
Once you finish entering your recipe information you'll be given a set of HTML code pictured above with all of the recipe microformats entered.
You will then copy and paste your HTML code into the HTML of your blog post where you want the recipe to appear.
As you can see once the time is fixed there is no longer an ISO 8601 error message in Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool.
Problem solved!
I haven't been compensated in anyway to write this blog post all opinions and ideas are my own.