by Diane CuPlease welcome today’s guest post by Allison Day, developer of the new WordPress Recipe SEO Plugin and founder of SushiDay and CodeSwan.
When Google announced its new Recipe View at the end of February 2011, many food bloggers – myself included – were pretty excited. “Finally,” we must have collectively thought, “a search function geared towards us! A way to find all sorts of great new recipes! A way for my recipe-centric food blog to get more traffic!”
And then, moments later, we were all horribly disappointed when we tested out the Recipe View… only to find out that none of our blogs were anywhere to be found in the results!
Not only were we not well-ranked… in fact, practically none of us were even in the results at all. Anywhere. Not even on the very last page of results.
So why is this? Why do recipes from big sites like Food Network, Serious Eats, and AllRecipes show up, but us bloggers all seem to be cheated?
One word: microformats.
99.99% (okay, I made that up, but it’s probably accurate) of us food bloggers have never used microformats on our blogs. In fact, most of us had never even heard of microformats before Google Recipe View suddenly made them relevant.
So what are they?
Microformats are a type of markup that uses HTML markup to display metadata about your website. When we’re talking about recipes, that means adding HTML markup to the title of your recipe, all your ingredients, your instructions, any other information that might be associated with your recipe… and right now, microformats are what Google’s Recipe View uses to figure out what websites have recipes on them, and what information to display from those websites in its search results.
It’s just like any other type of SEO – it’s commonplace to use keywords to tell the search engines what your website is about, or the “description” meta tag to tell the search engine what it should display as the short blurb about your site. So recipe microformats, in the same way, are there so the search engine can easily find out information about your recipes.
Okay, so what do these microformats look like? There are a lot of posts out there that explain all about microformats (like the one I posted on my programming blog, CodeSwan, today), so I won’t go into it much here. But when you add all that markup to your recipe, it ends up looking something like this:
That’s quite a bit of code that you have to add to your recipe. And you have to put that on every single recipe on your website.
Sounds like a huge pain in the butt, doesn’t it? Especially if you already have a lot of recipes on your blog? Heck, I’m a programmer – coding websites is what I do for a living – and even I dreaded the idea of having to go back and add all that code to every single recipe I’ve ever posted. Not to mention remembering to add it to every recipe I ever post after this.
As I said, I’m a programmer – so I decided to do something about it.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to just type out your recipe, click a button, and voila! – magically have your recipe formatted with all the appropriate microformats, without you ever having to touch a single line of code? I rather liked the idea of something that would make adding microformats to your site so easy, but I wasn’t happy with the one or two options that already existed.
So I made my own plugin: the RecipeSEO WordPress Plugin. I’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for food bloggers to add microformats to their recipes – all you have to do is enter your recipe into the form, and the plugin does all the work of adding microformats for you! It’s 100% free to download and use on any WordPress.org site.
However, I know not all of you have self-hosted WordPress.org sites. Some of you are on WordPress.com, Blogger, Tumblr, other blogging platforms… what about you? Well, unfortunately WordPress.com doesn’t allow plugins on their websites. And I can’t possibly try to make a plugin for every single blogging platform out there.
But it’s not really fair that you guys kind of get cheated just because you don’t have a self-hosted WordPress site, right? So instead, I’m developing a website you can go to – RecipeSEO.com – that does something very similar to my WordPress plugin. Just enter your recipe into the form and click the button, and you’ll have a fully formatted recipe that you can copy and paste into the HTML view of your website.
My hope is that this plugin will make things a little easier for all of us in the food blogging community. Have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future features you would like to see added to the plugin? You can always email me at allison [at] sushiday [dot] com.
You’re plugin is AWESOME! Thank you so much for this rocking new tool!
THANK YOU! This sounds awesome! I am glad there are those that understand code and are wiling to make programs/shortcuts for those who don’t.
I can’t wait to give it a go, especially the RecipeSEO.com site since I have an free wordpress site.
Thank you again!
This is wonderful. Thank you so much! I can’t wait to download it!!
I just have one question. When I have cut and pasted the microformat tags (manually input) it seems that in WordPress, the Visual Editor seems to strip out this code as it is not a default valid element in TinyMCE editor. I’ve looked in all the forums and it seems not to have an easy answer as how to prevent this. Have you experienced this and will your plugin correct this problem? It’s really upsetting to type in all this code only to have it disappear when you go back to look at it.
Thanks so much for working on this!
Renee
I am thrilled that you did this, as I am a techno-dud. I do have a self-hosted blog, but someone else set up everything for me, and now they are no longer available to help. SO…I am on my own. I will be using RecipeSEO.com instead of the plugin, only becasue I have no idea how to install a plugin, and would be afraid I would mess up my blog.
Anyway, thank you for your time and generosity!
Cecilia
http://www.fieldandfeast.com
[...] Update: For more specifics, see Elise Bauer of Simply Recipe’s post on Food Blog Alliance, and this post on the Food Blog Forum: Making Micro Formats Manageable. [...]
I’ve downloaded the Recipe SEO plugin and set it up in my Godaddy-hosted blog. I used it to create a recipe within a new page (not a post) and started loading a recipe into it, specifically, the recipe found at http://micuisine.com/lunapiercook/?p=268. If you Google ‘Velveeta macaroni and cheese’ this recipe on my blog comes up as link #6 on Google’s search, and is the most popular recipe I have yet posted.
Unfortunately the recipe instructions contain a number of photos of the process. I did this because the process can get a bit confusing so it’s really a ‘teaching’ recipe. Of course the Recipe SEO plugin doesn’t accomodate photos in the process so is unsuitable for this recipe.
I like the concept of the plugin but I’m already thinking of a number of improvements. Besides photos where necessary in the process, I’m wondering about the method for listing, say, 2 one-pound boxes of macaroni. Is that it right there as I wrote it or are we now to write 24 ounces macaroni? Also, would it somehow be possible for a future version to include HTML in the instructions for emphasis and notes?
Yeah I know, I’m a pain! But I do think this is actually a good beginning.
That seems to be a great plug in and wonderful for a code challenged blogger like me. I downloaded hrecipe a while ago, but yours looks more ‘comfortable’. Thank you Diane.
PS would you know of a plug in to print just the recipe portion of a post {the recipe is enclosed in a blog}
Thanks for your help.
Debra – try WP-Print. I use it on my blog and it works fine. You can see an example of it in action here – http://www.dontforgetdelicious.com/2010/spicy-crab-cake-panini/.
You just have to use [donotprint] [/donotprint] tags to enclose the stuff you don’t want printed, and plug a [print_link] tag wherever you want the print link to show up. Clicking on the Print link will present a printer-friendly page.
Make sense? It’s actually very easy to use and has worked great for me. And it allows you to customize exactly what you do and don’t want printed.
Valerie
Thanks so much for not leaving us non-wordpress bloggers out!
I am rushing right now to your website to check it out!
Allison: Thank you so much for sharing this plugin. I’ve tried adding the tags manually, but it always failed Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool. I’m looking forward to trying this! Thanks again.
~Cristina
EEEEEEKKKKKK!!!!! Coding makes my eyeballs glaze over! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for creating a plug in. I will definitely implement it. Now I just have to find minions (which I don’t have) and go back and code all of my previous recipes. WAAAAAAAAAA!!!
Thank you for letting me vent.
Alison does the plug in allow you to keep H1 header tags for your recipe titles. Also how do you use the plugin when you have a 3 part recipe i.e. Hazelnut, Raspberry Jam and White Chocolate Ganache Tarts – recipe for Hazelnut Shortcrust Pastry, recipe for Raspberry Jam and recipe White Chocolate Ganache and then assembly instructions? Can it be coded for H1 tags for each part of the recipe?
[...] some helpful articles published if you wish more information. Here is a round up of what we found: The Food Blog Forum, Food Blog Alliance, Will Write For Food, Meathead Goldwyn on the Huffington Post & Amazing [...]
Thanks everyone!
Renee – Copy it into the HTML editor, not the Visual editor. That should solve your problem – I’ve never had a problem with WordPress stripping out code when I enter it into the HTML editor.
Lunapiercook – Photos are something that a lot of people have requested. I am planning on trying to add that functionality when I have the time. ’2 one-pound boxes of macaroni’ should be fine. I can see about allowing HTML in the recipes as well, in a future version of the plugin.
Deeba – Sorry, I don’t, but I know there are plenty of good ones out there.
Grace – Currently no, but in the future I am planning on giving users the option to choose what tags they want to use for the different sections of the recipe. Honestly, I’m not sure how to do a multi-part recipe – Google doesn’t strictly follow the microformats guidelines, and I haven’t seen anything about how they expect users to handle recipes like that. If I find any information about the best way to do that, I’ll update my plugin to handle multi-part recipes, but for now unfortunately I’m just not sure.
Alison do you suggest doing three separate recipes, i.e. inputting the first one, then the second etc. Would it look weird to have three recipes on page when advising Google? Most of my recipes (I do strictly desserts) tend to have more than one element, i.e. dessert sauces, ganache, jams. I’m lost on how to use the plug in effectively.
This looks great! I’ll have to check it out. Thanks.
How will we know if it actually works and gets our recipes out there? I use blogger.
Hi Vicki, you can use the Google “Rich Snippets Testing Tool” to test pages. It doesn’t work 100%, but it is a good start.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
-George
Thanks so much for this tool! I tried it, but it mucked up my formatting a little. My ingredient list came out bulleted and double spaced, as in:
*1 tbsp
Olive oil
*2 tsp
Basil
Any hints on how to fix this? I use wordpress.com.
Thanks again for the awesome hard work and problem-solving!
Thank you so much. As a beginner blogger, this was a great way to get introduced to the mysterious world of SEO…
Regards,
Sushmitha
http://icancooktosavemylife.wordpress.com/
Sorry to nitpick here, but this plugin does not wrap the recipe title in an tag which is standard practice SEO-wise. Furthermore, at least on 3.1.1, it’s rendering the title twice. This would have been a great plugin though as it’s wrapping ingredient items and quantity separately, which seems will become a valuable asset for search in the future.
Cara,
You can edit the plugin to incorporate the h1 or h2 tag around the title. It’s fairly straight forward and I can tell you how. PM, if you are interested.
Scott
your system removed the tag – I was trying to say H1 tag.
Allison,
I have been looking at your RecipeSEO plugin and have been playing around with all these fun micro-formats getting another clients site ready for launching. I love it and will use it. I have been adding somethings to it to make it a little more useful for me. But I wanted to get your understanding of what’s “really” required to get a hit on the google recipes search.
From the research I have done the absolute minimum needed to complete the microformat are the following tags:
hRecipe, fn, and at least 1 ingredient.
Then google later goes on to say it really needs to also have 2 of the following four items to be considered valid by it’s search engines:
1 – duration (which includes prep time and cook time – although not clear if one, both or just total duration is needed to be valid)
2 – calories
3 – review hreview-aggregate
4 – photo
I understand the first two as the recipe search can be filtered through prep time and calories, and I think they were hinting at review information as well.
What’s is your understanding on this?
I am using post_thumbnails on most of the sites I run. I like the ease and slickness on how wordpress now includes thumbnails. So I added the following lines to your plugin in the amd_recipeseo_format_recipe function right after the “fn” span:
if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) {
$output .= get_the_post_thumbnail( $post->ID, ‘thumbnail’, array(‘class’ => ‘photo’) );
}
You’ll also need to include
global $post
at the top of your function.
I would love to see author and published microformats pulled from the post information and added to the microformat. Also the tags would be good as well.
Meathead has a good summary of all the tags in his post as well at http://www.amazingribs.com/blog/google_rich_snippets.html
Are you planning on updating the plugin soon?
Thank you for your plugin. Enormous help for the coding impaired like myself.
Can’t wait to get started. This looks amazing. Thank you, thank you!