Easy DIY SEO Tips For Food Bloggers

Google Search Console is a free tool with a ton of valuable data. It can show you keywords and errors in your pages. 

Hoarding plugins will increase your website load times. It’s easy to forget about deactivated or unused plugins. Check your plugins every few months and remove what you don’t use.

Optimized and compressed images impact site speed and performance by reducing the size of each image in a post or on a page while still delivering high-quality images. If you have a library of uncompressed images, install an image compression plugin. I wrote a lot about image compression over on Imagify. I suggest you start testing a page on their free tool. We use Shortpixel on our own blog because I prefer some of the features. 

If you want to have a shot at ranking on the first page of Google your site needs to load in under 3 seconds. If there’s one area of tech support that’s worth every penny. Test your site speed and how mobile-friendly your website is. Test your speed with the PageSpeed insight tool from Google or an old standby tool that I love: GTMetrix.com

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Video content is the great way to boost your food blog’s visibility. Some people prefer to watch rather than read. Create your own engaging videos and show your visitors how you cook or taste dishes. Remember, Google owns YouTube. Use keywords and other simple SEO techniques in your YouTube video description. 

Here’s a tip, if you don’t have your own videos, post other people’s! It adds to your visitor dwell time and increases your engagement metrics because people spend more time on your site watching videos. 

Microformat markup is a special format of the structured data that is displayed on the page of search results. This might include a number of reviews, star rating, the time necessary for cooking, and much more. Microformats specify the information on the web page and increase your chances to be found through Google search.

It is not only important to add internal links to your own content but you also should provide external linking to authority sites. This tells Google about high-quality and relevancy of your food blog.

Baking pumpkin bread in July and testing Thanksgiving recipes in September; that’s the life of a food blogger. Circulating season-specific content earlier can be helpful for your readers who like to plan in advance, but SEO is one of the major reasons why it’s absolutely necessary. SEO takes time. If you publish new content, it can sometimes take weeks or even months for that post to start ranking on Google.

Use social media icons and links in your blog design to encourage readers to share your content. WordPress plugins like Sumo or Social Pug will help you do that.