December 2008: Optimizing Recipe for Fatherhood

I recently reviewed a volunteer effort I put together a few years ago called Recipe for Fatherhood. It was a web site I put together when my daughter was born because I didn't see a lot of resources for fatherhood on the web. As I love to cook, I pulled together 30-minute recipes that even a father with little experience in cooking could create. My work in recent years has been around optimizing websites for search engine optimization (SEO). Looking at this site I had built, I was overwhelmed with how naive I was to the interaction between form and function. I had a beautiful site but it wasn't going to be seen by many people without some serious reworking of code, text and navigational structure.

I started with how I had it structured. I had a neat javascript that expanded and contracted the recipes I had posted so that you could either see them all at one time or in categories like breakfast, lunch or dinner. Now that I've been trained in SEO, it occurred like a total fail as I wasn't giving search engines an opportunity to index the content with that format. I changed that in my recent clean up of the site to make four different pages which featured each category of meal. I've already seen better search traffic based on that.

Next, I took a look at the sites metatags which is the part of the code which tells Google or other search engines what you have on the page. A rookie mistake I had made when I first designed the site was to insert very generalized keyword metatags. "Recipes" as a keyword, for instance, gets tens of thousands of searches a day on Google. "Depression Era recipes", which describes a tamale casserole dish my great grandmother used to make, does not get tens of thousands of searches a day. Redefining the keywords in this way made a big difference as well.

A couple hours of work can make a big difference in optimizing a site...