SEO for Food Blogging

We food bloggers have hundreds of questions on SEO. Shawna Wright, is the SEO expert for BGMP – Boston Globe Media Partner. In her spare time, Shawna consults people learning SEO with a very little charge. She was kind enough to explain me the dos and dont’s of SEO and it helped to clear my head and focus more time on blogging. She is too nice to answer a few questions by me and a couple of other food blogger friends of mine.

Thank you so much Shawna! It really helps and mean a lot to us.

SEO Questionnaire : Answered by Shawna Wright, the SEO expert of Boston Globe Media Partner.

1.  Is hiring a SEO company a good idea? What should someone check before hiring a SEO company/consultant? Is it possible to get fooled (robbed) by them?

a. It really depends. I honestly don’t believe it’s worth hiring an SEO company if you’re a blogger, especially if you are just starting out. You better off learning the ropes and doing the work yourself. A good SEO consultant could easily charge $150 an hour and a company is going to charge a lot more. It might be worth hiring someone to do an audit and give you a roadmap, but the biggest thing is that SEO takes time, so save yourself the cost and invest your own time as you can.

b. I think SEO training is going to be more valuable because it will also teach you what NOT to do, so if someone tries to sell you a scam you’ll be able to recognize it.

2. Does moving to wordpress help SEO? Since blogger does not have plugins for SEO, what’s the best approach to tackle SEO for blogger? 

a. WordPress is great because they make it very easy to have good SEO fundamentals in place. It’s just easier and more user-friendly. I don’t have any experience working in blogger, but I imagine as long as you follow best practices the platform shouldn’t matter. Google doesn’t give blogger any boost because they own it.

b. The most important thing isn’t necessarily your CMS, but your domain. BUY YOUR DOMAIN and then you can change the CMS as you see fit (provided you have the tech skills/help to do so). Age of domain is one of the 200 factors that affects SEO, so setup a site and stick to it.

3. Can my site get deleted from Google? If yes, how? What should I avoid in order to not get banned by google?

a. Yes.

b. If you get caught in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines your site can be manually removed (meaning a human being actually saw your site and said ‘no.’) Or it can be removed algorithmically. Google is basically one big math equation and if you are on the wrong side of it you’ll get dinged. The only way to undo that is to fix what you did wrong (and Google won’t tell you) and wait for an update to roll through. Hopefully you cleaned up your act enough to recover.

c. Link schemes, stolen or thin content, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, hidden text – anything that tries to “trick” Google is a big no and will get you in trouble. Google Webmaster Guidelines outlines it all.

4. How can I improve my SEO for FREE?

a. Again, everything an SEO consultant/company could do you for you could probably do yourself given enough time and direction.

b. Learn the ropes of onsite optimization and do it yourself. Moz.com, SearchEngineLand, Google Webmaster Guidelines —there are a lot of great sites out there that will walk you through the process.

5. What are the 5 must have SEO steps in every blog post?

a. Do your keyword research – how do people search for your topic?b. Optimize your title tag, meta tag description, URL, H tags (headlines and subheads) based on your keyword research – no keyword stuffing!

c. Interlink with other posts (as it makes sense)

d. Promote it on social

e. Rinse and repeat with every new post

6. Why pageviews reduced after migrating to wordpress or own domain? How to get it back?

Did your URLs change? If your site used to be mywebsite.com and now the site is mysite.com (or even if the domain stayed the same and the page names change) you have effectively started over from scratch. Make sure all your original URLs are 301 redirected to their new counterpart. Otherwise your new site gets none of the value of your old.

7. Can having too many images impact SEO? How to do SEO for images?

a. No.

b. Google can’t “see” images, so they only hurt you if your entire page is image based and there is no text. Without text Google has no idea what the page is about.

c. The only way to optimize images is to name the file and alt tag something that is optimized based on your keyword research.

8. Does layout of a site help SEO or is it all about keywords?

a. Layout matters. The flatter a site is (meaning how few clicks does it take to get from A to L pages) the better. It helps condense the SEO value of each page.

b. You will also need a working XML sitemap submitted to Webmaster Tools to ensure Google crawls all your pages.

9. Does ads imact SEO?

No.

10. Does bounce rate affect seo and how to reduce bounce rate?Bounce rate is one of 200 signals that can affect your site. Bounce rate means someone hit your site and immediately left. If your bounce rate is high that means you have a bad user experience –poorly written, thin content, bad design, etc. The user experience is something that Google takes into account.

11. Do Social Media Shares Count towards SEO ranking?

Yes and no. Social shares help drive people to your site, which increases the likelihood of them linking to your content from their own site. Can Google see Facebook links? Sure. Do they matter more than other links? Not necessarily. But it’s never a bad idea to promote your content across all channels. The more places you promote it the more people will see it.

12. What’s the best way to build backlinks?

Naturally. Never pay for a link. Never engage in a link exchange. Never get links from sites that are unrelated to your industry (a food blog does not need a link from a construction company). You want to earn links by writing great content, promoting it, developing real partnerships with other sites, building your brand and generally marketing your site. If you are getting a link simply to help your SEO it’s probably a bad idea.

Much thanks Shawna, for taking your valuable time to do this interview.  Shawna can be reached at shawna.wright@boston.com.

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