We all understand the value of a good recipe, whether it’s for Grandma’s Apple Pie or your favorite pizza. Recipes are the building blocks in the foundation of a superior food blog. Even if you ran a food website where you never shared a single recipe (not that you would…), the content you would be sharing would have originated from a recipe at one point or another.

Because recipes are so integral to the food blog process, it’s important to make them as available to your readers as possible. Sharing recipes makes food blogs interactive and valuable to their audience. It gives them something they can take away from visiting your spot on the web. Recipes are like your site’s little goodie bag. Ensuring that your recipes are picked up in search results is key in knowing they are reaching your audience.

The formatting of a recipe is different than that of prose, even as hard copy. Recipes include lists, sometimes lengthy, and step-by-step directions. On top of visual formatting, recipes require a little more attention when thinking about how search engines deal with them. Web searches are now looking at recipes in an exciting way.

Google Recipe Search

Google Recipe Search is an intuitive approach to presenting recipe search results. Google is already ubiquitous across platforms and projects these days, and it’s because they know how the internet works. Creating a space specific to recipes allows Google to compete with other sites out there that operate as a recipe specific search engine. They are the king at presenting search results in a clean, easy format.

When someone looks up a recipe on Google, the results are presented with bright images and key information. They have a star rating, a description, and a link to the recipe in full. It takes into account the high priority on visual appeal with food and makes photos a prominent part of their listings. It’s like a virtual cookbook listing.

Rich Snippets Make It Happen

Google is able to present recipe results in such a visually appealing format because rich snippets are working in the background to ensure success. Rich snippets are pieces of markup that call attention to specific aspects of the code. These snippets allow search engines to break down the content and give it deeper meaning.
For instance, if somebody were to search for chicken recipes, normally Google would search the internet with documents containing that combination of words. Perhaps the returned results would include articles about chicken recipes instead of actual recipes. Rich snippets allow Google to find recipes based on how they are marked up – finding a recipe with chicken as an “ingredient”. Rich snippets mean that people are finding search results that are more valuable to them.

Microformats and Structured language

The schema recipe standard lists a set of universal markup used to define specific elements of a recipe. It establishes a baseline for how to markup text in order for Google to pick it out a recipe and add it to its search results. Properties that schema defines include: cooking time, cooking method, prep time, recipe instructions, and recipe yield.

The schema recipe standard is set up so that even someone coding their own food blog can format their recipe to maximize search results. The simplicity of the code makes it accessible for everyone. The bigger food websites began coding their recipes in this standard as soon as news of Google Recipe Search came out. The smaller sites are now catching up, but this amount of code can be labor intensive to add to archived recipes.

Using WordPress to Structure Recipes

As we already know, WordPress is an extremely powerful content management system that caters to all means of blogging. With WordPress’ prevalence on the internet, it is no surprise that developers set to work on creating plugins to make the task of recipe formatting a breeze. Plugins take out the guess work of having to manually enter code and structure your posts by automatically formatting the data you enter for you.

Google loves WordPress sites because of how neatly they are coded and how easy they are to index. Ultimate Recipe knows that and builds off it by creating rich snippets for Google to find. Your food blog posts can be formatted the same way that those on big food websites are. And it won’t take any more time than you’re already spending hunched over the computer on the kitchen counter.

WP Ultimate Recipe Plugin is steps ahead of the food blogger. We know how important proper search representation is. Ultimate Recipe is so intuitive, you won’t ever have to think about recipe markup or language again. The second you post your recipe, it will be ready for Google to showcase. It’s one of many benefits of using such a robust plugin on your site.

Putting It All Together

The internet has become a leading resource for home cooks and chefs alike. The wealth of information on technique and flavor out there answers any question you could conceive of. People are becoming increasingly dependent on search engines to answer the question of “what’s for dinner?” and tell them how to cook it. It’s imperative to your success to maximize your visibility in search engines.

The good news is you don’t have to worry about learning new code if you really don’t want to (though it’s not that hard), and you won’t have to think about it much at all. WP Ultimate Recipe will do all the hard work so that you can think about what to write next. You can rest assured that people are finding your delicious recipes and using them to bring their kitchen to life. Now, you just gotta keep on cooking!