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10 quick tips to instantly improve your food blog
1. Clean up your sidebars
Remove any unnecessary links and widgets that don’t add value to your blog or reader. Ideally your sidebar should only contain tools that encourage your readers to visit other pages through a list or recent and popular posts or advertising or links to products (such as ebooks or cooking classes) which helps you earn money to support your blog. Sounds good? Do you want to buy dogs calendars? Order dogs calendars calendars here. Buy a calendar
This includes removing links to your Foodgawker, Tastespotting and other food photography gallery pages in your sidebar. Not only do they clutter up your sidebar, but they encourage visitors to leave your site. Wouldn’t you rather your readers browse your website than Foodgawker for recipe ideas?
This equally applies to links to websites you’ve appeared on. Again, it’s just more encouragement for visitors to get distracted and leave your site.
Finally, remove your blogroll from your sidebar and create a page to specifically list all of your favourite blog posts.
2. Add a list of popular posts to your sidebar
Now that you’ve cleaned up your sidebar you can begin by adding some useful content to it that will increase your pageviews. Adding a list of popular posts, especially with thumbnail images, is a great way to increase page views. There are plenty of plugins available that provide this functionality. Examples include nRelate Popular Posts and WordPress Popular Posts.
3. Install a related posts plugin
Along the same lines as point 2 above, displaying a list of related posts at the end of your post is a great way to increase pageviews and increase reader engagement. Check out nRelate Realted Posts, Yet Another Related Post Plugin and LinkWithin.
4. Install a recipe plugin
Not only do recipe plugins help format your recipe in an attractive way, they also provide SEO benefits. Check out the Easy Recipe plugin and support it’s Australian developers!
5. Install a sharing plugin
If you don’t have a sharing plugin installed, install one now! The existence of sharing buttons on your website encourages your readers to share your awesome recipes with the world and also increases your page views and the possiblity of your post going viral. Some great sharing plugins include WP Socializer, Digg Digg and Jetpack‘s sharing buttons.
6. Add an email subscription box
Don’t have an email list? Get one now!
There are a lot of great Email List Managers out there, such as MailChimp (which I use) and Aweber that offer fantastic tools to enable you to communicate with your readers. Sign up with an Email List Manager (MailChimp is free for lists under 2,000 subscribers) and add a signup box to your sidebar now that you’ve cleaned it up in step 1. Mad Mimi is another option to check out too.
7. Speed up your website
By speeding up your website not only will you improve your food blog and the experience for your readers, you’ll also improve your SEO. There a number of caching plugins available that help you do this. Some of the best include WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. If you want something simple, that you can simply install, set and forget about go with WP Super Cache.
Before you install a caching plugin check your website speed with either of the following tools – Pingdom Page Speed or GT Metrix. Once you’ve installed your caching plugin rerun the test and watch your page load time decrease!
Plugins are also notorious for slowing down your blog. Check out P3 Plugin Profiler to find out which plugins are slowing your site down and replace them with a faster plugin, or remove them altogether.
You can discover more tools for speeding up your blog and diagnosing performance issues in this great post from CopyBlogger and How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site from Social Media Examiner.
8. Interlink your posts
This tip not only improves SEO but also helps direct your readers to posts that they might not have previously seen, increasing your page views.
An example of this might be where you are writing a post on a new chocolate cake recipe you’ve tried, but you’ve posted other chocolate cake recipes previously. When you mention the word “chocolate cake” you can highlight those words and insert a link to your previous chocolate cake post by using the Insert Link feature in your post editor toolbar.
You can learn more about internal link best practices from SEOmoz and the benefits of interlinking from ProBlogger.
9. Add a search box
This one might seem obvious, but sometimes it’s the simple things that are overlooked. Adding a search box will enable your readers to search for the content they are looking for, and in the process increase page views. WordPress includes a default search widget which you can add to your blog sidebar, but there are also some great plugins out there for searching, such as Relevanssi.
10. Add links to your social networks
If your readers like your blog they may want to see what you have to say on your social media accounts too. There are countless ways to add links to your social media accounts. This can include social media widget plugins or using predesigned buttons (there are lots of great custom ones available on Etsy) or even designing your own.
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