www.simcooks.com

[yichen]

Hi,
My blog (SIM Cooks | Cooking Tips | Easy Recipes) is about 2 weeks old and am seeking for fresh eyes to view and comment so that I can improve.

Some issues that I discovered myself:

(1) I use the plain vanilla template and I realised that the font in my posts was not the same as the Adsense fonts when I accessed my website from another computer.

Please let me know if that happens to you too, when you view my blog and I will figure out how to get a more widely used font.

(2) I haven't figured out how to remove the default blogroll list, so erm.... I'll be leaving it as is for the moment.

Thanks all!

[bizolink]

It look good and delicious..good start for a new site, niche market for blog...

Good content but maybe is still new, it look quite plain. pack more stuff, utilise your area. Place ads above the fold. Optimise your picture file, a page should load 3-5 seconds recommended. your blog roll seem to be loading quite slow. Tweak it. Header missing, should have ready one.

Seem like your site dont have metatag keyword, place them in. Review this keyword and use your creativity to create a niche keyword for yourself:

cook
dane cook 763684
cook island survivor 54700
cook book 36278
cook island 33359
cook 32275

recipe
recipe 698122
all recipe 59753
chicken recipe 57613
food network recipe 50415
salsa recipe 45688

Hope this help...keep it up !!!

[yichen]

Thanks bizolink.
What is a metatag keyword and in what way will it help?

Cheers.

[WordpressConsultant]

Originally Posted by yichen

Hi,
My blog (SIM Cooks | Cooking Tips | Easy Recipes) is about 2 weeks old and am seeking for fresh eyes to view and comment so that I can improve.

Some issues that I discovered myself:

(1) I use the plain vanilla template and I realised that the font in my posts was not the same as the Adsense fonts when I accessed my website from another computer.

Please let me know if that happens to you too, when you view my blog and I will figure out how to get a more widely used font.

(2) I haven't figured out how to remove the default blogroll list, so erm.... I'll be leaving it as is for the moment.

Thanks all!

Wow, YiChen, that was a very nice new blog talk about food... You have impress me and most of the visitors on the first time.

The good about using plain vanilla themes is, it presents the colorful picture and look perfect. Just kept including more pictures in your future posts. That will increase the feel of visitors when they read your website.

Next is remove the unnecessary external link like Yahoo & Google on top. That links don't make sense to your readers. Even if you want to link us, I suggest you put our link in blogrool. The top link should like to more important one such as your affiliate products, etc. To remove the defauly blogroll list, just follow the following steps will do:

Login your blog admin area ==> Look for Links tab ==> Manage Links ==> deleted whatever link you want to. For full post about how to remove link, read here.

The next step to re-arrange your categories into several anchor tags, like fish, vegetable, beef, chicken, review, etc.... Conduct a study on different category and decide which one you like to put it as main category.

You can use technorati tags to cover the smaller category. I suggest you use Ultimate Tags Worrier (UTW), it is a good plugin to create tags for technorati. UTW also create tag for categories as well. Once it is created, it will updates technorati on your assigned tags.

Pertaining to the text size appear differently in different computer, it doesn't matter as the display resolution in different PC are different.

Overall, you have done a good work and have a good start. The next steps is study various plugins that can help you to make your blog easier for reader to get info. Features like, bookmark me, print, email friends to increase the viral effects. You may even want to consider put up rating systems in order to increase the interactivity of your readers.

You can search in the plugin page. I am sure you can find few of them.

[bizolink]

I am not sure wordpress has any interface for user to add metatag keyword. Metatag keyword was use by search engine to determine site rankings, optimizing a page to rank high in a cumulative effort based on keyword you define. It might or might not be useful as search engine like google use wide variety of factors to determine site ranks. No harm, just add in to make search engine like your site.

Here is how a metatag look like, if wordpress doesnt have those interface, u gonna find the header page and edit them.

<HEAD>
<TITLE>your DESCRIPTIVE KEYWORDS title goes here</TITLE>
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Your keyword cook or recipe meta description goes here">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="your keywords,go here,separated by a comma,but not a space">
</HEAD>

Read more about search engine optimization to boost your traffic. Well, since this forum is about wordpress (easy wordpress), guess i am not belong here, all my post was not reply. Anyway...keep the good work. bye everyone..

[WordpressConsultant]

Originally Posted by bizolink

I am not sure wordpress has any interface for user to add metatag keyword. Metatag keyword was use by search engine to determine site rankings, optimizing a page to rank high in a cumulative effort based on keyword you define. It might or might not be useful as search engine like google use wide variety of factors to determine site ranks. No harm, just add in to make search engine like your site.

Here is how a metatag look like, if wordpress doesnt have those interface, u gonna find the header page and edit them.


Read more about search engine optimization to boost your traffic. Well, since this forum is about wordpress (easy wordpress), guess i am not belong here, all my post was not reply. Anyway...keep the good work. bye everyone..

Hi Kenneth,

It is depends on which search engine. If you are targetting Google, there is no need to optimise your metatag as Google no longer using metatag to determine your page rank. It uses more complex algorithm to do so.

Blog especailly wordpress blog is design in such a way seo friendly. It is so much easier to get listed in search engine and you can beat most of the HTML website easily.

Regaring your post on response has been answered here.

[ProfitBlogger]

Hi Yichen,

Your blog is probably the best I've seen in a while, however there are some changes you can do:

1) Meta Tags / Keywords

I don't really put meta tags in my blogs as it's quite outdated, but some search engines still do use them. You can do this by trying out one of the plugins here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Meta

--> If you find one that you like and is easy to use, can you post it here?

2) Theme

This theme is perfect for your blog as it involves a lot of images, which is the center of attraction. If you get any other theme, make sure that's it's simple and doesnt distract from the pictures.

You may also want to get rid of the default blogroll, and start linking to other bloggers on the same topic. This will get you noticed and make more friends.

3) Keywords

The main keyword for your blog is "SIM Cooks". You should try researching for the actual keyword like "asian cooking" or "asian recipes" as this is what people type in search engines.

4) Photos

Since you're going to be using tons of photos, get a Flickr account at http://www.flickr.com

Then get this plugins that will help you manage and add Flickr images easily to your posts: http://www.tantannoodles.com/toolkit/photo-album/

Otherwise, you're doing great. Your Adsense is also neatly integrated into your posts.

Good job, and tell us your progress soon... I might give your blog as an example to customers.

[bizolink]

Originally Posted by WordpressConsultant

Hi Kenneth,

It is depends on which search engine. If you are targetting Google, there is no need to optimise your metatag as Google no longer using metatag to determine your page rank. It uses more complex algorithm to do so.

Blog especailly wordpress blog is design in such a way seo friendly. It is so much easier to get listed in search engine and you can beat most of the HTML website easily.

Regaring your post on response has been answered here.

Yup, probably google will need more backlink from high traffic site to get a better pagerank (Everyone is just assuming and not really many know how google engine works). I think it is a good practice to identify and list down keyword that represent your site, it might be handy sometimes. If google doesnt pick up, there is still the big 3 search engine out there or some smaller one like it. Anyhow, metatag keyword is outdated because it has been misuse by most webmaster.

Yup, not just wordpress, others cms is also quite seo friendly and almost all script out there is seo compliant, depend on who is willing to code that piece of SEO component. Is just the knowledge that make it different.

Anyhow, anything can get free on the internet, is just depend on where you get it and how you get it run.

[yichen]

Hi Steven,
Thank you for your specific suggestions.

1. ...remove the unnecessary external link like Yahoo & Google on top.
Done.

2. ...remove the default blogroll list.
Done, but kept 2 around just for my ref until I add relevant ones.

3. UTW - I have that installed already and am tagging my post entries. However, I don't really understand what you mean by :

Originally Posted by WordpressConsultant

The next step to re-arrange your categories into several anchor tags, like fish, vegetable, beef, chicken, review, etc....

Can you direct me to somewhere to get more info?

Again, thanks for your guidance.

[WordpressConsultant]

Originally Posted by yichen

Originally Posted by WordpressConsultant

The next step to re-arrange your categories into several anchor tags, like fish, vegetable, beef, chicken, review, etc....

Very simple, when you use your UTW plugins, there is an option to choose to convert your categories into tag.

The categories here act like your achor texts. Therefore, you only include the bigger category into here. While the small one will create as tag.

Take for example, beef, chicken, fish, salad, soup, vegetables can consider your category, while most of the postings are related to recipies, so don't use recipies as category here, put it as tag. This is the same goes to the rest. So, you need to study the category well before decide include here.