Panel
Barnaby Dorfman, Foodista.com, CEO
Joy Victory, WordPress.com, editorial czar
Mani Dhillon, UrbanSpoon.com, general manager
Barnaby Dorfman, CEO Foodista.com
Terms to know:
Monthly unique visitors: Who is coming to your site
Page views, how engaging is our site
Bounce rate: Use Google analytics, or Blog Stats on WordPress
Revenue per thousands: how much money are you making per thousand pages you serve?
Measuring traffic tools:
How Google works:
- Google Bots “crawl” billions of Web pages, follow links and try to understand what a site is about (note: computers aren’t good at irony and humor yet and can’t see photos)
- Indexation, contents of pages placed in the Google index, estimated at 15 billion docs. Someone can’t find you if you aren’t in the Google index
- Relevance, Google uses 200 different factors: Page title match, frequency in document, uniqueness, frequency of updates, age of site, number of pages.
- Pagerank: Google maps all the links, number of links count as a “vote,” most links = authority.
The Web is really about links! Inbound links = authority.
How to get links:
- Comment on other blogs
- Urban Spoonback
- Foodista Widgets, embed in your blog
Note: Traffic from Facebook will not increase your inbound link authority.
Webmaster tools great to use. Sign-up at Google.
Barnaby Dorfman disagrees with previous panel: Give away your recipes!
Making money through advertising:
- It takes a lot of traffic to make money. 500k visitors could translate into $500 a month (not a lot of money).
- Food journalism writing and journalism is still being figured out.
Joy Victory, updates Freshly Pressed on WordPress.com
How to make friends with search engines:
- FoodPress is coming out on WordPress in October (hooray!)
- Back door traffic, learn now to optimize your traffic. Looks at your stats often. Get a sense of where your traffic is coming from.
- Learn to track trends. Google Insights shows you how to track trends. Write about something that is trending.
- For any topic (trendy or not) write with keywords in mind. Be specific, i.e., Chipolte Corn Chowder Recipe. Repeat this term often in your post.
- Use your keywords in your url (blog title), first sentence of your post, subtitles, photo captions, Twitter links. Don’t go overboard in your keywords, don’t be obvious.
- Post often.
- Write about tried and true trends, predictable, write them in advance.
Mani Dhillon, Urbanspoon general manager
Spoonback program, restaurant guide
- Helping people find restaurants and make reservations, iPhone, iTouch, iPad apps
- Discovered that neighborhood zipcodes were something that people were using for finding restaurants.
- Created novel ways to present data, e.g. Restaurants at Night
- Spoonbacks trades links with bloggers, linking back to their blogs. Benefit to both Urbanspoon and bloggers by increasing Google Pagerank.
- Urbanspoon does this for multiple cities, not just Seattle.
Google Insights for Search
- Food blogs have more than doubled since 2004
- Food & Drink are one of the top 20 categories.
- Big spikes for Food & Twitter at the end of each year (spikes have increased yearly)
Q&A
Growth in Social Media. What are your thoughts on using these and integrating them?
Facebook and Twitter are not competitors, different animals. WordPress.com stores content for years. FB and Twitter are tools for sharing, but not competition. FB can take away from comments appearing directly on your blog. A lot of people seem to want to post on FB and not on WordPress.
What are three things that beginning bloggers should keep in mind?
Have a niche, have a clear sense of where you want to go. Keep perspective, it takes a long time to build followers, be patient. Update often.
Three kinds of bloggers at this conference:
- Grass-roots bloggers
- Journalists figuring out to morph their careers to a new platform
- PR and product marking
What do you about headlines/titles with foreign words in them?
You’ll need to take those words out. Varying punctuation will interfere with the search. Make sure your titles/urls are human readable and computer readable.
How do you know what aggregators/tools you should be using?
Think of the Web tools as a laboratory. Don’t be afraid to experiments, and analyze your metrics. Try new things and then figure out your strategy.
Always have an About page and a Contact!
Does WordPress have a widget coming out that will translate the Facebook comments to your blog?
Not at this time.
Will social media “kill” search engines like Wired magazines predicts?
Not yet.
What is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?
Wordpress.com is hosted by WordPress
Wordpress.org is open source software, you pay to have your site hosted by a third party provider. You can host advertising and more plugins.
This post was blogged live from the International Food Blogger Conference in Seattle.
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