It was a fantastic day that kicked off with a session of food photography and styling by Donal Skehan and Sharon Hearne-Smith which was both fascinating and entertaining. The lunch period offered up some amazing treats from food stalls such as Flippin Nells, Moose Maple Butter and Secret Sausages.
We then took some time out to organise ourselves before our slot in the afternoon (though you may not have noticed!). The session before us over ran by 15 minutes and then we kicked off our presentation with a rather embarrassing IT glitch, meaning that we had to squeeze several complex topics into a very short amount of time. We had bitten off more than we could chew!
So we had to cut short a few aspects of our presentations and focus on the more fundamental elements. The great thing was that the audience at FBC seemed to be in very good spirits and were very understanding, with a lot of people queuing up to ask us questions after the session which gave us a great opportunity to talk to people on a more one to one basis and advise on their individual needs.
We really hope that everyone who attended enjoyed it and learned something useful that they can apply to their food blog.
Below are download links to the slides from our presentations for anyone that was desperately trying to take notes. Also below is a complete list of the plugins that we mentioned throughout.
If you have any questions or comments, please don’t be shy. Leave us a comment below this post, tweet us @eatwholegrain or send us an email.
WP for Food Bloggers Presentation slides
Our presentation was divided into the following 3 parts, and all slides (including the bits we skipped) can be downloaded here:
- WordPress SEO for Food Bloggers – Tom Greenwood (PDF – 1.1MB)
- Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools Fundamentals – Ervin Domonkos (PDF – 0.5MB)
- WordPress Backups, Security and Maintenance – Eugene Molari (PDF – 3.1MB)
Recommended Plugins for Food Bloggers
Throughout the presentations we recommended the following plugins:
SEO Plugins
- WordPress SEO by Yoast
- Feed Stats for WordPress
- Pinterest Hover Pin It (FREE) or Pinterest Pin It Button Pro ($29)
- JetPack or Disqus for easy comments
- Ziplist Recipe, WP Ultimate Recipe or more general schema plugins such as Schema Creator or Recipe Schema
You can also find out more about formatting your recipe and review posts with Schema and hRecipe on these sites:
hRecipeWebsite: http://microformats.org/wiki/hrecipe
Schema Website: http://schema.org/
Google Analytics Plugins
Backup, Maintenance and Security Plugins
I would also like to mention that I started the SEO part briefly talking about the fact that food bloggers need to consider not just Google, but other search engines like Pinterest, Yummly and SuperCook. Later on I had the pleasure of meeting David Urbansky for a new intelligent search engine for recipe called Spoonacular, so it is definately worth checking that one out and also taking a look at their recipe toolkit, which might be helpful for food bloggers. Hopefully a WordPress plugin will come soon!
Here is the food blogger connect’s own post https://www.foodbloggerconnect.com/fbc14-recap-and-video/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=driLekPzymI
