I had a great time at Kingsford University in Las Vegas two weekends ago. I learned a lot, got to meet old blog friends in real life, and met a bunch of new friends.
One of the things Chris Lilly stressed was “grill once, eat twice”. So last night I grilled an extra chicken to use for dinner tonight.
But I learned much from my fellow students too. On the last night six of us were having dinner at Mesa Grill and we talked about how recent changes to how Google searches and presents results for recipes. Previously, bloggers had a fair chance at showing up high in results for a specific recipe. But NOW if your recipe posts do not contain “metadata” or “microformatting”, they will NOT show up in Google recipe searches. Only the big sites like FoodNetwork, Allrecipes, Cooks, etc show up.
My new friend from last week, Meathead Goldwyn of AmazingRibs.com shared what he had found out about this in THIS POST. John Dawson of PatioDaddio shared THIS USEFUL WEB SITE that will let you enter a recipe and then generate the appropriate Google Recipe SEO friendly format. I tried it out tonight and here is the result.
Easy Chicken Enchiladas
Ingredients
- 1 ea
small onion, chopped - 2 tsp
butter - 3 cups
cooked chicken, shredded or chopped - 2 ea
chipotle, seeded and diced - 1/4 cup
cilantro, chopped - 1 14.5 oz can
diced tomatoes - 10 oz
Philadelphia Sante Fe Blend Cooking Creme - 2 cups
baby spinach, chopped - 2 cloves
garlic, minced - 1 cup
cheese, shredded (I used 1/2 of smoked cheddar and monterey jack) - 1/4 cup
half and half - 10 ea
flour tortiallas (6″ size)
Cooking Directions
- Preheat a saute pan and then melt the butter. Saute the onions for 5 minutes until tender.
- In a large bowl mix together the chicken, chipotle, cilantro, spinach, tomatoes and garlic. Add 3/4 cup of the Philly Sante Fe blend Cooking Creme and 1/2 cup of the cheese. Top with the hot onions and let sit for a minute. Toss all of this together until well blended.
- Spoon the mixture evenly among the tortillas, about 1/3 cup each. Roll up and place seam side down in a greased 13 x 9 casserole dish. We ended up having to use another small dish too.
- Top with the rest of the cheese. Mix the rest of the Sante Fe Creme and the half & half. Spoon over the enchiladas.
- Bake at 350f for 25 minutes.
- Serve with Mexican rice and tortilla chips.
Ok, so I’m not crazy about the layout that it generates. So how do you choose between “how your recipes appear on your site” or “how your site appears on Google”, tough one, right? I guess we will be seeing a lot more tools to help us little guys compete with the big sites.
Are you planning to change how you post your recipes relative to the Google changes?
Yeah, I definitely don’t care for it either (the layout). That site is just one quick formatting tool. You can do the required html metadata manually with your standard format but it triples the work you have to do for a post. I just can’t see doing that.
I prefer to write my recipe how it will appear on the site. I’m not impressed with the Google layout. I like something easy to read and spatially appealing. This recipe sounds delicious, btw.
Chris, the enchiladas look awesome, the layout not so awesome – but as long as your photos look so great I don’t think the rest matters much either way!
The enchiladas look fantastic…the layout not so much. I think it stinks that you have to change the look of your site to get on a Google search. Why does the man always try to hold us down?? 🙂 Thanks for sharing this info, Chris!
The layout and copy editor in me is leaning towards how the recipes appear on the site – my 1st inclination is to fix, fix, fix! The chicken looks amazing!