Online Recipe SEO Success

Last June 30, I blogged about the initial success of my free source codes blog. This time, it's my other website, online recipe collections.

A Brief History
This website has been online for about 8 months now. I don't really market this aggressively except for putting it's URL in my signature sections of my emails. I rely mainly in search engines for it's traffic.

Since the site was fully index by Google, Yahoo and other search engines, I've been enjoying good amount of traffic from those search engines. But I noticed that some of the recipe categories pages do not appear in organic searches. Further studying revealed that I was because of the URLs I used. Instead of the actual names of the categories and recipes (Ex: appetizers, bread, cakes, etc), I used the ID's from the database tables (Ex: 1, 2, 3, etc).

In search engine's point of view, appetizers, breads and cakes are more relevant than 1, 2 and 3 when a user searches for recipes.

Although my website's contents is optimized for every recipe categories, it lacks one key optimization point, the URLs.

To counter this weakness in SEO, two weeks ago I recode this website (I use PHP) to display the category and recipe names instead the ids. Here's an example:

Before
1) http://onlinerecipe.grinhost.net/categories.php?category_id=1
2) http://onlinerecipe.grinhost.net/categories.php?category_id=1&recipe_id=25

After
1) http://onlinerecipe.grinhost.net/categories.php?c=Appitizer-Recipes&p=1
2) http://onlinerecipe.grinhost.net/recipes.php?c=Bread-Recipes&r=Apple-Roll&p=1

The Result
This morning when I check my sitemeter, I was very excited to see that my online recipe collections website more than doubled it's visitors. The keywords before that I don't rank well in searches suddenly become my traffic sources. Let's see if this big adjustment I made well bring more traffic to this website.