Recipe Formatting

Why does it matter?

When you post a recipe on your blog or website, Google and the other search engines need to know that it is a recipe and not any other type of page.

You must wrap a recipe in special 'markup' so that Google (and other sites, like Pinterest) understand what it is and can interpret the ingredients, the yield, the cooking time etc.

Here is why it matters...

Search Engine Ranking

It is dramatically more likely that your recipe will show up high in the search results if it is clearly a recipe. Better search engine results means more visitors to your site, and if your site is well designed, you can direct those visitors to your shopping pages.

"Popular Recipes"

Once Google understands that your recipe is not an everyday article, your page will show up as a "Popular Recipe" complete with image, title, cooking time, reviews etc.

You can see at a glance that most visitors will choose a "popular recipe" over a more traditional text result.

Social Media

When a visitor shares a recipe on social media, then many of the platforms will suddenly see that this is a recipe and will show the ingredients, instructions, cooking time etc. in the well-established display format.

Continue to link to ingredients

The way that the 'markup' works means that you can continue to lay out your recipe pages just exactly as you prefer. Your ingredients, and your instructions, can link directly to commercial pages where your recipe-readers can also purchase the kitchen items they need.

What is this 'markup' called?

This special formatting has several names. You will see it referred to as:

Recipe Markup
Schema.org
Recipe Rich Snippets

How to markup your recipes

There are likely to be two tasks to do. First is to set up the infrastructure so that your website/blog is ready to render formatted recipes. Secondly, recipes will need to be converted to use the markup code.

Most web developers understand the principles of markup language, but are less expert at the 'recipe' part of the challenge.

Equally, most well-used platforms (WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Magento etc.) offer plug-ins for markup.

This is our area of expertise.

Please email us for a quote.