The Good Cook Guide To SEO: Baking To Perfection
So you’ve seen those beautiful websites in all their optimised glory that pull out top rankings with ease.
You’ve yearned to have a website that can rank alongside your favourites with the relative ease they seem to rank with.
But, it’s not as easy as people make out… or is it?
The SEO Recipe
So you’ve discovered the SEO recipe that has been handed down from one generation to the next:
1 Dash of Title Tag 
A Sprinkle of H tags
A half cup of Keywords
A full cup of Content
Alt tags for images to decorate
And a mix of Meta Tags to garnish.
That my friends can be considered your very basic recipe.
You see, I can bake a mean cake. I can now use the one core recipe for a sponge and add dashes of this and dashes of that to completely change the flavour and look of the finished article.
That being said, the core recipe of the cake is still the same, the same initial ingredients always go into the mix.
Following A Recipe
If you are anything like me, the first time I followed a recipe for a cake it never turned out the way I expected and it did not look remotely like the picture.
The second time I tried I over did it, baked it too long. No-one wants to eat a burnt cake no matter how much they say they love you.
My third attempt was to perfection… well, it looked that way until you got to the soggy middle.
By about my sixth attempt I had what resembled a cake, at least it was edible this time.
The Recipe For Success
You see, I went over the same recipe over-and-over again, without deviation that now, today, I can do it without looking at the cook book, without following the recipe.
I have mastered the core ingredients, the fundamentals, the prerequisites of a good cake.
Since the days of struggling with the basic recipe, I’ve moved on to learning other cake mixes, changing up the icing, adding this ingredient and that ingredient to see what end result I like best.
Let’s apply this to search engine optimisation (and Internet marketing, website design, and other learning situations).
By learning and mastering the fundamentals, you will then have a strong foundation to mix up your strategies, test and measure effectively and work with the ‘ingredients’ that get you the results you want.
Having a strong foundation allows you to drop the ingredients from your marketing mix that left you with a bitter taste in your mouth.
You see, the tendency is for people to jump straight into the cake that looks fancy, the cake with all the trimmings, when their time would be better spent learning how to bake a killer sponge, a basic starting point for many cakes.
In closing, take the time to master the basics, play with the core ingredients of SEO until they become second nature, and then add all the wonders you can imagine to spice up your end results.
Happy baking,
Kelly-Anne Foxley
Here are a couple posts on the fundamentals that will help to get you started.
A Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO
Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
23 Comments
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Kelly, I’ll try your The Recipe For Success, The Good Cook Guide To SEO: Baking to Perfection. Thanks for nice idea!
very nice on page optimizations ,surely would be very helpful for newbies !
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Love it. But what do you mean by “Dash of Title Tag?”
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The Title Tag is the information about the page that is displayed in the browser bar. You can read more about Title tags by visiting the Understanding SEO link at the bottom of the post. Hope that helps.
Excellent metaphor, Kelly! And you’re right, unless you’re a pro, focus on the basic cake and don’t worry about getting the trimmings perfect.
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I love the creativity for this piece… LOVE IT!! Very nice work Kelly, and excellent tips for building up some sweet tasting SEO.
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Thanks John, that means a lot!
Hi Kelly & Karl – nice idea – and good to see FMS continue to rise in the internet oven …
Cheers, Will
Thanks for the feedback Will, always great to see you here.
Kelly-Anne
Yeah, I learned of this basic recipe sometime ago. So, what would Allan’s (iWoodpecker) addition be in recipe terms? Use microwave instead of the usual stove to get the cake cooked quicker?
Brilliant way to present the basics of SEO in blogging. I will definitely try cooking something different today. But for, just like any other cooks out there,I love to experiment.
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Excellent post, love it. I remember when I first started online as well and I would literally refer back to my SEO checklist for every element, now I can do it in my sleep as well as other IM tasks, and that is very very productive, practice makes perfect
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What a good cake, Kelly. I love this post
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So true Dennis. Are you talking about any ‘gurus’ in particular?
There’s nothing more beneficial then getting back to basics…oh how I wish more “guru’s” would learn this.
I wasn’t speaking about the core.. just little details. For instance.. the latest Google upgrade of their algorithm. Now your page loading time also matters. This made me change a lot of things on my blog and delete some stuff as well, like extra web analytics scripts etc.
And as well as I know, Google is thinking now on several more changes.
@Chandan, thank you for the show of support.
@Allan (iWoodpecker)
Totally. I don’t see the core on page optimisation characteristics changing for quite some time yet.
Kelly-Anne
Sometimes cakes came out too excellent to be true.. And I more and more believe, that SEO is just like biology
This will always keep staying enexplored.. and everyday there will be always something new: a new “spice”, some new “powder” etc..
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This one is nice recipe on SEO, I have tweeted, and digged the post.
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Thanks for the great feedback Ching Ya. I certainly hope to keep sharing the scoops.
Kelly-Anne
What a smart way to present a post, Kelly. I enjoyed the ingredients and ‘am now wondering what kind of SEO cakes I’m able to come up with?
To learn the basics is essential, without them it’s hard to be creative for nothing will be in place. SEO has always be a topic I fancy in, I know there’s a lot more to learn but I’m sure fmsseo is a place I can get some scoop out of. Am I right? ^^
Keep up the good work, Kelly & Karl.
@wchingya
Social/Blogging Tracker
Ah, now this comment has all right ingredients.
Thank you for the Sphinn Ileane.
Kelly-Anne
Hi Kelly, I’ll be a chef in no time if I stick to this recipe. I certainly need help in the SEO kitchen. Thanks for making such a tasty dish. I gave it a Sphinn.
@Ileane
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