Getting Sunny Anderson’s Attention

The Red Bird Life is one of my most recent projects. The site is the adventure of Vanessa Anderson as she tackles life and cooking. She has been blogging for just over 4 months, with the last month being at The Red Bird Life. Prior to that point she was using a hosted blogger account. When we moved her to WordPress we knew we would sacrifice some of the links she had built up but we were looking to take advantage of her own domain name and a WordPress managed site. Since the move she has improved recipe and picture management afforded by plugins and custom coding in WordPress.

Recently we have been reviewing the Google analytics for The Red Bird Life. We noticed a few key details. Slowly the readership is building. Nothing amazing by seasoned blogger standards but it is a start. However, we have noticed that lots of her search engine traffic is finding her site for one of her recipe reviews in particular. The recipe, Airman Anderson’s Chicken, is by Food Network’s, Sunny Anderson. You can check out the post here.

If you actually went to the post and looked at the comments you will see that Sunny Anderson herself posted a response. She has more recently commented again on Vanessa’s experience with another one of her recipes. It seems Sunny Anderson is one of our regular readers, or at least she monitors blogs posting about her recipes proactively. (And no Vanessa is not related to Sunny.)

Generating More Pageviews

In an effort to turn these search results into repeat readers we have several plans in place. First this was a post originally posted on her blogger blog. On that site she was limited with the picture formatting. When we migrated the picture did not fit perfectly. We did not go back and fix all the posts but we have taken the step to fix this photo as it is one of the most read articles on the site. The photo now fits the width of the blog post.

Additionally, we are using the All in One Seo Pack for WordPress. I have tweaked the settings to take advantage of the keywords that are most used in organic searches finding this post by updating the meta keywords, page title and description for this specific post.

We are looking at the prospect of using a related posts plugin to push readers from one post to the next. We are pleased with the Archive and Tag Cloud and the presentation of the category/tags pages as they do a beautiful job of listing posts with mouth watering photos. See for yourself on the desserts page.

Finally we are thinking of having a new post with variations or side dishes for this Sunny Anderson recipe that Vanessa has used or recommends. This will hopefully keep the search results coming in and we will continue to work at turning visitors into followers.

Finally this post, is also a step in the overall strategy for The Red Bird Life getting more exposure. Hopefully, broadening the audience who might not otherwise look for a food blog.