About SEO Cooking

Welcome to SEO Cooking! You're reading our about page? Let's bring this burgeoning relationship to the next level:

Okay, now that we're eternally and digitally bound … what the hell is SEO Cooking?

SEO Cooking is a instructional cooking show. SEO Cooking is a instructional SEO video series. SEO Cooking is the site you go to at work when any diversion is better than actually sending out link requests.

That's right, SEO Cooking demonstrates invaluable cooking techniques, walks you through the making of delicious recipes and teaches you how to do a better job at search engine optimization.

We're not the first SEOs that are known to cook (I've got forty people on my food optimizers list, and I've barely scratched the surface). Nor are we the first SEOs to make a video. We may not even be the first to combine cooking and SEO on screen, but we did grab the domain name seocooking.com, assembled the technology, put together a great team and came up with these videos, and this site.

Sharing the Love

The primary goal of this endeavor is for Aaron and Keith to see through yet another drunken scheme to completion. If you're reading this, we've actually succeeded. Hooray for us!

But because SEO Cooking is devoid of any commercial potentional whatsoever, this also presents an SEO instructional opportunity. We have no vested or proprieterial interests in protecting any of the data related to SEO Cooking, so we want to share it all with you. All. Visitors, search referrals, indexing statistics. Any and all non-personal information. As much as you'll learn about amazing SEO techniques in the videos (cough, cough) we also hope you'll be able to learn something from the data we share and the observations we make concerning it.

We find this actually a little bit exciting, as SEO Cooking is anchored on web video, and nuts-and-bolts information concerning video implementation and search engine optimization can be hard to come by. Video sitemaps? Best players for HTML 5 that the search engines understand? Impact of the video container on vertical rankings? Learn with us!

Inspiration

SEOmoz's Whiteboard Fridays and Matt Cutts webmaster videos notwithstanding, there isn't exactly a rich history of SEO instructional videos. There is, however, an enormous corpus of television cooking shows to draw upon. SEO Cooking draws inspiration and hope from two TV cooking shows in particular: America's Test Kitchen and Cookin' Cheap.

America's Test Kitchen is a half-hour PBS show from the same crew that publishes Cook's Illustrated magazine. Front man Christopher Kimball's approach is simple: test recipes exhaustively to determine which is the best. Every recipe produced is the result of dizzying number of different ingredients and cooking techniques, and it's not uncommon to hear a Kitchen presenter say things like, "we tested nine different cuts of beef for this recipe." Testing is obviously a cornerstone of all sorts of web realms: usability, conversion and – of course – effective search marketing.

Cookin' Cheap was nationally syndicated PBS TV show out of Virginia that ran from 1981-2002 (the DVD-selling site itself doesn't have any video clips, you must watch some of the show on YouTube). Hosts Laban Johnson and Larry Bly walk you through largely viewer-supplied, untested recipes – including all the tiresome preparation work that every other cooking show does in advance of filming (watching Larry prepare a head of iceberg lettuce for a salad is painful yet strangely compelling). Cookin' Cheap is kind of a cross between Waiting for Godot and an Abbot and Costello movie.

In one way Cookin' Cheap is the exact opposite of America's Test Kitchen: make something once, and only once, versus 50 times. On the other hand Cookin' Cheap is the ultimate recipe test. Pick up a recipe and make it: if Laban and Larry can actually create something edible by following recipe instructions cold it must be a winner. There's clearly no point subjecting viewers to 100 hours of link building, but Cookin' Cheap reminds us here at SEO Cooking of two things: have fun, and don't take yourself too seriously.

Contact Information

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