The 5 Best Food Related Blogs on The Internet

Lovingly written by Mai Bar from the editorial team at Fueled, London's premier iPhone app design agency.

Generation Y-ers love to be connected to the things they love as much as possible. Enter social media, blogging, smartphones, the whole gamut of interactive technologies that we so love.

I like to eat. And because I like to eat, I like to spend my time with,around, and thinking about food. It only makes sense that I would enjoy blogs dedicated to food and appreciating it in all its glory, and I know I’m not the only foodie out there who indulges in their obsession through the internet, so heres a list of the best food blogs in five tantalizing categories:

Best Food News Blog

As a New Yorker, I want to keep up with what is going on in my city. I can read the Times, or the New Yorker, or New York Magazine, but my interests span beyond the usual fare of New York news -- I want to know about food. Not just about the opening and closing of restaurants, I want to know about literally everything related to food in the five boroughs, and that is why Grub Street  is the best food news blog out there. It is run by New York Magazine, so you can understand why it is so extensive: cronut imposters in Manilla, NYC’s fast food worker strike, hipsters making absinthe in their Harlem apartment basement’s, and why bars keep making clams so damn expensive. But the gamut runs beyond New York City limits, with the inclusion of out-there readable pieces for foodies like the video piece Porn Sex vs Real Sex: The Differences Explained With Food and how Alan Rickman is taking a stab at restaurant reviewing for GQ magazine. Besides the content, the site is sleek and is pretty much akin to NY Mag’s site so its navigable and nice, just like I want blogs to be.

Best Cooking Blog

Light on the layout but heavy on the pictures and narrative per recipe -- the perfect balance for a cooking blog. Alexandra Cooks got it right by having a compressed version of her entries with one enticing picture that you can then expand to read the full recipe experience. A lot of other writing-heavy cooking blogs make the mistake of having the entire entry take up essentially one page, making scrolling through recipes a time-consuming ordeal. A super helpful aspect of her blog is ‘The Essentials’ section, which shows you how to make everything from chicken stock and tomato sauce to pesto, vanilla extract and way more, all from scratch. Alexandra also boasts a great variety  of things on her blog, which is why I love it: there’s healthy and unhealthy, sweet and savory, breads, breakfast, etc.

Best Restaurant Review Blog

Also as a New Yorker I love to dine out indiscriminately, but I lack direction, I need a guide, I need help! This is where the Immaculate Infatuation blog steps in -- a New York Metro Area restaurant reviewing blog that helps you find restaurants in a few ways. What makes immaculate infatuation stick out from the rest is the “perfect for” filter, where you select a need that needs to be met by the restaurant like BYOB, dining solo, [places with an abundance of] hipsters, or drunk hook ups (if you are so inclined..). The categories are humorous yet applicable and help a great deal. Another filter that really helps is the “proximity to” filter, in case you’re in a neighborhood for something specific like Irving Plaza, the MoMA or the UN, and you’re not trying to travel far to eat. Smart, right? Besides the features of the site, the reviews are as extensive as can be. There’s the review itself, always a few paragraphs of relevant information about the dining experience and then a food rundown - a breakdown of the dishes tasted, complete with photos to help you make meal choices when you make your own trip.

Best Baking Blog

I do not want a sickeningly sweet layout that screams cutsie and Martha Stewart-esque in style, and Sprinkle Bakes’s simple, yet subtly sweet layout is really what made me give it the title of the best baking blog. Sprinkle Bakes is also the best baking blog because it stayed true to its nature, you’d be surprised at how many blogs who boast themselves as being baking blogs dabble in cooking here and there. For all intensive purposes I like when my blogs stick to their intended guns. Sprinkle Bakes is filled to the brim with recipes (in alist-formatted categorized index): breads, cakes, candy, cookies, cupcakes, pies, tarts, cold desserts, even chocolate soup. Baking is also an art form, and Sprinkle Bakes embraces that with recipes for those who are a little more inclined to appreciate this facet of baking: matcha cake faux sushi rolls, bellini petal lollipops, icicle candy, and decorative meringue mushrooms. Sprinkle Bakes sticks to baking in the entirety of its definition - plain and simple.

Best Food Porn Blog

And when I’m not looking for food to eat or to make...  I’m just looking for food to stare at. We are all familiar with the “food porn” trend that has been running rampant on the internet -- the Tumblrs and other blogs that are dedicated solely to the endeavour of making your mouth water and your stomach growl. Frankly, I love this fad and hope it stays forever. My favorite outlet to satisfy my food porn craving is the appropriately named blog  FoodGawker with the even more appropriate tagline: “feed your eyes”. This website pulls food porn off of other cooking blogs (click on the picture it will take you to the page from the blog where it came from) and compiles them into pages and pages of glorious food, it literally has everything: gluten-free, vegan, pasta, pizza, drinks, foreign foods, comfort foods, you name it. The simplicity of the layout and the well-integrated ads make navigation much easier than some other food porn blogs.

How to add Search Description and Meta Tags to your Blogger blog and posts for better SEO

Now this is something that every person using Blogger would need to do. A little bit about the history and use of description for posts. This is something that was not available to people using Blogger or blogspot blogs as some people like to call them. This is one of the main reasons why WordPress was a preferred blogging platform. Many an online blogger would tell you that a description for your posts does wonders. One would also wonder why it took Google so long to implement it. 

What is Search Description

If you are a blogger and you know a little bit about SEO you would know then when someone searches for a search term on search engines like Google. The title of your post shows up and below that is the search description. You can from the image below of Google's description see how it is laid out in results. The site title appears and below that is the search description. 

Google's Search Description

Do users see the search description when they land on the page or blog

Uses and visitors to your site do not see the search description on the actual page. This description is only for search engines to find and understand the content of your page. It users the information found in the description to show visitors what the page is all about. So once your page or post is found on a search engine, visitors see the description and decide whether to click and visit the page. Same things holds true for your Blog description. If you blog's index page or main page shows up on Google. Visitors get to see in a short snippet what the entire blog is about. So if your Blog is about Social Media then without a description containing the words Social Media, your website or blog will not show up on the search engines. 

Is search description good for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Every person who uses WordPress would say yes. This is one feature that they claim ensures their blogs rank better that Blob hosted on Blogger. Since search engines use the page description as a window to the post and blog and are very SEO friendly. Ensures according to many bloggers online better rankings with Google, Yahoo and Bing.

How to add a Search Description to your blog posts on Blogger

1. Login to Blogger

2. Use the New Interface if you are not already using it

3. Click on the pencil icon to create a new post

4. Click on Search Description found on the right hand side

5. Enter a sentence that best describes your post 

6. Click done to finish

How to add a Meta tags search description to your blog

1. Login to blogger

2. use the new blogger interface

3. Click on more options

4. Click on settings

5. Click on search preferences

6. Beside Meta Tags description click on edit

7. You have 150 characters to use and create a short description

8. Click on Save Changes

9. You're done

You blog will now appear with a Search Description on search engines along with Meta Tags. Meta Tags are a good way for website and blog owners to provide information to Google on what their websites or blogs are all about. You can check out the Google webmaster help section to learn more about Meta Tags. While all of this might be important it is equally important to remember that all of this is no substitute for good quality content. No matter what SEO practices you follow if content is not good and does not enhance visitor experience then all else will fail. 

  

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Sociolatte