A while back, I mentioned that I went down to New Orleans to help a friend out on his website and since early April, I’ve been consumed with the Great Chefs website, it’s not completely finished yet and I’m sure there will be many changes over the coming months but I wanted to share the progress with you and explain some of the choices so that other restaurants and chefs could see how the Internet can be better utilized for their business.

Rich Search Engine Friendly Content

For those who are regular readers of my blog, you know that I’m a huge fan of content. In fact, I don’t believe there’s anything more important on a website and when it comes to making a website successful, content truly is king.

SEO Features

Search Engine Optimization isn’t about tricking Google, it’s about helping Google understand what’s on your website and that’s exactly what we do with Great Chefs. Take for example the recipe page, this page has been carefully designed to contain significant value for Google and other search engines without taking away from the value of the page for the reader. In fact, the page was designed to provide the reader with quality navigation before worrying what Google found.

This is the true strength of a website, serving the needs of the user, your customers while ensuring the information is easily read and understood by popular search engines. The Great Chefs website includes SEO tactics hidden from the general public but optimized for search engines including:

1. automated sitemap.xml creation and optimization which helps major search engines find deep pages it might otherwise miss;
2. automated notification services to major search engines of page updates, additions and changes to the structure of the website which ensures an accurate listing on engines;
3. creation and maintenance of META data tags for search engines including the powerful META description and META keyword tags for all pages;
4. optimized nofollow and noindex META data for duplicate content to avoid being penalized for content appearing in multiple areas;
5. W3C compliant xHTML 1.0 publishing structure;
6. canonical URL’s to indicate content which appears on Great Chefs website as original
7. enforced www. to ensure all pages are only indexed on the main (www.greatchefs.com) domain, not a secondary domain such as greatchefs.com.

In addition to these hidden tactics for optimizing the website, the pages also feature a wide variety of tactics clearly visible to users of the website.

1. rich pages with links to free giveaways, each containing descriptive titles and appropriate attributes (rel, title, href);
2. proper use of the HTML <title> tag to inform search engines that a webpage is about specific items. For example, Bermuda Wahoo and Lentils with Foie Gras as a title;
3. use of attractive website addresses such as http://www.greatchefs.com/bananas-foster-bread-pudding/ instead of http://www.greatchefs.com/?p=4507 to help visitors find content;
4. proper use of the <h1> and <h2> heading tags to ensure the webpage structure is clear to both visitors and search engine robots;
5. deep linking from products and free giveaways to similar content on the website, designed to help users locate items of interest;
6. inclusion of a comprehensive sitemap for visitors to locate content easily;
7. an easy to use search tool, providing easy access to all areas of the website

Promoted Content

Beyond simply deep linking content (the process of ensuring pages other than your homepage are linked to), I also wanted to highlight and feature the great programs Great Chefs Television has created over the years and add some distinct color to the pages. To accomplish this, I added a special highlighted content at the bottom of the pages. This area is automatically generated each time a page is cached (we’ll get the that in a moment) and randomly selects three products from the store, tests to see if there is a featured graphic and displays it along with a text description. This way, each webpage has a different collection of three great TV shows at the bottom, giving both users and search engines the ability to find distinctly different content.

Interlinked Content

One of the things which pleased me most about the way the Great Chefs website turned out is it’s ability to automatically link and re-link content from other areas of the website. For example, the free daily videos are linked from both the easily accessible free cooking videos page as well as each individual series.

This allows visitors to quickly locate videos which have been published from a given series (for example, Great Chefs Great Cities) to determine if they would like to buy the series similar to how the video game industry would let you download a free trial version.

Free Recipes

With over 700 amazing chefs in the Great Chefs family, the television program has thousands of award winning recipes and books to share with the world. Every day, the people at Great Chefs select three wonderful recipes from their archives and post them for free on the website.

To make sure you never miss a great free recipe, I’ve built in a number of tools:

Subscribing to Great Chefs

To help ensure people have access to all our great free recipes,  the website automatically published the latest recipe links to both Facebook and Twitter. If you’re familiar with RSS readers or have an email account, you can also receive free daily updates to the recipes via email subscription or RSS feeds hosted by Google.

Free Videos

What kind of television station would put up a website and not give away free, award winning cooking shows? Every day, Great Chefs posts two recipes from their hit TV show directly to YouTube where fans can subscribe to be kept up to date and watch the program in High Quality.

You can also receive notifications via Facebook and Twitter, email subscription or RSS feeds. In fact, if you really want to make the most of the Great Chefs Television free videos, you can even subscribe to the service on your iPhone or iPod via the iTunes store or the PodCast service!

Chef Biographies

With over 700 chefs appearing in 2,100 series episodes and hundreds of more specials the Great Chefs website is home to biographies on the vast majority of the chefs who have graced the television program. Of course no index is complete, so if you know any links or projects these Great Chefs are involved in, why not comment on their profiles!

Blog

Each area of the website, including the videos, recipes and biographies includes the ability for visitors to leave comments and links to related content. Soon, the website will also feature a daily blog for those interested in cooking shows and the industry as a whole.

DVD Store

Perhaps the most important part of the website is the store. While most people never reach the sales pages of the Great Chefs store, it’s critical that visitors are made aware of the fact it’s possible to purchase the product. Simply put, while you can watch the show for free online the purpose on the website is to sell DVD’s.

With that in mind, each free DVD (or recipe) page has been designed to offer links to the DVD from which it was created and the homepage of the website is set to promote the DVD’s upon each visit.

On the DVD pages themselves, navigation makes it easy to purchase the discs as either a complete set or individual items, with the focus being on ensuring customers are able to purchase online using Googles secure checkout system or via a toll free telephone number.

Each collection shows a 3D rendered collection of exactly what customers can expect to receive in their order, including an accurate depiction of the number of discs in the set. Since it is possible to also order each disc as an individual item, the recipes included on each disc are listed for visitors to choose from.

Google Integration

One of the major differences between the Great Chefs project and many other previous websites that I’ve worked on is the level of Google integration that I went with on this particular project. In addition to ensuring the Webmaster Tools was fully supported by the website, we’re also using:

1. Google Analytics to provide daily tracking of website traffic, page testing and optimization settings;
2. Google Feedburner to provide easy access to daily RSS and email subscriptions
3. Google AdWords with integration with Analytics to promote and market the website;
4. Google AdSense to sell advertising in the footer of most pages as well as on free content located throughout the website;
5. Google Checkout for online shopping cart integration and to offer a fast, safe and secure means to order online;
6. Google GMail to host the email for the Great Chefs web domain and finally;
7. YouTube to host the video files displayed on the website

Automation

Running a website is hard work, in fact it’s not just time consuming it’s also extremely technical and the great people at Great Chefs Television all have tons of work to do already without having to learn about Search Engine Optimization, Organic Marketing, keyword density and all the other things that make promoting a website successful. That’s why the vast majority of the website is completely automated.

Easy Updates

Knowing that the team at Great Chefs do amazing work on their television series, I wanted to ensure they had the ability to do the same on their website without having to make any of them learn extensive HTML programming. To do this, I used the powerful WordPress content management tool to build a robust solution capable of serving their needs while making it easy for them to update content.

Fast Pages

A website is useless if it’s not fast, that’s why the website makes the most of caching technology to rapidly build and store dynamically generated content. Instead of rebuilding the webpage each time a visitor comes to the site, the Great Chefs website rebuilds the pages only when needed.

Service Integration

When the staff of Great Chefs updates their website, it automatically generates Email and RSS updates for people who are subscribed, as well as informing Twitter and Facebook of the recent changes. Podcasts and Apple iTunes are automatically updated within minutes of fresh videos being posted to YouTube. This ensures that quality content is distributed to all areas of Great Chefs, without having to spend countless hours reproducing the same content in multiple sources.

The Future of Great Chefs

Over the next few months, there will be a lot of great new features added to the Great Chefs website, I hope you’ll join me in supporting the wonderful television series and as always I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for improving the website!