I am a food blogger and have recently learnt about recipe rich snippets. I found some material online, mostly being about plugins. I tried using ZipList plugin, which is actually pretty good, but
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For some posts, I cannot add pictures within the recipe box and
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I cannot add alt text to my pictures (which I find to be quite SEO-unfriendly or is it?).
So, I was thinking of trying to implement it by myself onto my website.
Any good links or advice on how to do it? I tried looking on google but I am only coming up with plugin tutorials.
Yes, your search results are correct.
If you don’t want to use a plugin, you have to code it yourself. But this is the kind of thing that you don’t want attached to your theme’s
functions.php
(“without a plugin”). Because you have to be able to swap themes and preserve this functionality. Themes are for design and content display. Plugins for functionality. All those themes with SEO incorporated are simply dumb.So, you end up writing your own plugin. See this article: Create a functionality plugins instead of using Functions.php.
All that being said, what I’d suggest is that you create a Custom Post Type to handle your recipe snippets. You’ll have all the default functionality of WordPress customized to your needs. The CPT could have only Title, Content and Featured Image, eventually your own taxonomy (recipe categories).
Useful links:
Or you can use a nice plugin to create your CPT 🙂