Looking at Traffic, Food and Recipes!

I’ve been doing a bit of looking at traffic today – web traffic that is – across both my personal and our Glenbrook web sites.

For my personal sites, it’s interesting that my recipes blog, ScottsKitchen.com, has been running about twice the number of page views daily that this blog receives. While I tend to think of sjl.us as my personal “hub” – the web doesn’t. It likes food (and recipes) much better! 😉

Our hyperlocal blog – InMenlo.com – has yet again twice the number of pages views – it’s become very popular indeed. Fascinating that a significant amount of InMenlo’s traffic comes from Facebook while the traffic to ScottsKitchen and SJL.US comes primarily from the search engines.

Part of that is seasonal – my high heat upside-down roast turkey recipe on ScottsKitchen.com is an annual Thanksgiving favorite! Since I posted it in 2005, it’s consistently been the top page on that site. Our late fall roasted tomato soup recipes were also pretty popular this year.

The other perennially popular recipes are those for oven roasted tri-tip (a Christmas favorite around our house) and grilling tri-tip on our Weber charcoal BBQ.

In my book, the “gold standard” for a superb recipe site is SimplyRecipes.com run by Elise Bauer. She does a wonderful job – combining great recipes with luscious food photography! The iPhone web app version of her site has come in very handy for me many times!

My other go to iPhone app for cooking is Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. The paper edition of this cookbook was my late friend Chris Gulker’s go to bible for cooking! His kitchen copy is delightfully bookmarked, spattered and stained – a real working volume!