Cooking Nook

A free recipe based website offering the best in easy free recipes, healthy recipes, cooking tips, diet and healthy lifestyle information, plus great kitchen gift ideas.

Cooking Nook is owned and operated by Karen Ciancio and was first setup on 26th May 2005.

Karen has used a popular CSS driven 3 column template wrapped within a basic table structure to build her website. The site uses a nice clean cream and light blue color scheme which complements the foody theme quite well.

The Cooking Nook site presents well and the visitor knows instantly, this website is all about food. This is a large site in a very  large niche and shows over 3000 pages indexed in Google and over 3000 yahoo links. There is a wordpress blog, a food glossary,  an RSS feed and a reasonably well indexed recipe section.

Ratings
Look-and-Feel
Ease-Of-Use
Content-Quality
Overall

Karen clearly loves cooking and cook books. You can feel a tremendous passion coming from the site as a whole and Cooking Nook demonstrates how adding passion, commitment and your own knowledge can build a website that performs really well when it includes all the Site Build It bells and whistles.

At the time of writing this SBI Site Review, the Cooking Nook website statistics are …

Website Title: Free Recipes | Healthy Recipes | Cooking Tips | Kitchen Gifts Title Relevance : 100%

Meta Description: Look to CookingNook.com for the best in easy free recipes, healthy recipes, cooking tips, diet and healthy lifesyle information and great kitchen gift ideas. Description Relevance: 85% relevant.

Primary Keywords: free recipes, cooking, healthy recipes, food recipes, healthy diets Keyword Relevance: 60% relevant

Search Results for Primary Keyword: Google #Not in top 30 – Google Canada #1 – Yahoo #Not in top 30 - Bing #Not in top 30

Overall SEO Score: 82%

Alexa Rank/Trend: 77,863 up 53% in the last three months.
Compete Rank: 50,921 up 5664
Quantcast Rank: 22,464
Google Pagerank: 4/10

Site Worth Appraisal Estimate: $17,885

SBI Tools & Resources Used in Cooking Nook:

In creating Cooking Nook Karen has used most of the website building tools and resources provided by Site Build It, including…

• Content 2.0 - The SBI Web 2.0 feature included in the Site Build It package, which allows your visitors to submit their own content and images to your site.

• Form Build It – which allows the SBI user to create an unlimited number of Contact or other forms and to analyze and measure results. Including Database storage for managing, searching and reporting of form data

• Socialize It - An optional bookmarking module that you can build into your site pages and which includes bookmarking functions for the main social networks.

• RSS It - The Subcribe Section that appears in the left side below the navigation and allows visitors to subscribe to the sites RSS feeds.

• Infin It - which allows the site owner to simply and seamlessly integrate PHP and MySQL features using sub-domains. It has been used here to integrate the Cooking Nook Blog

Monetization Methods – How Does Cooking Nook Generate an Income…

Karen monetizes the Cooking Nook using various methods, which include…

• Google Adsense advertisements, which are presented in very prominent positions

• Google Search, which is positioned at the top of most pages, but does move around a bit. This will probably be used regularly on such a large site.

• Amazon affiliate links selling various cook books and an Amazon A-Store selling kitchen products.

• Cooking Nook also monetizes by selling its own e-Book collection, ‘The eBook Extravaganza’. The collection is made available via digital download and currently costs $9.95.

Overall …

Definitely a comprehensive SBI site bursting with food recipes and quite well done. The size of the niche is daunting and although Karen’s choice of primary keyword, (keyword relevance only 60%), leaves her out of the main SE front pages, the Cooking Nook, does appear to be very popular with Canadian viewers and over 67% of traffic comes from Canada. The fact the Canadian results are so good, shows the power of the SBI site submitter.

The only criticism I have on look and feel is the slightly disjointed display of banner ads in the margins and the completely different look presented in the Cooking Nook Blog. The blog really could be integrated seamlessly through consistent look & feel and adding RSS links to the main site.

The A-Store integration could be better as Iframes do nothing for your own site. Using Infin-It to integrate a full shopping store sub-domain rather than just an Iframe plopped on a page, might just prove more profitable.

I like Cooking Nook… It was pleasant to use and very informative. I’m now off to the kitchen with my Apple Oat Bran Muffin Recipe… Yum.

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