Where my visitors are coming from

The image slider works fine for me (Firefox 4.0)

I think it’s supposed to be on the right side…looks good offset IMHO.

I like how you incorporated the shorter pages. Simplifies the whole layout and makes navigation better.

Cheers!

Nick

Robert,
Thanks for the comments. The slider seems ok to me. It is supposed to be on the right side, it balances the title and tabs etc that are on the left.

Nick,
I think it is much improved. The site used to have a long list of recent recipes on the front if you remember, and I shortened that; since then I replaced the recent recipes with a static page that gives a little bit of information and some text for the search engines to look at.

Something else that you or others might be able to help me with:
I’ve been having visitors who leave about 50 silly messages a day that are not serious messages; they are just bits of chat that look like they have been copied from somewhere and pasted on the site. None of it is offensive. I think the email addresses and the url’s that come with the messages are not the real senders details. I think they have just hijacked those. The messages have to be approved before they appear on the site so I just delete them. Do other people have these visitors?

Rose

@marshall2000,
about the message/comments – I would suggest you to have the akismet plugin, it is by default present however it will require an API key which is free to get. also, another plugin bad-behaviour helps in keeping those messages away. If it still does not helps, then perhaps having that re-captcha plugin might be your final option.

Now here are some suggestion for your blog.

1) Why don’t you select a more friendly permalinks structure. Your current links are based on default permalinks structure. Having friendly links improves your search engine traffic.

2) I see that you have a facebook fan page with 0 fans. Perhaps you should have the fan widget in your sidebar, that is a great way to get some facebook fans for your fan page. Also on that note, perhaps you should get a twitter id too and look for some followers.

3) In your original post you asked, why you are not getting global audience. I guess a bit of SEO can help you with that. Get an seo plugin to start with. Also, are you writing recipe’s that target your local place, if so, try writing recipes which attracts others as well.

4) I suggest you to have your recent posts appear on the homepage, it will help your posts to rank better on the search engines and that way you will get more traffic.

Overall, it is a nice theme, good logo as well. I see that you got the facebook like button on the posts as well, perhaps you can consider putting a few more buttons there, like twitter/delicious etc. Best of luck with your blog,

healthvotes,
Many thanks for your message and the interest that you show.

I am very new with wordpress but I changed a discussion setting so now visitors have to be logged in to post. That stopped the bad messages. I’m not sure if I need discussions anyway. I suppose it might create some interest when the site gets busier.

There are 3 other permalink settings I could use. Day and name; month and name; numeric. These others are better for search engine traffic?

Since my first post I am getting more traffic now from USA than from Australia. Loke pointed out it was probably because of family and friends and I think that was correct. Now they have all lost interest. ??

I originally had recent recipes listed on the home page. Someone told me it was better to have a static page with text using words that were relevant to the site; like recipe, bread, cakes, pudding etc. so I wrote the text that is there now. How will it help with ranking to have recent recipes there.

I am still working on social networking. As simple as it probably is I find it is tricky.

Thank again for your help and your comments.
RM