Anybody care to take a look at my Experimental Chefs site to see if I am making some stupid mistakes?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Ian Dixon: Am I missing something?
  
  Anybody care to take a look at my Experimental Chefs site to see if I am making some stupid mistakes? Tricky market to rank in because there are many big players yet I get pushed right down for most terms. I fear I am doing something wrong somewhere but cant figure out what I might be missing.
  Home page is experimentalchefs(dot)com
  An example page is experimentalchefs(dot)com/paprika-chicken-casserole/
  
  It's a tricky market to rank in because there is so much already in there. Yet I am failing to see results and I fear I may be making some simple errors.
  
  Any thoughts?
  
  Note: first attempt at this post was putting in dumb links that G+ decided to add of its own accord. You may see the first version as well but that has been deleted.
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  Ross Barefoot: +Ian Dixon , do you have general keywords which are your main concern (and the driver for this question), or is your concern that you are not ranking for long-tails such as "paprika chicken casserole"? ; Just wanting to clarify the competitive landscape.
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  Ian Dixon: +Ross Barefoot ;essentially the recipe title is what I am trying to rank on. That is, after all, what the content is about.
  Now I am struggling for recognition in a very hard market. Recipes are after all dominated by some very big players that pay google mega bucks to have them shown.
  Trying to figure out if I am making simple errors that stop our site from ranking higher. I think I have everything correct but my brain may be missing something that would improve things.
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  Lori Eldridge: Your site took over 10 seconds to load on my computer ( 5 to 8 seconds would be better). With download speed being a new ranking factor your competitors will rank higher if their sites load faster (all other factors being equal). You have a massive Javascript file for Mp3 when there was no music playing (I would suggest removing it as music annoys most visitors), plus multiple other JS and CSS files. Being as you are using Wordpress this often can't be helped unless you use ;as few plugins as possible.
  
  re ranking, you will have a hard time ranking for terms that are not in your title. You can't rank for all the recipies in the home page title so they will have a better chance of ranking from their own pages. You might consider including the word 'recipe' in the recipe page titles and also on the first paragraph or header on each recipe page.You don't need to include your domain name on each title as it's in your domain name.
  
  Your recipe images are quite small on the home page and therefore not very appealing. Consider larger images on the home page, however some of the larger images on the recipe pages have a distortion problem (white edges - Chicken kidney bean salad ).
  
  Don't comment on your own recipes other than to reply to comments as google doesn't like you promoting your own pages. Find some way to market your site and hopefully you'll get some comments from others.
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  Edwin Jonk: To me if you keep the number of categories low you can add them to the index. Looking at your site it seems you only use two categories per receipt. For example to me ;
  http://experimentalchefs.com/vegetarian/
  can be a valuable landing page. And I wouldn't noindex it, but it is debatable (not questionable because it is a good landing page).
  
  http://picketfenceblogs.com/button/standard/9551 gives a 302. Although I wouldn't worry to much about a single image, this image is being served on many pages and you can speed up your site by using a 301. Because a 301 will be cached by the browser and thereby if people are going through your site they don't have to request it again.
  
  http://experimentalchefs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/ecslogo2014.jpg
  This is your top image which has text. I would use HTML instead of an image. If you cannot do that, you can use the alt attribute.
  
  Furthermore with the courtesy of +SEMrush ;I did a site audit. I will share the full report in .csv in a private post with you. ;
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  SEMrush: +Edwin Jonk thanks for the shout out and your reference :)
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  Ian Dixon: +SEMrush ;I have a headache from it. The information that +Edwin Jonk ;got using your tool on my site is causing it.
  It's great stuff though and will help me to improve the site. Makes your product a very strong candidate when I am in the position to look at such a tool too
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  SEMrush: +Ian Dixon oh, thanks for the kind words! would be happy to set up a trial account for you. Would need your email and phone number to arrange a 1-month free access! Please contact me via private message. Thanks! :)
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  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:41:56 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/anybody_care_to_take_a_look_at_my_experimental_chefs_site_to_see_if_i_am_making_some_stupid_mistakes +Ian Dixon
  
  The cuetimes listed on this page are functional while the live broadcast continues and also once Youtube has finished processing the public broadcast. Processing time varies between 6-24 hours. During this period the clip is viewable in full but the cuetimes cannot be relied on. ;
  
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