Keeping Up with the Community

online community[This is a guest post from Amy G. Howard, Founder of Raleigh Special Tonight. Follow her at @amgenove.]

Running a hyper-local website about daily specials can be quite grueling. In order to keep readers, you need to update at least once a day, or people will stop visiting your site. Raleigh Specials Tonight averages about 600-800 hits per week and 50% of that traffic is returning. I have very loyal readers and I am grateful for that, but I know I need to keep coming with the content if I want it to stay that way.

Where do I find daily content for my site every day? When I first started the site about a year ago, it was tough. I had to seek the information myself by going to individual restaurant websites. I still do that occasionally, but here are some tools I use to keep up with my community so I always have fresh content:

The Anatomy of the Long Tail Search

This is a guest post by Ben Hook, a search engine marketer and owner of UK based online marketing company, Navaro.

Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Engineering’s comment that approximately 20 – 25% of searches performed each day are completely new queries helps to highlight the increasing need to understand how your customers are going to be looking for your products or services on the long tail of searches.

Keyword research is essential to any search engine optimization campaign.  It helps ensure the time and effort put in to attain those high rankings pays off with an increase in the amount of conversions received. The main focus of keyword research though, is to highlight the most rewarding keywords to focus on in terms of traffic driven, a job they do to the best of their ability.

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