• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, September 1, 2015

Allrecipes continually proves content and native advertising fuel search engine advertising and marketing. Meredith's foodie Web site Tuesday officially rolled out a variety of options for advertisers, such as the ability to search for recipes by ingredients and native advertising in the recipe feed intended to lead consumers to nearby grocery stores to pick up any missing ingredients. The content also serves up in search engine queries to lead recipe hunters back to the site.

A social feature of the site highlights each person submitting the recipes with each shown in tiles, also called cards, on the page related to credibility and reviews. Reviews, profiles, videos and shared photos support search engine rankings in query results. About 300 million recipes are saved to a feature called Recipe Box boxes, which fuels the site's cooking graft, each site user's "food fingerprint," said Esmee Williams, VP of brand strategy at Allrecipes. This helps the site make recommendations.

The site also will have the ability to support cross-target advertising. Selecting a recipe, with help from geo-location targeting, serves-up retailers and products on sale at local stores. Technology integrates the data from weekly flyers from local retailers and integrates it into the site.

While the Web site provides a new social experience, only 20% of visitors come from social or email. Some 70% of people finding their way to the Allrecipes' site, meaning visitors who do not directly land on the Web site by typing in the URL, come from search engines. Some 20% come through direct bookmarks.

Home cooks visit Allrecipes.com 1.3 billion times annually, consuming 3 billion pages of food-focused resources, and view more than 100 million videos annually. Of total Internet traffic, 289 million unique visitors visit food sites. Of those visitors, 24.2 million, or 8.4%, visit Allrecipes, according to data from ForeSee and comScore.

The same data estimates that nine out of 10 home cooks using resources from the site seek recipes -- and half of these plan to go to a grocery store within 24 hours of their site visit. Collectively Allrecipes site visitors spend $312 billion on groceries annually.