Robert Niles: "What if your site's focus is local, as are the readers your advertisers want to reach? What if you are trying to build an online community, cultivating ongoing relationships with a core of contributing readers? 'Drive-by' visitors from search engines inflate your site's traffic stats, but they don't help you reach those goals. Worse, traffic numbers plumped by infrequent visitors clicking news alerts create a distorted picture of your website's health and viability. As an industry, we've got to develop a deeper reading relationship with our audience. From the data I've seen, the shortest route to that goal lies in building traffic through human connections, not search engines and their news pages." Read More...