If you're building a thriving online community, chances are you've already planned your outreach, invited some people who fit your target audience, and prodded your core members to invite their friends.

Once you've exhausted that resource, how do you attract new members to your community?

Hint: it involves something that rhymes with Shnoogle (or Shming).

Yes, search engines can be a source of new members if you play your cards right.

Rather than beating the bushes to find people interested in your niche, why not make it easy for potential community members to find you?

Key areas of your online community to optimize:

• Use custom URLs, so your content is easily identified.
• Make sure your images are properly titled and captioned.
• Create a coherent identity (logo, tagline). Make it dead easy for your existing members to talk about your community, as in "it's the best place on the web to learn about extreme snowboarding," or "it's the best resource for lead-based paint removal experts." Whatever your "thing" is, make it very clear.
• Come up with 3-5 important key phrases or key words that your core audience would be interested in, and make sure that those are sprinkled (only where they make sense) in your content, via blog posts, forum topics, etc.  (Note thatI said sprinkled, not stuffed.)
• Don't leave your "about this community" blank. Write a smashing description that makes it obvious who would be interested.
• Try to do "deep-linking" into your own community content. When you do a blog post, find a relevant older blog post or forum topic to link to. Google sees this as a sign of longevity and authority (that's a good thing). 
• Bonus if you've gotten your Google authorship connected. This will help your blog posts appear in Google search results, which will help get you (and your community) noticed! 

Do you have any special tricks for attracting the attention of your core audience?

Photo Credit: Bart van de Biezen via Compfight cc