Lisa Sharples is president of Allrecipes.com, one of the top cooking websites. She joined the Seattle company in May 2007, about a year after it was acquired by The Reader’s Digest Association. Right now she’s focused on rolling out Allrecipes.com in other countries, starting with Britain and Australia, with France and Germany to follow.

Tell me about Allrecipes’ international expansion. As Allrecipes expanded over the years, we noticed a lot of the traffic coming from international, primarily English-speaking countries — Canada, the U.K., Australia, and even non-English speaking countries ... We felt we could build a global community of chefs who are all sharing recipes. The top recipes that are used by people in the U.K., and rated and ranked by people in the U.K., could be translated back in terms of ingredients and measurings to the U.S. and vice versa. So if you’re interested in finding the best recipe for trifle, you can find it from someone in the U.K.

How do you distinguish yourself from all the other recipe websites out there? We actually are one of the largest food sites. We’re No. 2 right after Foodtv. Our growth over a year-to-year basis is faster than the food category overall online. We feel like in some ways we are very different than they are. We are really a social media site. If you look at the top 10 food sites online, we are really without a doubt the biggest social media site in the food space. If you look at the women’s category, which we look at as well, we’re the No. 1 social media site for women. We’re much bigger than iVillage.

How important are the search engines for your business? We’re on average with the whole (food website) category. If you look at the category, between 50 and 70 percent of daily traffic will come in from search engines. It depends on the time of year, the seasonality, some of the holiday stuff. In general people will use search engines these days more than ever. Even if they know exactly what site they’re going to, they’ll just type it in (the search engine). In case they type it wrong, it’s a short cut. So you’ll even see people typing your URL into Google and coming to you that way. If you look across the food category, it’s what people do.

Where do the recipes come from on your site? Allrecipes is very much a user-generated content site. So all the recipes come from the users with the exception of recipes that come from some of our advertising partners. And we are a Reader’s Digest publication, so we have some recipes from our sister publications in the Reader’s Digest family.

Tell me about the social networking component of Allrecipes. People can build profiles and they can upload photos ... People will upload everything from pictures of their grandchildren to their most recent trip to Europe to pictures of something they’ve cooked that isn’t on the website, just an amazing cake they made for their kid’s birthday and they want to share it with the community. So people really do use it as almost their Facebook, these people that are really into cooking, love cooking and love talking to other people about cooking. So they use it as a launching pad to talk about all sorts of things.

Is Allrecipes seeing the effects of the economic downturn? A lot of people decide to eat more at home with an economy in the shape that it is ... We’ve seen 200 percent year-over-year increase (in page views) in people trying to learn how to cook their favorite Italian dishes, their favorite Chinese recipes, Indian food, all kinds of things, and we attribute that to the fact that people are eating at home more and trying to be more creative about what they make. We’ve built a budget cooking tab on the website to help people better plan meals and how to make the most cost-effective meals for their families and cost-effective ingredients.

So you don’t expect a drop-off in traffic? If anything, you’ll see the opposite. That may not be true of all the food sites, because some of the food sites are more upscale and are more about gourmet cooking. But for us, we are the site that’s about “What am I going to make for dinner tonight?” We’re for the everyday cook, the person who wants to put something great and healthy on the dinner table on a daily basis.

Who is your favorite celebrity chef? I really like Rachael Ray. I think she’s great, because she’s funny and she’s kind of entertaining. And I like how she has an attitude of “Do it your way. Here’s my guidelines, but put your own twist on it.” I think that’s really great.

—As told to Eric Engleman