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Wine SEO

Wine SEO can be split into many sub themes:

Local Search (starting with this post)
Search engine optimisation (start with this post)
The biggest challenge for eCommerce sites and SEO: Content Duplication – 1
Themes – 2
Content – 3

Actually there’s much more to SEO so I’ve split it into many sections and dispersed it into other categories like Selling Wine Online and Comparison Shopping Engines.

What’s it is not is “Web Spamming”. Unfortunately this is the reputation it’s getting so please ignore that. What we’re talking about here is ensuring you have great links to your site from authority websites and that Google is clearly able to see you have great things to say about buying wine.

Wine SEO: Increase Web Traffic via title tag

18 January 2010

The title tag tells search engines what the topic of the particular page is about. Many businesses don’t bother doing this, they use a default title (e.g. Tony’s Wine Store) on all pages and they lose search engine favor by doing so. If you have a product page – Andrea’s Vineyard Merlot Napa Valley. Then you gain search engine favor by telling it what the page is all about. However don’t forget the human … this same title tag is used as the first blue line in search engine results…

Wine SEO: Increase Web Traffic via meta description

19 January 2010

This is where the meta tag description is. If you’re looking at a Google search result then you may see this as the description of what this page is all about (it’s all about wine retailers ranking well in search results).

Wine SEO: Increase Web Traffic via the URL

20 January 2010

In this post we look at how a wine retail website can improve the structure of their URLs to boost search engine rankings. A URL is what you type into a web browser e.g. http://www.mylocalwinestore.com is a URL, also known as a web address or website name or web name… you know what I mean right. We have two audiences – Google and those good ol’ humans. Both of them are going to be confused or skeptical about avnb1232?mnp+cfsd.asp. But it get’s even worse…

Wine SEO: Increase Web Traffic via Navigation and Sitemap

21 January 2010

In this post we look at how a wine retail website’s navigation can boost search engine rankings. Your navigation should: make it easy to go from general to specifc content – not too many levels (3-4 max?); use text based navigation; use breadcrumbs; and a useful error page

Wine SEO: Increase Web Traffic with Great Content

22 January 2010

Useful and compelling content. If you draw people to your site through great content then Google will start to notice and rank your site higher. Which means more people will visit and comment (on blogs, forums, email, chat, various social media sites) which Google will notice. Which means you get more visits that Google will notice …a virtuous circle.

How To Leverage your Local Wine Retail Business Advantage

10 February 2010

This is the start of a series on a local wine retailer’s local business advantage. The US (and UK) internet wine markets are super-competitive however I still believe there is a large gap in the market for local wine shops on the internet. As sophisticated as the national competitors are they cannot offer the ability to pick-up or quick delivery. Nor can they offer the face to face trusted personal service that a local retailer can

Wine SEO: 80% of What Your Customers Buy is Within 15 Miles of their House

11 February 2010

80% of what a person buys is within 5, 15 or 20 miles of their residence – you have a natural advantage as the local wine retailer. So despite how competitive the big national internet retailers are you can still get your fair share of what is probably a large local market. In fact many people go online in the belief that their sales will be mainly national whereas they remain local. How to do set up your wine retail business on Google Local Business Center

Wine SEO: Google’s Local Business Center

12 February 2010

Other great features on the Local Business Center: Statistics, Coupons, Photos and Video, and Reviews. Adwords as per normal but also along with your local business address. Your local address will come up on the right hand side of the Google search results page. Talk about STAND OUT

Wine SEO: Local Search and Review Services like yelp

13 February 2010

This continues my latest series of posts on local internet marketing for a wine retailer. There are a number of local search and review services such as yelp.com and judysbook.com that offers searchers the chance to assess local businesses. In yelp’s words, “Yelp is the fun and easy way to find, review and talk about what’s great – and not so great, in your area.”

Your local retail advantage will get even bigger: twitter

18 February 2010

I’ve said elsewhere that facebook may take over your google advertising by 2012. That your local advantage is significant. But the more I look at what goes on in the social media space the more interested I get in twitter. Here’s a post from Mashable, “Everyone from Yelp and Foursquare to Google are trying to serve local businesses… As for Twitter, it is positioned better than anyone to roll out business services that serve local retailers…”

Local Retailers Selling Wine Online have a Seriously Big Advantage

26 April 2010

The advantage of being a local wine retailer close to a customer’s location – the Location War between Google, Yelp, Foursquare etc

How to Rank Higher than your Competitors in a Local Search on Google

1 June 2010

Local Search is more important for the local wine retailer selling wine online than the normal SEO guidelines you may read about

Are you using Wineries’ Wine Descriptions? If so, you have a Problem.

8 June 2010

Copying wine descriptions isn’t really an issue with wineries given that they are usually very happy with wine retailers using their “poetry” (note there are copyright issues). The issue is really with Google. Google is smart. It is very user focused and knows that searchers do not want the same content for every link in the Google search results page. So Google detects duplication of page content. Google knows if a wine description is a duplication of the winery’s description. It only wants to include the “best page”. Google probably regards the “best page” as the winery’s product page*. Therefore the winery will get the ranking for it’s own page. The rest of the pages will be either discarded (in SEO language made “supplemental”) or given a poor ranking for organic (“left side”) search results.

The SEO Problem with Normal Wine Retail eCommerce site Set Up

15 June 2010

The problem is around categorization and I get a little technical on ya, so please bear with me. I first outline how to categorize your wine eCommerce website for search engine optimization – luckily this is very similar to how you do it normally, but with some exceptions. The second part of this post discusses those exceptions. It is all about theming your website and using links to show search engines your theme.

How a Cheese Store did better than a Wine Store in Google

29 June 2010

Showing how to do better on Google by analyzing the search engine results for local wine stores in CA 90210. The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills is ranked in the top two places in local search and organic search. Now perhaps they are famous in Beverly Hills but check out their site. This cheese store has 686 external links from 250 unique websites. This little cheese store for Pete’s sake! Okay – they also sell wine, but not prominently on their website. Photos of the store suggest perhaps one third to one half wine and the rest in cheese? Let’s dig a little further into what’s going on

The Top 5 Online Wine Stores in the US

30 June 2010

The top 5 by SEO factors only. Not by any usability tests, sales, content, wine range or other consumer factors – just industry SEO analysis for the broad term “buy wine”. Wine.com is miles ahead of anyone else. Winebuys is behind the rest of the pack. It’s the middle of the pack that are in a serious battle for spots 2 and 3.