If you’re reading this page then either a client asked you to keep these things in mind, or you are the client in which case good on you for digging into the technical stuff! Note though this is really written for a web developer so it’s shamelessly technical and jargon filled 
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What I do
In short I provide a system to drive traffic to wine stores through various methods (SEO, Adwords, social media, email marketing).
The key issue I’ve found is the creation of content. Try asking a client to write 100-1000 wine descriptions before launching the site – ain’t going to happen right?!
Yet if they don’t create unique content then they will suffer a duplicate content penalty. What’s more if they do create content they can reuse parts of it to generate traffic from email marketing and social media without the duplicate content issue.
So that’s the heart of the system – creating great content in as easy a way as possible for the client.
SEO Strategy
I use the Bruce Clay method of siloing and the seomoz page rank sculturing. This can be physical siloing in which case please set up the store with the folders that the URLs below suggest. Alternatively please ensure that you are able to do server rewrites to these URLs so we can do virtual siloing. We don’t want to see those URL parameters so I suggest setting up on a server with .htaccess.
Also only link up or within the folders/silos not between the silos. If you link across categories it’s preferable to use the nofollow tag.
In fact you should just ignore tags unless you can keep them to a silo. See my post on The SEO Problem with Normal Wine Retail eCommerce site Set Up for more on the approach.
Website Levels
The first level is the home page. The second level are the major SEO silos. I strongly recommend varietals based off search volumes but your client may have some sort of specialization that makes this not sensible. The third level are the regions for those wine (do not link between regions, I know a good usability argument can be made for this but please see my SEO post). The fourth level is products.
There should be at least 5 regions to every grape variety (i.e. supporting the theme). There should be about 5 to 50 wines per page with no pagination (see the post above “Pages or Pagination”). If you need to go to another page then create a new region. For example if there too many wines for California then split them into Sonoma Coast, Sonoma Valley, Sonoma Mountain etc.
The products that will be listed on the level 1 and 2 theme pages are the ones the client wants to promote (SEO). I suggest you have the e.g. top 10 most popular merlots, top 10 chardonnays, top 10 recommended/featured etc on these pages for a total of 50 listings per page. See seomoz and Architecture for Commerce for discussion on wine.com and other eCommerce sites.
Sitemaps and redirects
Create a html site map (for humans) no longer than 100 links. If necessary create a parent and child sitemap structure. Include an xml sitemap for Google. Make sure robots.txt includes only the content and product pages.
Ensure that you use canonical URL in the head. Avoiding duplicate content is a key part of this System.
URL structure
Here’s the indicative structure
Level 1
www.yourdomain.com/
Level 2
www.yourdomain.com/pinot noir/
www.yourdomain.com/cabernet sauvignon/
www.yourdomain.com/syrah/
www.yourdomain.com/zinfadel/
www.yourdomain.com/sauvignon blanc/
www.yourdomain.com/chardonnay/
www.yourdomain.com/sparkling/
www.yourdomain.com/merlot/
…
Level 3
www.yourdomain.com/merlot/californian/
…
Level4
www.yourdomain.com/merlot/californian/wineproduct1page.html
www.yourdomain.com/merlot/californian/wineproduct2page.html
www.yourdomain.com/merlot/californian/wineproduct3page.html
www.yourdomain.com/merlot/californian/wineproduct4page.html
www.yourdomain.com/merlot/californian/wineproduct5page.html
…
Level 4 another example but of the french category
www.yourdomain.com/merlot/french/wineproduct6page.html
www.yourdomain.com/merlot/french/wineproduct7page.html
www.yourdomain.com/merlot/french/wineproduct8page.html
www.yourdomain.com/merlot/french/wineproduct9page.html
www.yourdomain.com/merlot/french/wineproduct10page.html
You get the idea right? We are setting up a theme, with supporting sub themes, with supporting sub-sub themes, with supporting product pages. The most important products will be linked from the various category pages as we go up the silo.
If you make a mistake or need to re-categorize use 301 redirects on .htaccess .
Software
Ideally you would use WordPress for the levels down to region ie Level 3 and then have eCommerce software take over the product pages and checkout. Your product pages do not need to link anywhere other than up the theme and of course to your shopping cart. Remember we’re trying to isolate themes.
If you have a good CMS with your eCommerce software then that’s okay. The system aims to make creating content hassle-free and natural which I find eCommerce CMS systems are not good at.
Any questions please contact me. If you ask too many questions you’ll have to send me a bottle of wine…
