Wine Search Engine Optimization

Wine SEO Blog Posts

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.

Posts

• Local SEO and Wine Stores in 2011: an Update of the Top 10 tasks Google is putting more focus on local businesses and location services. In this post I go through all the things you can do to make sure your local store is at the top of the search rankings. It is an update of the blog post I did back in Feb-11.
• Local Wine Stores on Local Search: the Top 10 Things You Can Do A survey is done each year to see what Local SEO experts think the most important factors are. I go through the top 10 here from a local wine store perspective. In 2010 they included: 1. General Importance of Claiming Place Page; 2. Business Address in City of Search; 3. Associating Place Page with Proper Categories
• Wine SEO in 3 words - High Quality Links Wine SEO is about four things: Trust/Authority of the Host Domain (i.e. "www.the-domain.com") Link Popularity of the Specific Page (i.e. "www.the-domain.com/the-specific-page.html") Anchor Text of External Links (i.e. this is what anchor text lo...
• The Internet Emperor says faster, so I turn to the Optimizer I redesigned MyLocalWineStore to make it faster. I replaced the theme and logo, and made the content easier to find. The key way I improved performance though was through an optimizer, specifically W3 Total Cache, but there are many you can use as well. I cover why I did this and some other reasons why I changed the design.
• The Top 5 Online Wine Stores in the US 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.
• How a Cheese Store did better than a Wine Store in Google 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 SEO Problem with Normal Wine Retail eCommerce site Set Up 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.
• Are you using Wineries' Wine Descriptions? If so, you have a Problem. 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.
• How to Rank Higher than your Competitors in a Local Search on Google Local Search is more important for the local wine retailer selling wine online than the normal SEO guidelines you may read about
• Local Retailers Selling Wine Online have a Seriously Big Advantage The advantage of being a local wine retailer close to a customer's location - the Location War between Google, Yelp, Foursquare etc

Wine SEO Forum

To ask questions or discuss, please go to the Wine SEO Forum. You’ll need to Login or Register to post questions (‘topics’).

Please note this is for general SEO not Local SEO (e.g. search queries with a specific location element, Google Places). These discussions should be in the Local SEO forum.

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