How To Optimize Winery Website Page Names & URLS
By Brian Pasch
It’s The Little Things
Welcome to another edition of the WineMarketer.com newsletter. What do you want to read about in future newsletters? Let us know by filling out our poll. Our mission is to help YOU, our subscribers.
One of the most overlooked ways in which you can optimize you winery website for search marketing is to create effective website “page names”. In addition to the domain name you choose to host your website, your website page name choices can have a big impact on how consumers find your site. Traditionally, website page names were created by web programmers. Today, the process of naming web pages should be in conjunction with your marketing department and web development firm.
A simple test is to search for a vintage of a particular wine and see what Google displays as the search results. For example, go to Google and search for this phrase “2005 Keever Cabernet”. You will see that my wine blog is the #1 listing in the USA. One of the reasons why my review of the 2005 Keever Cabernet Sauvignon is at the top of Google search results is because I saved the review to a page called “2005-Keever-Cabernet-Sauvignon.htm”. I took the time to use the year and name of the wine as the page name to optimize search results for years to come.
You can see that the Keever website is also shown on page one. The web pages that are search engine optimized, like my wine blog, rank ahead of the winery. The Keever Winery page that describes the same wine is called: www.keevervineyards.com/keever/catalog/view_product.jsp?product_id=1006.
This page naming convention is called a “dynamic web page” and it is formatted with “gibberish” because it is part of an ecommerce package that is NOT optimized for search marketing. An example of a dynamic page that got it almost right is: http://www.whitehalllane.com/our_wine/facts/fact_06_Chard.php.
This page describes the 2006 Whitehall Lane Chardonnay, unfortunately the web designer got only half way there. The page should have been called “/our_wine/facts/2006-Whitehall-Lane-Carneros-Chardonnay.php”. There is no need to repeat the word “fact” and the phrase “06 Chard” is not something anyone will type into Google. Whitehall’s web designer gets a “close but no cigar” score.
Choose The Right Platform
My recommendation is to avoid website platforms that have outdated dynamic page names since newer packages have intelligent dynamic page names. If you don’t want to boot your current ecommerce system then at least create static pages on your site for each wine outside of the shopping cart.
I’m writing about this technique to demonstrate that if wineries would like more direct to consumer wine sales or just to increase their mailing lists, they should have an optimized web page for each wine they make in each vintage. So, if a winery makes five different wines a year the directory structure could look like this:
- www.wineryname.com/wines/2005-Cabernet-Sauvignon.html
- www.wineryname.com/wines/2005-Cabernet-Franc.html
- www.wineryname.com/wines/2005-Bella-Vineyard-Cabernet-Sauvignon.html
- www.wineryname.com/wines/2005-Trailside-Cabernet-Sauvignon.html
- www.wineryname.com/wines/2005-Block-16-Merlot.html
You can also the winery name into the page name for extra reference, but that would depend on the winery URL and the names of the wines.
Make It Common Practice
By separating words with dashes, and spelling out the specifics of the wine name, there is a very high probability that the winery website pages will be at the very top of Google search results when people search for a specific vintage of a wine. By ignoring this optimization technique, wineries will lose consumer sales to online retailers and will also have lower mailing list registrations.
Every page on a winery website should have well thought out page names. The pages name should be c based off of keyword research and common sense. Taking time to revise your website page names is a great long term investment. Once the website pages are renamed, you should recreate your sitemap.xml and rssfeed.xml files and tell Google and Yahoo to reread the files.
There are some other caveats about renaming names that you can discuss with your website developer. For example, make sure the old page names are redirected to the new names so during the transition and re-indexing, you don’t have any broken links.
Need some more examples of how powerful good page name are? Go to Google and search with the phrases 2003 Scarecrow Cabernet and 2005 Ghost Block Cabernet.
You will see that in the first few search results on Google Page one, I have articles shown from my wine blog that follow this intelligent page naming convention. This technique in conjunction with good HTML page titles and good page content will deliver optimal search results.
Cheers,
Brian Pasch - CEO, Pasch Consulting Group
About the Author: Brian Pasch is the CEO of Pasch Consulting Group, a firm specializing in Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization. The PCG website is located at www.seonj.com and Brian Pasch can be reached via email at brian@seonj.com. Brian is also an avid wine collector and wine advocate. His wine blog can be found at www.brianpasch.com.
Other Network Sites: Wine Ratings, Wine Prices & Reviews | Online Wine Videos | Wine Marketing & Wine Advertising