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It’s good to see wineries dipping their toes into SEO waters. Last month, Fantesca Winery ran a “wine corkies” promotion where they allowed users to submit quotes that could make it on to the corks of their upcoming vintages. This was a good play for multiple reasons.

On the surface; it got their customers engaged, expanded their reach and audience, reinforced brand image, and portrayed their brand in a fun, non-stuffy light. But the true magic of the “wine corkies” promotion was the (perhaps unintended) SEO benefits. They are now ranked number one for the term “wine corkies” and their other pages have undoubtedly received a “shot in the SEO arm.”

Another winery that is taking an innovative approach to online marketing and SEO is Twisted Oak. They are allowing user submissions for the back label of their 2006 Sierra Foothills %@#$! This promotion is already receiving attention from the blogosphere, with at least six notable blogs writing about it.

This is the kind of link bait that will help Twisted Oak establish a long term presence online. Unfortunately, with the good comes the bad. Not to pick on Twisted Oak, because they are leaps and bounds ahead of almost every other winery, but they have room to improve.

First of all, their blog, El Bloggo Torcido, is probably the source of most of their incoming links, and it’s not on the same domain as their website, TwistedOak.com. This is a major problem, even if they link to their winery website from the blog, the incoming links are going to a distinctly different url from the one they want these links to go to. So essentially, they are losing hundreds of links (376 to be exact) to their winery url by putting their blog on a separate domain.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to fix this problem. Because the search engines already recognizes the blog as a distinct url, switching it over and saving the link juice is a multi step process. This needs the attention of SEO professionals.

Now on to the Twisted Oak website itself; I have to give a shout out to Jeff Stai for developing it himself, but it seems that he ditched the SEO and back-end coding classes when he was in school.

The single-layer url structure that he has implemented is not only confusing to the search engines, but it also wreaking havoc on the site’s organizational structure. This is one of the reasons why he doesn’t come up number one for his own terms.

Next, look at the Source Code from his home page:

The code on this page is the opposite of what is considered search friendly. This is what it should look like:

These two screen shots are coding for the exact same part of the respective web pages. Can you see the difference? It is easy to see which one the search engines prefer. All of the unnecessary code on the Twisted Oak page is seen as noise to Google and the other search engines.

Search engines have to index and store each page on the internet in their data base. The hundreds of unnecessary lines code on Twisted Oak’s website is definitely causing their rankings to drop. There are other serious structural SEO issues, but they are very technical and not within the scope of this newsletter. If you want to discuss your website, you can email me at ryan@calwineries.com.

Overall, Twisted Oak is on the front lines of online wine marketing, and with a few changes, they could leave everyone in the dust.

– Ryan Fujiu, Calwineries.com

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This entry was posted by admin on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 3:57 pm and is filed under On-Site SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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