Making your Wine Site or Blog "Search-Friendly"

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    Making your Wine Site or Blog "Search-Friendly" - Presentation Transcript

    1. An Introduction to “Search-Friendliness”
      Doug Cook
      Founder, Able Grape
    2. Overview
      Debunk a few search “myths”
      What is “search-friendliness”?
      The Long Tail and what it means
      “Search 101”
      How search engines work
      Implications for how you build your site
      Analytics
      Able Grape demo
      Q&A
    3. Debunking some myths
      Two fictitious examples
      Humblevino.com:
      1000 visits/day
      Spamovin.com:
      10000 visits/day
      Which site is more successful?
    4. Myth #1: More Traffic is Better
      Need more information than just traffic
      Humblevino.com
      35% meaningful interactions
      Spamovin.com
      2% meaningful interactions
      Humblevino is more successful
      More (350 vs 200) users engaged each day
      Spamovin is potentially tarnishing their brand
    5. Ideal Optimization
      Connect with all the people who are interested in what you have to say, and nobody else
      Maximizes meaningful interactions
      I prefer the term “search-friendliness”
      “SEO” often has connotations of spamminess
      Similar analogy can be made for Twitter, Facebook, etc.
    6. THE “LONG TAIL” and why you should care
      “I hope this talk is not too long a tale…”
    7. The “Long Tail” of Search
      Number of Times Searched
      Specific Searches
    8. The “Long Tail” of Search
      “Rare” searches
      = most of the area
      “Popular Searches”
      < 25% of area
      Number of Times Searched
      Specific Searches
    9. The “Long Tail” of Search
      Robert Mondavi Cabernet
      Robert Mondavi
      (18% of total)
      2004 Robert Mondavi Cabernet
      2004 Robert Mondavi Cabernet
      Reserve
      Number of Times Searched
      2004 Robert Mondavi Cabernet
      Reserve Tasting Notes
      Specific Searches
    10. The “Long Tail” of Search
      Put another way, searchers are infinitely creative
      Even for the exact same concept, many different searches
      2005 Hugel Riesling
      ‘05 Hugel Riesling
      DomaineHugel Alsace Riesling 2005
      DomaineHugel et Fils AOC Alsace Riesling 2005
    11. Myth #2
      Myth: “People will come to my homepage and browse around to find what they want”
      Some people will, most won’t
      Mondavi example: only 18% to homepage
      Most people find information by very specific searches
      Expect these to take them directly to pertinent info
      Implication: your site should have this info in a “search-friendly” format
    12. Myth #3
      Myth: “I have to rank highly for some popular query to get lots of traffic”
      Don’t try to be #1 for “cabernet”
      Too much competition
      Not that much traffic
      Only 7.5% of all queries mentioning cabernet!
      It is not the traffic you want (see Myth #1)
      Won’t result in a “meaningful interaction” unless you truly have the best general page about Cabernet on the web
      Put yourself in the shoes of the searcher
    13. The Long Tail: Implications
      Make sure you have lots of specific content on your site
      Wineries
      All wines, specific vintages, past and present, with detailed information
      Blogs
      Post often!
      Must be accessible to search engines
      Must be organized so “infinitely creative” searchers can find it
    14. Search ENGINE 101
      “A little knowledge can be dangerous…”
    15. How a Search Engine Finds Content
      Crawler (robot, spider) fetches pages from the web
      Parses (picks apart) page, extracts the links
      Goes to new pages found among links, and fetches them
      (Lather, rinse, repeat).
    16. Implications
      Crawler must find a link to your page
      Dynamic technologies (Flash, Javascript) problematic
      Content generated in response to user input (navigation by search/option menus) problematic
      Sitemaps (XML or HTML) can mitigate
      Crawler must be able to fetch/parse the page
      Flash: difficult/impossible to parse
      Age verification: is a crawler old enough to drink?
      Sites depending upon registration: bad
      Sites depending upon cookie from home page: bad
      Crawler doesn’t visit the homepage first!
      Blogging platforms OK, winery sites often problematic
    17. How a Search Engine Searches
      Search Engines are not very smart!
      Looks for all the search terms at least once in the combined:
      Document body
      Title
      Inbound link text
      Document URL
    18. Not all Text is Equal
      Title and inbound link text are seen as most likely description of what page is “about”
      Thus weighted more heavily by search engine
      Links are very valuable
      Quantity is of some interest
      Text of links is very important
    19. Example Blog post: mrwinehead.com
      A Great Wine I Tasted
      Last night I tasted the 2007 Hugel Gewürztraminer and it was good.
      Click hereto read a wine review of the ‘07.
      Hugel’sGewürz is not bad. Mr Wine Headreviews the 2007.
      Hypothetical “long tail” searches:
      2007 Hugel Gewürztraminer: will show up somewhere, not rank highly
      2007 Hugel et Fils Alsace Gewürtztraminer: nope
      (But for “click here” this page will be the billionth result!)
    20. Better Version: mrwinehead.com
      Tasted: 2007 Hugel Gewürztraminer
      Last night I tasted the ’07 Gewürz from DomaineHugel in Alsace, and boy, was it good.
      Check out a wine review of the 2007 Hügel Gewürztraminer.
      Hugel’sGewürz is not bad. Mr. Wine Head reviews the ’07.
      Hypothetical “long tail” searches:
      2007 Hugel Gewürztraminer: yep
      2007 DomaineHugel Alsace Gewürtztraminer: yep
    21. Alternative Version: mrwinehead.com
      Bloggers like creative titles. You might use an internal link to be the “full, descriptive” title, giving you more flexibility with the title. Experiment, but measure your results!
      HugelGewürzRocks Again
      Last night I tasted the ’07 Gewürztraminer from DomaineHugel in Alsace, and boy, was it good.
      Internal Link:
      Check out a wine review of the 2007 Hügel Gewürztraminer.
      Hugel’sGewürz is not bad. Mr. Wine Head reviews the ’07.
      Hypothetical “long tail” searches:
      2007 Hugel Gewürztraminer: yep
      2007 DomaineHugel Alsace Gewürtztraminer: yep
    22. So what does this mean for you?
      Choose your title carefully: should be complete yet concise description of topic
      Missing words = missed opportunity for “tail searches”
      But long titles have less weight, can bring irrelevant traffic
      When linking to others, choose your link text as you would a title for the page
    23. Encourage links to your pages!
      Tools to ease sharing/linking (e.g. sharethis)
      Use social media to get visits, some visitors may link back
      Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Digg, Technorati
      Essential: have something unique and interesting to say
    24. Analytics
      If you want to make something better, you must measure it
    25. Analytics
      How do you know your changes are working?
      Where do you get inspiration for other changes to make?
      Track your traffic
      Where is it from?
      If from a search engine, what searches are they using?
      What pages are users visiting?
    26. How do users respond to your site?
      Bounce rate
      If you double your traffic, and halve your “connect rate”…
      Time on site
      Where do your users go after the landing page?
      Optimizing is about learning from your users and evolving your site.
      NB: Google tracks these things too!
      Sites with high bounce rates may rank lower
    27. Analytics Platforms
      Blogging platforms often include basic analytics
      Google Analytics – free, much more sophisticated.
      Awstats – requires access to server logs
      Number of commercial packages (Omniture, etc)
    28. Experiment!
      Don’t be afraid to try things, as long as you measure the results
      A/B tests can be very useful
      Surprising things can matter
      Fonts, colors…
    29. Summary
      Produce unique, useful, interesting content!
      Understand the implications of the long tail
      Make sure your pages are findable/fetchable by search engines
      Make sure your content, especially titles/anchors, are well-chosen
      Measure your results and tune

    + Doug CookDoug Cook, 3 months ago

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