Search Engine Optimization

Included in your Monthly Support fee are the Bottlenose Search Engine Optimization practices. These ongoing performed practices are intended to lay a foundation for consumers to easily find your store. You still need, as noted below, to add your efforts to maximize Search Engine Optimization for your site.

Bottlenose SEO Practices Outline

• Adherence to search engine friendly design principles
• Custom meta tag configuration and targeted keywords for each of your items
• Maintain relevant inbound links and listing directories
• Daily updates to internal link structure and wine related content
• Daily inventory feeds to vertical search engines: wine-searcher.com
• Google Analytics (traffic reporting) profile configuration

How SEO Works

All major search engines use special software robots, called spiders or crawlers, to retrieve information from web pages. The spiders build lists of words and phrases found on each web page. Each search engine keeps an index, or database, of the words and phrases they find on each web page they are able to crawl. Bottlenose ensures that search engines can easily spider your web site and index all the available content. We also make sure that the search engines see the most recent content when they periodically spider or crawl your site to check for new content.

Once your site has been indexed, it will show up in the search results when a consumer searches for one of your target keywords on a major search engine, such as Google. However, where will your site show up among all the results? To determine the most relevant result for a search on Google (in other words, which page will rank highest), Google assigns weight to sets of words on each web site. Different engines have different formulas for assigning weight to the words and phrases in its index. (For example, one search engine might assign more weight to words which appears many times on a page. Another might assign more weight to words which appear in the title tag of a page.) Furthermore, the algorithm which is used to assign weight in the search engine rankings is kept highly confidential and changes almost every day.

Obviously, Bottlenose cannot claim to know any search engine's specific ranking algorithm. We do ensure that targeted words and phrases are placed strategically on your web pages, no matter what the algorithms are. For example, we make sure that the title tag of any wine's page on your site clearly states the name of that wine. We also make sure that relevant words are listed multiple times on each page.

Things You Can Do to Improve Your Site's Search Engine Ranking

The best way to improve the search engine ranking of your Bottlenose website, without knowing the specific search engine algorithm, is to add fresh content which targets relevant words and phrases. Bottlenose already accomplishes this by adding descriptions and reviews for new wines on your site. You can build upon our database of content by targeting particular online shoppers. For example, if you want to improve your site's ranking for searches related to Australian wine, you could do any of the following:

• feature wines from Australia on your home page
• write up your own tasting notes for your favorite Australian wines, and post them online
• write an article which suggests food pairings for Australian wine
• write an article which talks about an up-and-coming Australian winery
• post this months Event’s (tasting dates) listing featuring the Australian wine region.

Any one of these techniques will not only improve your search engine rankings, but provide fresh and informative content to keep customers on your site once they've clicked on.