No, we really are not insulting you. I'm sure your website is full of good and intelligent content. Probably great wine too.

I'm talking about search. Not a search on your website, but a search for your website. For your products, for your wines.

How do people find your website? They search. They search on what are called Search Engines. The most important search engines are Google, Yahoo and the new Bing from Microsoft.

But a search of many of your sites (and I'm speaking of the eWinerySolutions family of websites) reveals something missing. And what is missing seems to be those emblems of good search, what are called "meta tags."

What are Meta Tags and Why Should You Care?

Metadata is simply data about data or information about information. Meta Tags are simply those words or phrases that are used to help people find the data, the information that they are looking for.

If you are a winemaker (and presumably you or someone you work with is), you sell wine. That's why you have an ecommerce website. But if someone doesn't know who you are, you want them to find you.

There are many ways, including advertising, promotions, tasting rooms, etc. etc. But to the point of this blog post, the way you want people to find you is to search for you on a search engine.

So how does that work? A potential customer might be interested in Napa Valley Cabernet. Wow, you make a Napa Valley Cabernet. Terrific. So you want that customer to find your website, click on the link, find the wine and buy it, How does the customer do that?

The customer types in "Napa Valley Cabernet" in the search box on the Google, Yahoo or Bing website. Wow, a list of 372,000 links appear. Is your winery among them? Perhaps it is. Perhaps not. Perhaps it's on page 30,000 of this list. People will wade through 30,000 pages, right?

Ok, so obviously you want to appear on page one. (or two, but really one). Where you appear on this list of 372,000 links is called "Page Ranking."

So how do you get a high page ranking? Back to Meta Tags.

There are several types of Meta Tags. Each one can help your page ranking. Now there are no guarantees (possible exception: paid listings, but that's a subject for another post) but you can start by making it easy for the customer.

Google and the other search engines will find you if you have a Napa Valley Cabernet on your site, but maybe put you on page 30,000. So you are going to help Google put you ahead of the others.

eWinerySolutions makes this whole process very easy. So with eWinery's help, you are going to help Google push your site to the top of their list.

What eWinerySolutions has done is made it possible--and easy--for you to enter meta tags for every page on your site, every category of your products, and every product itself! Now there will be zillions* of ways (*zillions is probably an exaggeration. But not by much.)

If you go to a site page in your site editor, you see a section called “page properties.” Opening this will allow you to put your meta tags, marketing URLs, page descriptions, keywords, etc.

Your keywords should relate to the content on that page. Don’t stuff that section with lots of keywords related to wine. They should relate to the content on that page or Google will not like you and may decide not to rank your page at all.

The marketing URL is something that makes one of those long database generated URLs easier to read. For example, http://www.yourwinery.com//index.cfm?method=pages.showPage&pageid=d5d0a938-1cc4-fbb6-23b8-cc8432e82a27 can become simply http://www.yourwinery.com/06Syrah

That is much easier to read, to link to, and for search engines to make sense of.

The description will be filled in by Google if you don’t want to write anything, but creating your own sentence will allow you to control the content

The title is what will display at the top of the browser. If you don’t put anything in there, it just might say Internet Explorer when it could have Your Winery Name and Your Own Page Name. That would also get the attention of the search engines.

Remember you can enter meta tags on your eWinerySolutions website for each site page, each product, each product category.

It may be worthwhile to hire a person or company to assist you with this, though you may also want to do this yourself. The sooner you start on this, the sooner your page rankings will improve. And that can translate into increased sales. Which is really why you’re in business, right?

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