Springpad Partners with Snooth to Help Foodies Find the Perfect Wine

posted by Clare in Partnerships, Press, Wine

Snooth-powered wine pairings automatically enhance recipes and Snooth Wine Mentors engage with Springpad’s thriving foodie community

BOSTON, MA and NEW YORK, NY (August 21, 2012) – Springpad, the smart notebook app that makes it easy for more than 3.5 million users to save and share what’s important to them, has partnered with Snooth, the most comprehensive wine resource on the web, to engage with food and wine lovers on Springpad in new and meaningful ways. Recipes saved to Springpad will now be enhanced with expert wine pairings recommended by Snooth, and Snooth’s Wine Mentors will share collaborative notebooks with Springpad users. The partnership continues Springpad’s popular model of adding value to the items saved by its users with actionable third-party content, and helping users find curated content from thought leaders as well as friends and family.

With its Snooth partnership, Springpad is taking its value proposition for foodies to a new level. Snooth’s wine pairings will enhance saved recipes while exposing the community to new wine discoveries and knowledge. Springpad notebooks curated by Snooth Wine Mentors, a group of wine educators that includes sommeliers, winemakers, Masters of Wine and other wine industry professionals, will reflect their wine expertise as well as their broader interests and personalities. Snooth will also maintain multiple notebooks of its own dedicated to specific wine varietals, pairings, good values, independent vintners and other themes.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Snooth around our vibrant foodie community to share expert wine recommendations and interests with our users,” said Jeff Chow, co-founder and CEO of Springpad. “The recommended wine pairings provided by Snooth will add value to the recipes our members save, while the participation of Snooth Wine Mentors in our community will bring a rich new dimension to their shared interests in food, wine and restaurants.”

Food and wine lovers have embraced Springpad in large numbers, already saving more than 1.3 million recipes and more than 250,000 restaurants to the platform, organized by interest, such as #vegan, #healthy, #paleo, #glutenfree, #desserts, #beer, #wine, #baking and more. Springpad notebooks make it easy to add, organize and access recipes by course, cuisine, special holiday, main ingredient, favorites and other criteria. One-click shopping list creation, mobile access and a convenient tablet view help users every step of the way from inspiration to shopping to preparation. Now, every recipe saved to Springpad will be paired automatically with a wine recommended by Snooth’s patent pending flavor profiler, helping foodies not only find a wine that complements their current meal, but also discover exceptional new wines they might not have found on their own.

“Springpad has given foodies a fun and valuable new way to share culinary favorites and make new finds. By adding our wine experts, information and tools to the mix, Snooth will make it easier than ever for Springpad members to discover, share and enjoy wine,” said  Rich Tomko, CEO of Snooth Media.

“Springpad has quickly become a key place to be for passionate epicureans,” said Snooth Wine Mentor Julia Crowley. “I’m excited to engage with this thriving community to help enrich and educate their foodie experience—and I’m sure I’ll learn many things from them as well.”

About Snooth

Snooth Media is a technology-driven media company that is a leader in delivering wine, spirits and food content to the epicurean consumer. Snooth Media, with a reach of more than 3.5 million monthly visitors, includes Snooth.com, the largest online wine community with over one million registered members. Snooth Media is headquartered in New York City.

About Springpad

Springpad is a social, smart cloud-based application that helps you discover, save, share and act on the ideas and information that matter most. Created by Boston-based Spring Partners and available for free for iOS, Android and on the Web, Springpad’s smart notebooks help you make better decisions. TIME Magazine named Springpad one of the 50 Best iPhone apps of 2012. To learn more about Springpad, visit www.springpad.com.

Wine Buyer’s Guide Puts Emphasis on Grapes

posted by Clare in Food, Press, Snooth, Wine, Wine Industry

Snooth launches a digital wine magazine available on any device

NEW YORK, NY (August 1, 2012) — Snooth.com, the largest online wine community, will launch the latest edition of a new digital magazine called “Wine Buyer’s Guide” in partnership with Nomad Editions.

Each digital issue will be singularly focused on a specific type of grape. The issue will highlight where the grape grows best, trip itineraries to those regions, top wine producers, great food pairings, and nearly 100 tasting notes of individual wines at various price points to guide both wine novices and connoisseurs in their wine buying decisions.

The latest issue, launching today, features Sauvignon Blanc and can be accessed from any mobile or web-connected device. It is priced at US$0.99/issue or US$9.99/annual subscription. This new edition along with the previously launched first two issues – Chardonnay and Grenache – are available for purchase now at https://nomadeditions.com/snoothLaunchPromo2012/.

“The average U.S. consumer buys wine based on the grape – Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, etc. – yet most wine publications continue to focus on wine regions. By taking a grape-first approach, we aim to super-serve consumers with information on the wines they are most passionate about.” says Snooth CEO Rich Tomko.

“I’m thrilled to introduce Snooth’s new digital magazine.” says Gregory Dal Piaz, Snooth Editor-in-Chief. “Taking advantage of the flexibility of this medium allows us to present our content in a new and attractive format to a whole new audience. Snooth’s Wine Buyer’s Guide is a natural extension of all the work we have done at Snooth to make wine more accessible, easy to understand, and fun to learn about.”

“Snooth has broken new ground with their grape-first approach and in developing a digital magazine to complement their website. Nomad is pleased to have had the opportunity to help Snooth in this effort” says Mark Edmiston, Nomad Editions CEO.

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About Snooth:
Snooth Media delivers epicurean lifestyle content and innovative technology for wine lovers, foodies and the food and beverage industry. The media group, with a reach of more than 3.5 million monthly visitors, includes Snooth.com (http://www.snooth.com), the largest online community of wine lovers with over 1 million registered members; The Spirit (http://www.thespir.it), a comprehensive cocktail destination; What’s Cookin’ (http://www.whatscook.in), a site dedicated to culinary findings and tips; and the Snooth Media Connection, which includes the reach of its distributed content platform. Snooth Media is headquartered in New York City.

About Nomad Editions:
Nomad Editions LLC is a highly scalable digital media company with a sophisticated publishing infrastructure that re-imagines content for mobile platforms; creates beautifully designed magazines optimized for tablets; and delivers them via iOS or html to any device with a browser. The company has published over 300 issues since launch in December 2010. Nomad LLC is based in New York City.

Snooth.com Launches People’s Voice Wine Awards To Determine Best Wines of 2012

posted by Clare in Partnerships, Press, Snooth, Wine, Wine Industry

Media Partner Meredith Corporation to Support Awards Program via Brands Including Better Homes and Gardens, EatingWell, EveryDay with Rachael Ray, Recipe.com and Family Circle

NEW YORK, NY (June 27, 2012) — Snooth.com, the world’s largest online wine community, today launched the People’s Voice Wine Awards, a multi-platform awards program that invites consumers to judge and vote for their favorite wines.

Meredith Corporation will serve as the program’s media partner, leveraging its leading food and lifestyle content brands, including Better Homes and Gardens, EatingWell, EveryDay with Rachael Ray, Recipe.com and Family Circle, to drive consumer awareness and marketing support. Additionally, Meredith and Snooth will work together to create integrated, multi-platform marketing opportunities around the program.

The initial award nominees were chosen by Snooth Editor-in-Chief Gregory Dal Piaz based on typicity, consistency, quality, ageability, complexity and deliciousness. Each selection falls into one of over 80 categories, representing a wine type at various price points: Value, Premium, Super Premium and Luxury. Find the full list of nominees here.

“The U.S. is the largest wine-consuming country in the world and as the largest online wine community, we are excited to finally give the average wine drinker an opportunity to vote for their favorite wines,” says Snooth CEO Rich Tomko. “Most wine award programs are judged by wine critics, the People’s Voice Wine Awards turns that idea around and gives the judging power to the people.”

“Wine critics are a vital and integral part of the wine industry,” says Dal Piaz. “However, we also know the consumer decides which wines to buy based on a myriad of criteria. To honor those decisions made each day, we created the People’s Voice Wine Awards.”

“We’ve seen from our research that, in addition to their passion for food and entertaining, our audience is very interested in wine and wine pairings across a wide range of price points, said Liz Schimel, EVP/Chief Digital Officer, Meredith National Media Group. “Snooth’s mission and offerings align closely with our brands and we’re thrilled to help promote and market the People’s Voice Wine Awards through our powerful roster of food-focused media brands.”

Online voting occurs in two rounds, beginning on June 25 and concluding on October 12. Winner announcements will be made in mid to late October. Social media marketing and monitoring for all the nominated wines will be conducted using Vintank’s industry-leading Social Connect platform. Bloomspot, the online destination for exclusive local deals and travel offers, is the presenting sponsor for the program.

Visit www.snooth.com/awards for more information.

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About Snooth:
Snooth Media is a technology-driven media company that is a leader in delivering wine, spirits, and food content to the epicurean consumer. Snooth Media, with a reach of more than 3.5 million monthly visitors, includes Snooth.com (http://www.snooth.com), the largest online wine community with over 1 million registered members. Snooth Media is headquartered in New York City.

About Meredith Corporation:
Meredith Corporation (NYSE: MDP; www.meredith.com) is the leading media and marketing company serving American women. Meredith features multiple well-known national brands – including Better Homes and Gardens, Parents, Family Circle, Allrecipes.com, Ladies’ Home Journal, Fitness, More, American Baby, EveryDay with Rachael Ray and FamilyFun – along with local television brands in fast-growing markets. Meredith is the industry leader in creating content in key consumer interest areas such as home, family, health and wellness and self-development. Meredith uses multiple distribution platforms – including print, television, online, mobile, tablets, and video – to give consumers content they desire and to deliver the messages of its advertising and marketing partners.

About Vintank:
The worlds leading Social Media Monitoring and SCRM software that powers social intelligence for the wine industry. The software connects consumer interactions on various social channels allowing wineries and wine companies the ability to gain insightful information and analytics about online conversations and interactions and apply it against their social customers.

For more info, contact Clare Goggin Sivits: Email | (646) 723-4328

Snooth.com Launches New Facebook Integration to Make Wine Tasting More Social

posted by Kirsy in Partnerships, Press, Snooth, Wine

Snooth.com Launches New Facebook Integration to Make Wine Tasting More Social

(January 18, 2012 – New York, NY)

Snooth Media, home of Snooth.com the world’s largest wine site, is launching a new social wine tasting experience integrated with Facebook that makes it easier for people to discover new wines and wine reviews online with their friends. This new Facebook integration allows people to tell their friends that they are “tasting” a specific wine from Snooth.com, and add their Snooth activity directly to their Facebook Timeline.

With this new feature, people are able to share activity with their friends that goes beyond just Liking. Starting today, people can enhance their Facebook Timelines with the Snooth app, and update their friends with the new wines that they taste in real time. Wines tasted can then be viewed by friends in a person’s timeline and in the ticker on Facebook. People can also display aggregations of wines tasted in the timeline, including top picks or most recent wine reviews over time.

Through Facebook Platform, people can share the experience of tasting and reviewing wine, making their online experience more personal and relevant.

“We’re excited to launch this new Facebook integration as it makes it really easy for our users to share their favorite wines with their friends and also archive those same wines using Timeline,” says Rich Tomko, CEO, Snooth Media.

Snooth’s role as a launch partner with Facebook’s new platform was announced in September at f8, the company’s annual developer conference.

Learn more about Snooth at www.snooth.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/snooth.

About Snooth Media:

Snooth Media produces epicurean lifestyle properties that combine innovative technology, strong social elements and quality editorial content. With a reach of more than 6 million monthly visitors, Snooth Media includes Snooth.com (http://www.snooth.com), the world’s largest wine information site; The Spirit (http://www.thespir.it), a comprehensive cocktail destination; What’s Cookin’ (http://www.whatscook.in), a site dedicated to culinary findings and tips; and the Snooth Media Connection, which includes the reach of its distributed content platform. Snooth Media is headquartered in New York City.

Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.

Site Maintenance

posted by mark in Snooth

Hello Snooth users. We are going to be performing scheduled server maintenance tonight from 12AM ET to around 1AM ET. Please excuse the service interruption. We’ll be back as soon as we can.

An SEO guide for Wineries Part 6

posted by mark in Winery SEO Guide

Last time, we explored the basics of HTML, the behind-the-scenes language of the web. Let’s talk a little bit more about search engines and how they read websites.

How Do Search Engines Read Websites?

In part 3 of this SEO guide there are two fairly short sections on engines and robots reading your site. I’d like to explore more about what the engines are looking for, so we can dig a little deeper on what you can do to help robots, and users, understand your message.

Because the rules of how websites are set up are fairly well defined, robots tend to behave like extremely thorough users. Let me explain – any website is made up of pages of HTML and links between those pages. Some websites today have additional functionality that allows the pages to animate, or to change as you use them, but in general the basic web contains pages of HTML, with links between those pages. As a user of a website, you visit a site, you read the content, and you find a part of the page that references a topic that you want to know more about. Assuming there’s a link to a page deeper into the site that has information on that topic, you follow that link.

You are unlikely to follow every link on the page. There are probably too many, or you’re too busy, or not every link is relevant to what you’re looking for. A robot is not so picky. Its only task is to visit a page, then find every link on that page and follow it. Each link leads to a page, which the robot will then visit and find every link and follow it. And so on. As it does this, it stores a copy of the contents of each page so that the algorithms the engine has built can analyze those copies to figure out what they’re about.

Two things may be apparent here, given what is happening. If for some reason when a robot visits your page, there is no content (for example if your site is down or if in some cases the page requires a user to complete an action to read the content), then the page will have reduced its ability to rank. There is no content. Most engines are pretty forgiving here, and they’ll come back to visit again, so it’s not a terrible worry if this happens. Also, and much more importantly, if you have a page that is not linked to on your site, the robot cannot and will not find it.

In general, the first page that an engine will visit on your site is your home page. It will follow the process above, and if you have created a page but not linked to it anywhere, the robot cannot find where it is. It will not have the ability to rank because it is effectively invisible to the robots. Note that robots also follow links that go between sites. In fact, links between sites are very important for SEO (review the Site Authority and Links section of part 4). If you have created a page on your site, and you do not link to it from anywhere on your site, however another site does link to it, in general it will be found. I say in general because the other page must have already been found (linked to).

The important point here is that, after you write all kinds of great content, it’s important to link to it so that it can be found by users of your site. Ultimately, that also means the robots can find it, and that could potentially lead to more users from the engines directly.

Snooth.com Announces Facebook Integration to Make Wine Tasting More Social

posted by jchemtob in Partnerships, Press, Snooth, Wine

Snooth.com Announces Facebook Integration to Make Wine Tasting More Social

(September 22, 2011 – New York, NY)

Today at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, Snooth Media, home of Snooth.com the world’s largest wine site, announced a new social wine tasting experience integrated with Facebook that makes it easier for people to discover new wines and wine reviews online with their friends. Snooth’s Facebook integration will allow users to tell their friends that they are “tasting” a specific wine seamlessly from Snooth.com. Using new features announced at f8, Snooth is making it possible for people to share activity with their friends that go beyond just “liking”.

“We’re announcing a new way for people to connect around tasting wines and discovering new wines with their friends on Facebook,” said Rich Tomko, CEO, Snooth Media.

Through Facebook Platform, people can share the experience of tasting and reviewing wine, making their online experience more personal and relevant.

Learn more about Snooth at www.snooth.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/snooth.

About Snooth Media:

Snooth Media produces epicurean lifestyle properties that combine innovative technology, strong social elements and quality editorial content. With a reach of more than 10 million monthly visitors, Snooth Media includes Snooth (http://www.snooth.com), the world’s largest wine site; The Spirit (http://www.thespir.it), a comprehensive cocktail destination; What’s Cookin’ (http://www.whatscook.in), a site dedicated to culinary findings and tips; and the Snooth Media Connection, which includes the reach of its distributed content platform. Snooth Media is headquartered in New York City.

Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.

Snooth Media Introduces Wine Press – Provides Robust Contributor Platform and Streaming Content Viewer for Wine Fans

posted by jchemtob in Guest Bloggers, Partnerships, Press, Snooth, Wine, Wine Industry

Housed on Snooth.com, Wine Press Kick-Off Includes Articles from ZesterDaily.com Wine Experts

(September 14, 2011 – New York, NY)

Snooth Media, home of Snooth (www.snooth.com), the world’s largest wine site, today announced the launch of an innovative, new contributor platform and content viewer, Wine Press (www.snooth.com/wine-press). The new product enables Snooth site users to easily contribute articles, upload photos, take quizzes, start conversations and ask questions. Wine Press also allows users to view the best wine content on the Web, including original content from Snooth and posts from the top wine blogs, all in one easily navigable page.

Wine Press offers Snooth’s 850,000+ community members, and anyone who logs in with their Facebook account, the opportunity to become contributors and bring their wine insights to the forefront. After publishing, each post gets fed into the Wine Press news stream where its placement is then determined by relevancy, community votes, Facebook Likes and Tweets.

“We want to make it easy for anyone to contribute to Snooth.com,” notes Snooth Media CEO Rich Tomko. “Wine Press allows folks who would like to write about wine, but don’t want the overhead of starting and maintaining their own blog, to easily publish their posts on a platform that will seamlessly put their ideas in front of the Web’s largest wine audience. On the other side, we’ve also built a tool that makes it easy for any user to digest the best online wine content customized to their expertise level and interests.”

As part of this new product launch, Snooth has partnered with leading Internet food and drink news site ZesterDaily.com to bring additional expert content to the Snooth community. Articles from their award-winning contributors – Carla Capalbo, Patrick Comiskey and Elin McCoy – will help kick-off the Wine Press launch. In partnership with Zester Daily, Snooth will be hosting a “book-a-day” giveaway drawing from a robust “Wine Library” of books, including select titles from ZesterDaily.com contributors, and one grand prize winner who will receive the entire library

In June, Snooth launched Wine Rack, the site’s foray into social gaming. Interactions logged on Wine Press will be counted toward earning trophies on Wine Rack as well.

Visit Wine Press at: snooth.com/wine-press

About Snooth Media

Snooth Media produces epicurean lifestyle properties that combine innovative technology, strong social elements and quality editorial content. With a reach of more than 10 million monthly visitors, Snooth Media includes Snooth (http://www.snooth.com), the world’s largest wine site; The Spirit (http://www.thespir.it), a comprehensive cocktail destination; What’s Cookin’ (http://www.whatscook.in), a site dedicated to culinary findings and tips; and the Snooth Media Connection, which includes the reach of its distributed content platform. Snooth Media is headquartered in New York City.

About Zester Daily

Zester Daily (ZesterDaily.com) is an award-winning Internet news site covering the culture and politics of food and drink. More than 50 journalists, authors and editors worldwide create the site’s content, including breaking news, feature articles, op-eds, cartoons, videos and more. Zester Daily readers include opinion leaders in the fields of food and drink, politics, environment, health, agriculture and sustainability. Closely followed by the national media and lauded for its excellence, Zester Daily continues its growth since it was founded in 2010. Zester Daily is headquartered in Los Angeles, CA.

An SEO guide for Wineries Part 5

posted by mark in Winery SEO Guide

Last time, we explored how search engines rank websites. I spent a bit of that post talking about links. We’ve all clicked on links before, but let’s dive into the language of the web a little, to demystify the building blocks.

HTML is The Language of the Web

1. What is HTML?
If all content is not created equal, at least all web pages are. They’re created using a language, just like English, French or Italian. That language has a syntax and a grammar, and rules for how it should be written. That language is called HTML. Fortunately for us, it’s much simpler to learn to write in HTML than it is to learn a spoken language.

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. I happen to love acronyms, but I realize they’re fairly techy and you certainly don’t need to remember what it stands for to use HTML. The reason I bring it up is because it helps to remember what HTML is trying to do. Hypertext is web-activated text. So HTML is for working with hypertext. Markup is a lot like it sounds. Remember in school when you wrote an essay, and the teacher would Mark Up your work with red pen, adding strikethroughs, squiggly lines that signified that two letters were reversed, and so forth? Believe it or not, that’s all Markup is — you’re writing out some red lines that the web browsers will use to figure out how to display text. The L in HTML of course just means it’s a language.

2. The building blocks of HTML
If you right-click on this page and choose the option to “View page source”, you’ll see a bunch of text surrounded by small words enclosed in less-than (<) and greater-than symbols (>). That’s the Markup in HTML. If you remember back to my example of the teacher with the red pen – there were symbols that were used to signify what was to be done with the text. HTML doesn’t write on top of the text to mark it up however. HTML consists of a collection of symbols that surround the text. These symbols are called “tags”. Confusingly, these are not the tags you might use to describe your content. Let’s look at a tag.

<strong>This text should be bold</strong>

Let’s break down the tag – it begins with <strong>. <strong> is an “opening tag”. That tells the web browser that whatever comes next should be in bold. You may wonder when the browser would know to stop bolding text. The browser will bold all text until the tag is “closed”. We close tags using a slash after the less-than symbol. </strong> is a “closing tag”. It tells the browser to stop bolding the text.

That’s basically it – all of HTML from here on out uses these tags to tell the browser what to do with the text that is between its opening and closing tags.

3. There are many HTML tags
Here are some more examples.

<em>This text should be italicized</em>
<p>This text is a full paragraph</p>
<a href=”http://www.wine.com/”>This text should be linked to wine.com</a>

Hang on – see what happened there? Sometimes an opening and closing tag is just not enough information for the browser to know what to do. The “a” tag is also known as the “anchor” tag or the hyperlink or just the link. Why do we need 4 names for it? I don’t know.

Anyway, see the href=”http://www.wine.com/” part? That’s called an attribute. All attributes follow the same form. They appear in the opening tag, they begin with the name of the attribute (href), then an equals sign, and the value of the attribute is enclosed in double quotes afterwards (http://www.wine.com/).

In this case, a link tag needs to know where to link to. The href attribute defines where to link to. You can have multiple attributes as well.

Let’s try to relate that to wine. Let’s say the link tag were a bottle of wine. One of its attributes would be the closure, which might be cork. It might also have a vintage, say 2008. It would also have a name – the “Weak Example Cabernet Sauvignon”. If there were a bottle tag in HTML, it might look like this:

<bottle closure=”cork” vintage=”2008″>Weak Example Cabernet Sauvignon</bottle>

So maybe that wasn’t the best example – and there certainly is no bottle tag in HTML, but hopefully it shows that HTML is flexible, powerful and not too terribly scary.

Ready to move on? Proceed to Part 6: How Do Search Engines Read Websites?

An SEO guide for Wineries Part 4

posted by mark in Winery SEO Guide

Last time, we explored the search engine process. At the end of that post, I commented that, should you do a great job of “being an authority”, “you have a fighting chance of ranking against your competitors”. Let’s explore what that means.

Express Your Authority

When you use a search engine you may not think about the results that are returned or the order they’re returned in. You may be surprised to see how important the top few results are. Although this article is from 2006 and the numbers may have changed slightly, you can see how powerful a top ranking can be. The fact is, people rely on the engines to give them the most relevant and best information on their search in the top few results, and rarely go hunting lower on the page or on page 2. They’re more likely to rework their search if they don’t see what they want.

This puts a lot of pressure on the engines to be certain that users are served within the top few results. After all, the goal of a search engine is to be beneficial to their customers. They want to provide the best, most relevant information available. This requires that the engines analyze the pages their robots crawl from many different angles – there’s no silver bullet when it comes to finding the best result. At this time, Google uses over 200 signals to rank websites for a given search. Some of those signals are well known and some are kept secret by Google, after all the last thing they want is for people to be able to “game” their algorithm. Let’s explore some of the ones that the SEO community knows about.

1. Relevance
This one is an easy one. If your page is not relevant to the searcher’s search, you will not be able to rank. For example, if a searcher is looking for “best cabernet in napa” and your page is about different types of soda, there’s no way you would be able to rank in their search results.

To improve relevance, you should choose the topics that you want to write about and make sure you provide a page for each with plenty of good quality text on it.

2. “Brand” Relevance
A branded search is a search that includes your brand name in it. These searches are very important for you to rank for. You want your fans to find you in the engines when they search for you. Fortunately, there are signals in the engines that will help your site rank for branded searches. The engines look at signals such as the URL that your site has, the title of your home page, the amount of times your brand is mentioned on your site, and the number of other sites that refer to your site using your brand name.

Here’s a tip: It is a good idea to choose a domain name that includes the name of your brand. At the time of this writing, engines are still using the presence of your brand name in your URL as a relevance factor. So, if you are the owner of the Seven Eagles Winery, you will want to seriously consider putting your site on seveneagleswinery.com.

3. Site Authority / Links
A very strong signal to the engines that your site is a valuable member of the Internet community and therefore should rank higher comes in the form of links to your site. Each engine keeps track of how authoritative a site is as a whole and how authoritative each page on that site is individually. As sites begin to link to you, because they love your writing or because they love your wines (or because they love your site!), you will begin to gain authority. The more authority the site that links to you has, the more authority you will gain from that link. As I mentioned, authority is gained on a full site level and on a per page level. If you have many links to a single page on your site because that page is incredibly good, your site will benefit from all of those links and secondary pages will enjoy some benefit. Naturally it’s better to have many links across many pages of your site. It is also good to have a diversity of domains linking to your site. Many links from a single site are not as good as one link from several different sites.

I like to think of a link as a positive vote for your site – the site that links to you is vouching for your quality. As in real life, if Robert Parker vouches for your quality, it’s much better than if, say, Mark Angelillo does. Robert Parker has much more authority than I do. On the web, a link from CNN.com is much better than a link from awesomewines.net.

After reading this, it might seem tempting to try to go get links however you can. Please note that it is not a good idea to buy links or trade links with sites that are of low quality. In fact it is expressly against the quality guidelines of the major engines. Google has a good page on this and other quality guidelines. The reason this is such a good signal is that it is hard to fake people being interested in your wine or content. You can’t control that, and attempting to get around this might risk your site getting reduced in the rankings or worse, being banned from the engines.

If you focus on branded searches first, choose your topics wisely and write relevant articles about those branded topics, you’re much more likely to see increased rankings in the engines.

Ready to move on? Proceed to Part 5: HTML is The Language of the Web