November 2007 – avalonwine.com

[AnonymousParticipant]

Website: http://www.avalonwine.com/

Description: Avalon Wine Inc. has been in business for twenty-one years as a retail store in the small college town of Corvallis, Oregon. Of those twenty-one years, they have had an online presence for the last ten. Avalon sells hard to get, highly rated “Indie” Oregon and Washington wine and gourmet foods. Avalon does not discount, and has taken a slow growth route, building a customer base by word of mouth and unpaid search engine listings. Customer service is their focus coupled with providing a lot of useful and hard to find information about the products they offer. Their website is atypical in that it does not focus on listing the wines that are on sale, but rather the focus is on offering original, high quality journalism every month with stories written by professional wine writers and industry members. A lot of their customers come to them by finding their original articles and wine reviews through Google.

Technologies Used: “Most important of all technical advantages we have, we moved to LexiConn almost 2 years ago, after using several different hosts”, states owner Jean Yates. She went on to state: “The entire support staff is excellent. They always answer my inquiries within a few minutes and are so on top of the technical side of web hosting and websites that I have yet to find a question that stumps them.

Avalon’s site uses ShopSite, and has for the entire ten years it’s been up. Pages are built with ShopSite templates and a few are built as freestanding pages with php and include files. ShopSite was rather limited ten years ago, prompting me to separate the site into two URLs – avalonwine.com and northwest-wine.com. Avalonwine contains the articles and related info about Northwest wine and our company, and northwest-wine.com is basically ShopSite, and contains winery and wine info and reviews, as well as purchasing via the ShopSite shopping cart.

LexiConn set us up with their Fed Ex module, urchin, swish search, mail, and testing sites for each URL. We also use ScanAlert for security. LexiConn recommended Constant Contact for email, and we send 2-4 email newsletters every week via this service. We also use the Product Review Module within ShopSite, and it’s very popular with our customers.

We appear on the first page of most of the winery and wine keywords we want, usually the second position, right below the winery itself, and often first position for an individual wine. While we follow the “rules” for SEO, the frequently changing, fresh, original content, relevant to our readers, is the reason we see good SEO.”

[Author]

Posts