webgarden.ca

As you may know Webgarden focuses primarily on web site design & web page creation for the BC horticultural industry. Most of our customers are landscapers, retail garden centers or greenhouse growers based in the Vancouver lower mainland. In today’s article I am going to list  10 ways for retail garden centers and local landscapers to improve their google page rank.

1. Keep your website up-to-date. Make sure you update your content with upcoming events such as trade shows or ceremonies – or even awards you may have won. Give your readers an incentive to come back to your site for current and relevant information by keeping your site up to date.
2. Blog, Blog, Blog: The easiest way for website owners to share industry related information is to blog about it. Blogging is a great way to add brand new content to your website as well as positioning your company as an online industry expert. Blog posts usually rank highly in the search engines because blogs are usually updated frequently and since most posts are dated, the information can be sorted by relevance.
3. Use Heading Tags properly. In your website you likely have several different pages (home page, about us, contact us) Instead of using a generic heading such as “Contact Us” use your company name so it would be “Contact Webgarden”, or “About Webgarden Website Design” This helps differentiate your contact page from the millions of other “contact us” pages on the web.
4. Use original website content. Do not copy and paste text from other websites ( I know it is tempting especially if you hate writing) but google knows if content is repeated or copied and pasted from somewhere else and it will not only ignore your copied pages – google may penalize you as well.
5. Avoid pages that have no written content. If you have a home page that is just one big image it is going to be harder to improve your rankings than a home page with introductory text and a few images.
6. Send your website designer your written content and TRUST US that we can tweak it so that you will improve your search engine rankings. It is all in the little things for example instead of saying “Our company prides it’s self in growing the best plants” You should say “Webgarden prides itself in growing the best plants” But you don’t want to go overboard so that when human readers are reviewing your website it sounds like poorly written English. There is a fine line so perhaps it’s best to let the experts help you…
7. Utilize your location. You may be the only orchid grower in Canada but on the web you are up against thousands of orchid growers in the USA, Thailand, Singapore…. Promote your website to Canadian readers by mentioning your location on the home page of your site as well as on the contact page. Google indexes our searches based on the location of the computer we are searching from.
8. Don’t be affraid to use bold formatting. Using bold for a few key phrases in a few of your web pages (please do NOT go overboard here) can help google distinguish important information. If you are not sure how to do this, then it is better to not do it at all. You don’t want to go overboard and bold everything – it will work against you.
9. Select a few clever keywords or phrases that you believe your customers will use to search for you on the web. It is not realistic to think that you can have top rankings for the word “lily” or the word “grower”. However “Vancouver Oriental Lily Grower” is an attainable goal.
10. Be patient. It takes time for google to find your site. You can help it along by signing up for an analytics account and submitting a site map, but there is no gaurentee your site will be found any quicker. The big guys at Google keep search engine algorithms top secret – nobody really knows how or when the googlebots crawl – but these 10 steps I have laid out are tried and true methods that have proven time and time again to work.

I hope you have enjoyed this post and I hope you can apply some of this information to your own site. If you have found this post useful drop me a comment – I would love to hear what you think!