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!

• As a Canadian Company always buy both .ca AND .com. The cost is less than $20 per year for each and you can set up your website so that when the user types either version, your site will come up.
• If you can not purchase the .com – stick with the .ca
• Never allow your website designer to purchase your domain for you! We can point you on the right track and even recommend reputable registrars but the domain should always be registered in YOUR name with YOUR credit card. I can’t even tell you how many times this happens! It is very common to hear that a company has allowed the original website developer to purchase their domain name and now that person has disappeared or fallen out of favor. Do yourself a favor and keep your domain name in your name!
• Keep your domain name as short as possible – this will reduce the number of spelling errors while typing.
• Register all your domains with the same Registrar (if possible) This way,you don’t have to hunt around and figure out which domain was registered where – and what the user name and password is on each account?

If you have any questions regarding your domain name, or if need a reputable domain registrar, please give us a call (778) 858-7037 or send us and email: cathy@webgarden.ca -We are always happy to help!

You’re right – green is a great colour for our industry, however, does it always have to be the SAME green? Time and again, I run into greenhouse and garden center owners who give me their business card and it is always the same green : a combination of forest green and/or emerald green.

Consider stepping away from these boring and over used greens and embrace one of the THOUSANDS of other greens available! Here are just a few examples:

Using a different green allows you to stand out from your competition, and helps you build a distinct brand for your company.

Changing up your website header to reflect holidays and seasons is a great way to keep website fresh and interesting, and encourages your customers to come back to your site!

If you are interested in having your website changed to reflect the seasons or holidays, please contact us at Webgarden and we will customize a monthly or quarterly seasonal package for your corporate website.

Webgarden Online Contact Form

OR

Office Telephone: 778-858-7037

• E-Newsletters:Sending a monthly or bi-monthly newsletter to your clients is a great way to keep in contact with them – why not give them a list of monthly specials or keep them up-to-date with industry news… you can personalize each email to suit the particular interest of that customer and it is a great way to keep you and your company on the forefront of your customers mind. At Webgarden we design custom html newsletters with your logo and corporate colours, we embed an email sign up form on your website, and we set up an online email tracking system that you can log into and see who has opened your email, who has subscribed and unsubscribed and keep track of emails that bounce. To view the E-Newsletters we have already created check out our portfolio

• Website Maintenance: There is nothing worse than going to a website and seeing events or products whose last update was in 2005! If your website is not current, it is useless.At Webgarden we can customize a maintenance package for you – whether it be updating text, or adding seasonal headers, for a few extra dollars a year, you can maintain a professional and up to date website.

We still offer our main products: website design and blog development but due to high demand we have added maintenance and newsletters to our product line

For those of us you looking for a quick and cheap way to improve your site rankings, here are 4 tips to get you started properly optimizing your website and  help you improve your website placement in Google and most other search engines. 

1) Make sure your website content relevant and original: This means that if you create a website about your Abbotsford Garden Center – make sure your content is ABOUT your Abbotsford Garden Center – don’t start writing pages about the real estate market in Abbotsford!
I know it can be tempting to copy and paste information from another person’s website- but YOU MUST make sure your website content is ORIGINAL – Google knows if you have copied and pasted from another site and will not give your site much weight or importance.

2) Add metatags and keywords: This is a debate amongst many website designers – some say that Google no longer recognizes website keywords as being relevant to your site because of all the black hat SEO that is going on. (Black Hat SEO is the term used for illegitimate website marketing) However, until Google tells us that it specifically does not recognize metatags and keywords – I suggest you still add 10-20 keywords to your site’s index page. (Please note these keywords must be relevant to your website’s content – if you have a website about your garden center you should not be using the keyword “Hot Girls” if you do this, you could be banned from Google – and it is nearly impossible to get back in!) 

3) Use Text: Some developers will use images for the entire site – even though the images may have text within them, Google’s crawlers do not recognize text within images. This is a big problem with older sites and flash based sites! Make sure you design your site using css or tables with real text based content, otherwise your site will rank poorly – or NOT AT ALL!

4) Add a Sitemap: A site map is very easy to add to your site – there are many free sitemap builders available on the web. The one that I use is:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Although this list will give you a good starting point to optimize your website, it is not exhaustive. If you would like to know more ways to improve your site’s rankings I would suggest doing further research on the web. There are plenty ways to optimize your site for search engines and the best techniques are often FREE!

You can download the plugin here: geekgirl I spent a buck on this plug-in and it was well worth it!

Another plug-in I tried was by semi-logic, and although it seems to be working for some, I could not figure it out! Now, I am far from being a php expert, but judging from several user comments on their site, not many people seem to be able get it to work… and even though I posted a question on their forum I did not receive an  answer. (But, I shouldn’t really complain cuz these guys are building plugins for the greater good of mankind, and don’t receive any monetary compensation.)

All and all I think that geekgirl has made a ‘rockin plugin – and even includes example code  inside the folder so if you get stuck you can refer to those for help.

1. Duplicate style.css 
2. Rename the copy to ie7.css (or whatever you would like to call it)
3. Go to the Header Page of your theme.
4. Find this code:
   <style type=”text/css” media=”screen”> @import
   url (<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_url’); ?>);
   </style>
5. delete this and replace with:
   <![if IE]><link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”
   href=”http://blog.com/wp-content/themes/simpla/ie.css” mce_href=”http://blog.com/wp-content/themes/simpla/ie.css”>
   <![endif]>  
6. <![if !IE]><link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”
   href=”http://blog.com/wp-content/themes/simpla/style.css” mce_href=”http://blog.com/wp-content/themes/simpla/style.css”>
   <![endif]>

Basically this says that if the browser is IE user the ie.css stylesheet. If the browser is not IE then use the style.css stylesheet. Although you will now have two stylesheets to maintain, it is a lot easier to adjust the styles for troublesome IE.

Resolving Browser Display Discrepancies Between IE and Firefox This is where the site tip comes from – Thanks Tom!