Hey, readers, I’m taking my site about sustainable gardening live and you’re practically the first to know! Take a look at Sustainable-Gardening.com and send me your ideas, feedback, corrections (even typographical – especially typographical) using comments here or by email. Here on About this Site I to explain the method to my madness.
YOU’RE INCLUDED
- If you’re not already listed on my Sites and Blogs page, send me your URL and tell me where you’re located (and even a little bit about you). And naturally I’d appreciate your links back to the site so that Google will start to catch on and readers will find it. (Are links becoming the currency of our era? Hmm.)
- I’m looking for relevant blog posts on each subject to expand the conversation (there’s that Hillary word again). I could take the time to surf all your blogs, but it’s not gonna happen, so please send them along. If you’ve written about the topics I cover or any of the plants I’m writing about, I want to know. Here’s an example of what I’d like to see – only using more great links from you guys. (No surprise, it’s the page about lawns.) Let’s show off the great gardenwriting going on in the blogosphere.
- Send your favorite links and books, too.
NEWSLETTER, BLOG, COMBINATION THEREOF?
Tell me what you think. As a reader of a gardening site would you (or would beginning gardeners) sign up for a monthly newsletter by the webmaster? All the experts are insisting that sites have newsletters but on the other hand, I could bring this blog into the site and people can subscribe to its feed. I’d love your ideas.
SUSAN’S PROMOTING WEED&FEED!
Yes, that’s my darkest fear. I’ll try to monitor those Google ads but let me know if one gets by me.
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Do you have an RSS link that I am not finding? Very critical for me.
Thanks!
Douglas
Girl, you have been busy! Great site, and I’m sure you’ll attract readers and coachees with it. Nice job! By the way, I linked to your list of garden blogs.
The site looks awesome, Susan! Great work! I’ll be linking to it for sure. Regarding the whole newsletter thing, I’d say, if you’re into that kind of thing, go for it. Otherwise I’d say that directing a feed from this blog over to Sustainable Gardening will work perfectly. Just make sure you have a feed set up for Sustainable Gardening (as Douglas mentioned) because so many of us rely on our feed readers.
I’ve said it before: you rock
I’m also going to add a link, looks quite interesting and a like a good place to send someone who asks “How do I get started gardening”.
Thanks for the encouragement, everybody. And Douglas, I have a message in to my web-guy about feeds and we’ll get right on it – thanks for the tip. (I’m learning that feeds work for some readers, newsletters for others. Now does anyone need a blog on top of all that? Good question.)
Susan: I checked out your new Sustainable Gardening website. WOW! So much information and so relevant and I love that it says sustainable and not all natural or just natives even though those are major components. Takoma is linked on my site also and I will certainly link your new site. Promoting gardening aka Garden Coaching has been my life’s work and I applaud your new site! Lots of information which is practical and which will produce results!
As far as getting recognized by Google, I recommend going to Google’s webmaster site:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Click on Webmaster Tools. This will show you how to submit a sitemap to Google and monitor how the Google bots see your site. It will show you how you rank as far as key search words. And it lists outdated and non working links on your site … plus other things.
Most blogging packages like typepad should create sitemaps as part of the blog and they automatically submit blog entries to the Google bots. But if you create a webpage then you need to create your own sitemap and submit to Google. And it can be harder to get a web page indexed than a blog. Basically the bots are looking for pages that change. So if you have a website that is static … no changing content … the bots don’t come back often. Including a blog within a website should relieve that problem.
Anyways … that’s probably more than you needed to know. The new site looks great!
Take care,
Susanita … in Takoma Park
It’s been a while since I’ve visited – your site looks great! I’ve launched a brand new gardening blog – a bit of a beginner’s guide to gardening… let me know what you think! http://www.elementsintime.com/blog
I’ll add a link to your site. And good to know about the Google webmaster site – that will come in handy!
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