Help boost our ratings in search engines by doing your part.

I wanted to share something with all of you that I recently learned from Al. I think that it's important that I share this with you so that you understand why some things may have been edited (particularly articles and plant ID's,) or why the title may have been altered.

If I understand the way search engines work correctly, they send out web crawlers. These web crawlers look for key words and meta tags....so the shorter an article title is, the better. Another important thing regarding articles is that you NOT use abbreviations in articles. I didn't know this, but apparently it's important. So, if you're writing about elephant ears, you wouldn't want to refer to them as EE's, or brugmansias (which should probably read brugmansiae, if you want to be use the proper Latin plural,) as brugs or daffs for daffodils, or any other abbreviation.

Because the most important things that will affect our ratings in the search engines are likely articles and our Plant ID's, it is extremely important that you really make an effort to check your spelling (and the spell checker that is embedded here is woefully inadequate,) so if you need to have something spell checked, feel free to ask moderators, senior moderators or managers. You can also check with any of these people -- or me, if you want someone to review your stuff for grammar errors.....I don't want to speak for anyone else, but if they are willing to help out with this, I hope they will say so.

In general, we get very good ratings with search engines. At the moment, though, I think Al is working very hard on SEO (Search Engine Optimization,) and this is what he needs to do to boost our ratings in all the search engines. If we do our part by making sure that our articles and plant ID's are as polished as possible, we'll be doing Al a big favor and at the same time, each of us will be helping our ratings.

As far as plant ID's go, it is not necessary to indicate every single zone for which a plant of flower is hardy......It's kind of implied that if something is hardy at zone 9, or that's where you are growing it, it would also be hardy for zones 10 and 11. However, you may want to mention that something tropical that is hardy at zone 9 or higher could be grown in lower zones as a houseplant.....

I've been seeing people really go out on a limb to contribute all sorts of things to this site -- articles, blogs, Plant ID's and more....so I want to thank everyone for doing this.....Every time each of us contributes something to the site, we're doing our own little bit to make this site even better.

Please remember not to abbreviate in articles or Plant ID's....and especially not in titles. Please don't use slang in articles either. It is however, perfectly acceptable to use slang or abbreviations in blogs. The nature of a blog is such that it isn't intended to be formal writing; it's essentially someone's personal journal that just happens to be posted online rather than hand written.

I hope this clarifies why things may have been edited and why titles may have been changed. I hope that people will understand the importance of this and in the future, that each of us will be mindful of the need to pay greater attention to these details in articles and in our plant ID's.