Local Florists and Flower Blogs

Sad to say that most real local florists have been slow to embrace the world of weblogs (me included). 

First, there's the time factor. We're generally busy dealing with a concoction of responsibilities that marry artistry with perishable products (flowers), transportation issues (delivery) and deadlines (the birthday's today!) amid an atmosphere akin to a kitchen full of short order cooks.

Then, there's the tech factor. Let's face it - there's a significant group of flower shop owners still challenged with transmitting faxes.  The most experienced floral artists and designers are generally the least adept at surfing the web, let alone creating content for it. 

All this has lead to a www landscape full of florist and flowers splogs - junk blog sites full of repeated keywords, redundant content and useless pages created to goose the rankings primarily for affiliate resellers of the wire service products from companies like FTD and Teleflora. The affiliates don't make or deliver flower arrangements, they just sell them, earning hefty commissions and service charges in the process, and then pass the orders along for real local florists to make and deliver.  Some of the worst splogs target specific cities or geographic areas in attempts to make their related affiliates appear like local florists in those towns. 

You may never run into one of these types of sites, but every day surfers are presented with misleading and/or poor search engine results from the linking efforts of these skilled webmaster-merchants of garbage flower content.

It will be a slow process, but a small and growing group of we real florists are working to provide real information about the world of local florists, floral design and consumer care of flowers to add worthwhile reading to the millions of consumers interested in the topics.

Today, I signed up for a Technorati Profile to be able to help tag more relevant content about florists and flowers.  From the looks of things over there, the florist tagging could use some help.

Comment Notification

If you would like to receive an email when updates are made to this post, please register here

Subscribe to this post's comments using RSS