A little history about how the Truly Canadian Made website began.
I have two websites. Truly Canadian Made is the newer site, and at the moment, is a directory of the sites of artists and artisans based in Canada who offer their work for sale online. There are over 500 sites listed so far, just five months from start-up.
My older site I began just over four years ago. It is content-based. I am an English tutor, with a bachelor's degree in English language structure. I offer free materials for learning English, and writing help. Everything on the site is free. There are many portals available to list my site, and I have worked hard at finding the right keywords, and getting links all over the world. My older site pulls between 20,000 and 25,000 visitors a month, from many corners of the earth.
I have been making fibre art and textile art for years, and recently began to investigate where to sell it. To my surprise, I found there were few portals for my type of art (knitting, crocheting, and sewing). Where could I list a site I would build to sell my art? I was stumped.
At the same time, I was searching for places to buy art online in Canada. I kept getting searches which returned merchants who would ship to Canada, but who were not based here. I did not want to order from outside the country, I wanted to order from someone in Canada. But the search engines failed every time to find a good selection of various types of arts and crafts in Canada.
The art directories I found online were frequently full of dead links, and in one instance, viral attacks. They were usually geographically oriented, so a country-wide result was unavailable. They were also usually dynamic, and I am a person who likes a printed list of results, something not readily available with a database which finds listings one at a time.
So, I decided to begin an arts and crafts directory for artists and artisans who were based in Canada, because I thought other shoppers were probably having the same problems I was having.
Truly Canadian Made was born in November, 2008.
As I have contacted artists and artisans I have listed, and as they have proposed their sites for me to list, I have found a very enthusiastic response to an art directory listing the web shops of Canadian artists and artisans.
This blog will provide a few pointers to those who have a visually-related site and wish to raise their internet presence in search engine results. In plain English, I will offer suggestions which have worked well for my older site to get your web page closer to the top of the search results.
