How To Link To Other Websites From Your Tea Website - And How Not To

This post continues my series on best practices for tea company websites. This page is about how to link to other websites from your tea company's website. My guidelines are as follows:

• Link to a broad array of websites, picking the ones most relevant and informative; do not make your site a "dead-end" on the web.


• Link to coverage of your company in news media and reviews of your teas or business on third-party sites, including blogs, RateTea, Steepster, Teaviews, Tea Review Blog, and the like. Link to reliable, independent websites that make your business look good.


• Avoid having a "links" page, and absolutely avoid link schemes. Distribute links naturally throughout your site, where they will be most useful to your visitors, and, if you make pages that are lists or collections of links, keep them topic-focused and hand-picked for usefulness, never dependent on whether or not webmasters have linked to your site.

Link to informational websites when relevant:

One web design philosophy which I've encountered among some people, and seen manifested in some websites, is to minimize the amount of outbound links from your company's website to other websites. I do not think this is a beneficial approach. People often cite two reasons for this approach: outbound links can cause visitors to leave your site, and outbound links "cause pagerank to flow out of your website". The first rationale, in my opinion, is a valid concern, but the second is not. And the first point of concern is limited: if someone really likes your site, they are going to open links in a new window and keep your site open, or come back or bookmark it, and these are the visitors that really matter...the transient visitors who you'd lose by an outbound link are probably less valuable than the visitors who you will impress by relevant outbound links.



No one understands Google's algorithms fully. However, Google has published numerous explanations and recommendations for webmasters about how they recommend using outbound links. I recommend reading Linking out: Often it's just applying common sense for a full explanation straight from the horse's mouth.

For a brief summary, this page recommends to add thoughtful, relevant outbound links, and to choose links that show evidence of research and expertise, linking to the best resources related to your site. And, as both a webmaster and web browser/user, I agree wholeheartedly with these recommendations. I tend to trust, like, re-visit, share, and link to websites that have abundant outbound links of high-quality more than ones that have few or no outbound links, or ones that have sloppy outbound links.

Similarly, I have found that the pages on which I have put substantial effort into selecting and adding relevant outbound links tend to receive a lot of traffic, including traffic from search engines. My own data has given me a strong intuition that outbound links are likely to directly influence search rankings, and that pages with relevant, high-quality outbound links tend to rank more highly than pages with few or low-quality outbound links.

Link to third-party coverage of your company and its teas:

A large number of tea companies have on-site ratings and reviews of their teas, written by customers. Although these reviews can sometimes be helpful to repeat customers looking for information on new teas to order, they are unlikely to impress new customers. Why? For the simple reason that they are hosted on your website, so they cannot be trusted in the same way reviews hosted on third party websites like blogs, RateTea, or Steepster can be.



You may be a completely trustworthy person, and your business may be a pillar of integrity in the tea world, but your new potential customers do not know this. When they visit your website for the first time, they are likely looking for ways to assess the legitimacy of your company. To this end, anything you say about your company and your teas is going to be taken by these customers with a grain of salt. Potential customers do not know whether you are screening your reviews to only post favorable ones, or worse, posting fake reviews. Even if you're not doing anything deliberately dishonest, the reviews posted on your site are likely to come from people who already like your company, and as different people have different tastes, people are right to be cautious about giving weight to opinions presented on your own website.

Information published in third-party sources, on the other hand, is perceived as more reliable. When a tea blogger shows an established history of reviewing teas from a number of different companies, sometimes giving rave reviews, but other times, feeling more indifferent or even negative, and your company has a number of positive reviews, this counts for a lot. Similarly, when you have a blend like Rishi Tea's Masala Chai, which has three reviews on RateTea claiming that it is the person's favorite Masala Chai blend, and numerous favorable Steepster reviews, this counts for a lot.



Rishi Tea's Masala Chai has favorable ratings both on RateTea and Steepster. Both sites have multiple users claiming in the written review that it is their favorite Masala chai blend. These sorts of reviews are much more likely to convince someone to buy your tea than a review written by a customer and hosted on your own site.

Avoid having a "links" page, and absolutely avoid link schemes.

Above, I discussed the importance of having high-quality outbound links. What, then, is the problem with a dedicated links page? A generic "links" page is a sort of aimless, purposeless page. That's not to say that pages that consist mostly of lists or collections of links are not useful. For example, Tea Guy Speaks maintains a very useful tea blog list, and on RateTea there are numerous lists, such as our list of tea brands, and the page for each brand links then to the relevant company website. Usually, I only click "links" pages for one purpose--to judge or evaluate the website's legitimacy by checking to see if they are actually putting any effort into choosing their links.

A links page that shows evidence of a link scheme sends up red flags to me, and makes me highly unlikely to link to the company website. The following page is from a tea company I learned about recently, one whose teas have received glowing reviews on a number of tea blogs:



The page above, with numerous links to unrelated, low-quality websites, and no links to the high-quality, authoritative websites in the area of tea, made such a bad impression on me that it made me highly reluctant to link to the tea company website that this page is hosted on. I sincerely hope this company takes down their links page soon, because I would like to link to their page from RateTea, but am reluctant to link to websites engaging in this sort of scheme.

What is a link scheme?

A link scheme is a system or setup which intends to manipulate ranking in search engines through creating links to a certain website or collection of websites. There is a fine line of what constitutes a link scheme vs. what constitutes legitimate networking between webmasters in related areas, but I think Google explains how and where to draw the line pretty clearly in their page on Link schemes, in the Google Webmaster Tools Content Guidelines. In particular, Google identifies anything as a link scheme that:

Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you.")

Sometimes link schemes can get more complex, like the tea blog "award" scam I wrote about a while back. But either way, link schemes are best avoided, for several compelling reasons:

• Link schemes can result in search engines penalizing your website, causing it to drop in rankings, and in some cases, causing it to be banned or removed from search results entirely.


• Even if your site is not banned or penalized, link schemes, especially those that demonstrate an overt "link to us and we'll link to you" mentality, make a bad impression on webmasters, and will result in many of the most authoritative and high-traffic websites not linking to you.


• Because only low-quality websites tend to engage in link schemes, you are unlikely to get any truly valuable links by participating in them. I experimented with link schemes back when I did not know any better, and I did not once receive any quality traffic from a website that had a "link to us and we'll link to you" policy.

Rather than getting too stuck on what not to do, I want to re-emphasize the best way to include outbound links. I recommend to link to the best and most relevant tea websites, link to media coverage and websites or blogs that review or write about your company's teas, and link to relevant pages on related topics. For example, if you have pages about the health benefits of tea, you will do well to link to studies on tea, or authoritative websites that can be reliable sources backing up claims about tea and health. Distribute your links naturally throughout your website, where they will be most relevant to readers.

What do you think?

Do you think this advice given here is solid, or do you have any quibbles with it or points that you think you could improve on? Have you ever engaged in any link schemes, and if so, did they pay off in any way, or did you find any evidence that they actually harmed you? Do you react similarly to how I do when you see a link scheme? How would you handle the dilemmas that I face often, where I want to link to a company from RateTea but am reluctant to link to the site because it shows an overt link scheme?

Drinking Tea And Herbal Tea To Relax Or Reduce Anxiety: Beyond Drugs

This post is about tea and herbal tea, and the process of drinking tea or herbal teas, as it pertains to anxiety and relaxation. A little over two years ago, in my post Tea & Health: Beyond Chemistry?, I raised the question:

Could the health benefits of tea be partly due to how making and drinking tea slows you down?

That post seemed to generate a generally positive response to my question. Since then, I have researched this topic and found some conclusive evidence for this effect. You can find a lot of this work on the newly published page on RateTea about herbs and herbal teas to treat anxiety. This page describes some herbs which are known to have varying degrees of relaxing and anti-anxiety effects, but it also explores the ways in which the process of drinking herbal teas or tea can be relaxing and anxiety-reducing. In this page, which references some scientific studies published in peer-reviewed journals, backing up some of these claims, I explain how:

• The act of drinking hot fluids like tea relaxes the body.


• Merely holding a warm beverage provides an immediate change in state of mind and thoughts.


• The aroma of a cup of tea can produce an immediate relaxing effect; this has been verified scientifically in the case of some herbs, like lemon balm, as well as with jasmine tea; I do not know if this effect has been verified with any pure teas, but I suspect there are pure teas that have this sort of effect.


• Focusing on the experience of drinking a cup of tea or herbal tea can promote mindfulness, which has been shown as an effective and sustainable way to reduce anxiety.

I would not say that there is airtight science tying together all these points yet; a lot of my conclusions in that article amount to drawing conclusions by combining well-known scientific facts with slightly less scientific, but common-sense reasoning. I would like to see scientists test more of these points directly, but until now, I want to at least present the pieces of the puzzle that have been more firmly established.

What do you think?

What do you think of the conclusions that we draw in the RateTea article about the process of drinking tea or herbal teas being relaxing? Do you think the reasoning in the article is solid, or is any of it a bit more of a stretch?

Camellia japonica, Producing A Drink Like Black Tea

I recently read a post, Camellia, meet Camellia on Steph's Cup of Tea, which drew to my attention a post making black tea from your camellia japonica, by a blogger named Kelly in Adelaide Hills, Australia. In this post, Kelly explains her process of making a drink that is very similar to black tea, from the leaves of Camellia japonica.



Camellia japonica, pictured in this 1788 plate from Curtis's Botanical Magazine, is a popular landscape plant, closely related to the tea plant, but, usually cultivated for its flowers, rather than its flavor.

I've been curious about this sort of thing for some time, as I wrote about in my old post on other Camellias for tea. It was interesting to finally read an account of it. Now I'm motivated to try this with the Christmas camellia around the corner from me here; I'm waiting for it to leaf out in the spring, and I hope to try making a tea-like beverage from it as well!

Top 5 Most-Viewed Brands of Tea on RateTea

This Week's top 5 post features the brands of tea that are most viewed on RateTea. This list is not surprising to me, but it may surprise you. There's an explanation for each company in the list:

• Upton Tea Imports - Upton Tea Imports is certainly a well-known tea company, a major contender in the market, but I also think it is benefiting from the fact that it happens to be my favorite tea company. As a large portion of reviewers on RateTea are people I know personally, and I'm constantly giving people teas to sample, and I tend to have a lot of teas from Upton on hand, it makes sense that this company gets a lot of visibility on the site. My guess though is that, even without my added bias, Upton would probably still make the top 5: it's a major tea company and its teas are heavily reviewed even among users of the site that I did not know before RateTea.


• Adagio Teas - This one makes a lot of sense to me; Adagio is a top online retailer of teas, and is the tea company that has the most extensive online presence.


• Foojoy - Foojoy's presence in this list may surprise you. However, your surprise will likely vanish if I tell you that Foojoy did not have its own website until recently. But now it does...go visit Foojoy's Website if you haven't yet. This page was heavily viewed on RateTea primarily because of search traffic coming directly to the site. But its teas were also fairly heavily reviewed.


• Twinings - Twinings certainly isn't the biggest tea company in the U.S., but it's a major player, and I think its presence here makes sense because it offers a number of different varieties, in contrast to brands like Lipton that mostly sell a single blend of simple black tea.


• Tazo - Tazo is well-known, through being the official tea sold by Starbucks. But I also think that Tazo is viewed so often on here because Tazo has a flash-only website, and as I explain in that post, having a flash-only website causes them to lose search traffic, which instead arrives to RateTea, Steepster, and various tea blogs. And I'm not complaining! It's their choice, and it helps me and hurts them.

I also want to mention the runners up because, in this case, they are all quite close. In order, they are Teavana, Bigelow, Lipton, Republic of Tea, and Bromley. After that, Stash, Rishi, and then Harney and Sons, and then there is a steep drop-off.

You know what I like about this list? The top two are companies with a clear focus on loose-leaf tea. It's nice for things to turn out this way, for a change.

Tea Company Websites And Online Tea Stores: Consistent Navigation Schemes, When To Have Separate Websites

This post continues my series on best practices for tea company websites.

This post focuses on something so simple, yet very important. It's so simple that I'd think it completely ridiculous to even state it, if not for the simple fact that a surprising number of companies don't do it. The advice:

Have a single main website for your company and online tea store, with a single navigation scheme.

Going into more depth:

• Use the same header, footer, and navigation bars on different sections of your site. If you need additional toolbars or menus to navigate sub-sections of your site, add these navigation bars on top of the main toolbars, rather than creating a different one.


• Think carefully before building separate websites. Separating personal blogs of owners and employees is often a good idea (but not necessary if you're comfortable with the person's blog representing the official views of the company). Separating interactive / community websites can also be a good idea. However, separating your online store from your main company website is usually a bad idea, as it can cause you to lose sales.


• Maintain some sort of consistency in look-and-feel between sites on different domains, and draw clear attention to the relationship between your site and the other websites. This practice gives you free visibility for your brand, as well as maintaining transparency.

As with all my best practices recommendations, this advice represents my own personal opinion, based on my experience both as a webmaster and a web-savvy customer of online tea retailers. While it's not a global statement of fact, I do have reasons for feeling as I do, which I explain below.

Maintaining consistency of navigation:

I find the most illuminating explanation of why consistency is important to be what happens when you don't have it. The following screenshot shows the header on Rishi Tea's homepage:



Now, here is the header on the store section of Rishi's site:



Notice that this is a completely different header...the footer on the page, incidentally, is also completely different. This confuses viewers of the website, and also slows them down. People used to exploring the store section of the site may return to the site by typing in the URL, rishi-tea.com, only to find an unfamiliar header. Similarly, someone who wanted to click one of the links on the homepage's header may have trouble finding it once they click through to the rest of the site. In the case of Rishi Tea, because most people viewing the site will view both the homepage and the store section, most users will actually encounter this inconsistency.

I think, unless absolutely necessary, it is best to avoid this sort of inconsistency. Sometimes having different toolbars is necessary in different parts of your site, but I think that it is generally better to have a common, base toolbar that is the same on the whole site, and then add additional toolbars to other sections of the site, rather than having a completely different toolbar.

As a side note, I really like Rishi Tea and I think their website is actually quite good: easy-to-use and informative. I'm picking on them in part because I like them as a company and want to draw attention to a company that I feel good about supporting.

Do not build a separate website for your "store":

Not all tea companies sell directly through their website; some brands, like most of the tea brands owned by Unilever and other large companies, have strictly informational websites. However, most tea companies sell tea online. And, if you do sell tea online, through a company-owned online store, then by all means, sell your tea on your main website and do not build a separate site for your store.

Why? People will come preferentially to your company's main website, and you will lose sales if your store is compartmentalized in a separate section or hosted on a separate domain, and not fully integrated into your site. Many people will visit your site and may not even know that you sell things online. Here's an example of a company that separates its store in a way that I think is likely causing them to lose a lot of potential sales. The following screenshot is from the homepage of Equal Exchange, a brand of fair-trade goods that sells tea, among many other products:



Note the small menu item shop in the upper-right-hand corner. How many people are going to click, or even notice this link? A large number of people may visit the Equal Exchange website, because they know the Equal Exchange brand, but may not know that the company sells its products online. And they may visit and explore the site without ever clicking or even noticing that link. They may leave the site without ever learning that this brand sells online.

When actually clicking the "store" link, there is a completely different header:



This header draws attention to the different categories of products for sale, and the little "shopping cart" box in the upper-right hand corner makes clear that this is a retail site.

Although I certainly have not tested this, I have a strong intuition that Equal Exchange would make more sales by integrating its sites so that the sales header and shopping cart appear on all pages of the main website. And, as with Rishi, I have singled out Equal Exchange because they are a company whose mission and values I like, and who I want to support. There are so many examples of other companies, including some companies that sell nothing but tea, who have a similar setup on their websites.

When to separate different sites into different domain names?

Adagio Teas provides a compelling example of when it can be beneficial to run separate sites on separate domain names. Adagio also runs TeaChat and a variety of other sites which, while affiliated with Adagio, are really oriented towards the tea-drinking community as a whole, and not exclusively Adagio customers. In this case, I think hosting the sites on different domains is a good choice. Adagio also uses a consistent (although not identical) look-and-feel across all the sites, and has its logo and name prominently displayed on all sites. This both helps the company gain visibility for its own brand, as well as providing transparency, a win-win situation.

If you're a tea company, and you are running some other tea-oriented websites, by all means put your company's name and logo prominently on your other sites--failing to do so not only is giving up a free marketing opportunity, but risks looking a little shady, which can actually harm your image.

What do you think?

Do you think these recommendations are sound? Can you think of any caveats, or do you have any quibbles with what I say here?

Surface Area, Tea, Food, Physics: Do We Misuse The Word "Superficial"?

This post is about surface area, both as it pertains to tea, to food, and to everything about our world. In our culture, we use language in such a way that implies that, when dealing with anything, it's what's really inside that matters. Phrases like "on the surface", or the word "superficial" (which just means on the surface) are used to describe phenomena that are somehow more fleeting or transient, less reflective of true reality, and less important than things that are "deep", "on the inside", or "at the core" of something.



Diagram by Cmglee, used under CC BY-SA 3.0.

This post provides some powerful examples that demonstrate that this way of looking at things is not always valid. The world, both on a human level, and a fundamental physical level, does not always work in the way that the the word "superficial" suggests. The surface, or the boundary of a region, is often where the most interesting things are happening, and this phenomenon is widespread at all levels in our universe.

Surface and Boundary in Biology:

Anyone who has studied microbiology will undoubtedly be familiar with the cell membrane. Cell membranes, a double layer of nonpolar (oily) and polar (like water) substances creates a barrier which separates the interior of a cell from the outside world. Complex channels exist in these membranes to allow a living cell to control what passes through its walls, and structures attach to the membrane to allow it to interact with the outside world. A large portion of biological research focuses on the cell membrane or the various proteins and structures that exist within it.



Tea And Surface Area:

The surface area of tea leaf is of critical importance in determining how the tea infuses in water. The infusion of the tea's flavor and chemicals into the water happens at the surface of the leaf, so increasing the surface area will make the tea infuse more quickly.

The following is a photo of Imperial Tea Garden's Moon Swirl White Tip, a green tea from Hunan province. The complex curls and folds of the leaf provide greater surface area than the small, tightly rolled pellets suggest.



Breaking up the tea leaf increases the surface area, thus making the tea infuse faster. Finely-broken tea, like fannings and dust, have the highest surface area to volume ratio, and thus infuse fastest. On the other hand, whole-leaf tea with thick, tough leaves has the highest surface area to volume ratio, and thus infuses slowest of all, considerably slower than whole-leaf tea with thinner, more delicate leaves.

Thinking about surface area also helps us to understand the infusion behavior of flavored teas as compared to pure teas. When flavoring is added in the form of extracts or essential oils, the flavoring is added to the surface of the leaf. While some of the flavor may permeate deeper into the leaf, it is concentrated on the surface. The flavoring thus infuses very quickly. This is why flavored teas often have the strongest aroma of their "flavor" in the first infusion, and then taste more like tea in subsequent infusions.

Food, Surface Area, and Nutrition:

Surface area is relevant in food and nutrition as well. The skin of fruits and vegetables tend to be richer in vitamins, minerals, and proteins than the interior. Although not all fruit and vegetables have edible skin, the ones that do often have remarkably more nutritional value in their skin. As an example, let's look at the potato:

The USDA Nutrient Database tells us that 100 grams of baked potato skins have 4 grams of protein, 8 grams of fiber, and 39% RDA of Iron. 100 grams of baked potato flesh, on the other hand, while slightly less caloric (probably because they contain more water), only contains 2% of Iron, 2 grams of protein, and 1 gram of fiber. Baked potatos are not a good example for comparing Vitamin C content because the skin of the potato is exposed to more heat than the interior, so, although the skin is richer in Vitamin C, baked potato skins have similar vitamin C content. This is just an example. In some fruits, such as apples, the skin contains much more vitamin C by weight than the flesh. Moral of the story: don't peel your fruits and vegetables.



This blue potato has a lumpy shape, increasing its surface-area per unit volume. Buying lumpy, irregularly-shaped varieties of fruit can actually lead to better nutrition by adding more surface area. Similarly, buying small fruits also has the same effect.

Surface Area And Information in Quantum Physics:

There is some relatively recent work in quantum physics that has suggested a most peculiar result: it is possible that the amount of information that can be stored in a region of space is bounded not by its volume, but by its surface area. If you're a physicist, you can find the original paper here: Operational view of the holographic information bound, published in Physics Review D, Vol. 82, No. 12, 2010.

Doesn't it sound bizarre and counterintuitive? In other words, imagine a filing cabinet. The amount of information you can put in the cabinet depends not on the space inside the cabinet, but on the amount of area on the walls of the cabinet.

What does all this mean?

The point is...the phenomenon of the surface being more important than the inside of something, and the surface area being more important than volume for various practical reasons, is a phenomenon that appears again and again at all levels of our world: with tea, with food, with microbiology, and with the very fundamental laws of physics at the smallest possible scales.

So next time someone describes something as superficial, stop to think...maybe they're actually describing the things that really matter in life.

An About Page, And Other Navigation Pages

In case you haven't noticed, yesterday I added several more permanent or timeless pages to this blog, and a toolbar at the top. There's now an "About" page (helping me to be a little more consistent at practicing what I preach, after I wrote some time ago about the importance of having an about page), as well as a page highlighting popular posts, and a page on the series of best practices for tea company websites.



These changes are mainly because this blog has grown old enough that I think there are a lot of useful posts buried deep in the history...and I want to encourage new readers and new visitors to this blog to discover some of the better old posts out there.

If you have a blog:

If you have a blog, I'd encourage you to periodically draw attention to your older posts, especially ones that you are most passionate about, or that you think are the most informative or the best representatives of your work. I love reading this sort of stuff, so if I subscribe to your blog, and you post something of this nature, I'll be very likely to read it. Also, if you have any suggestions about what you'd like me to include in the navigation bar at the top, please let me know too!