Resources for Tea Companies

RateTea is committed to promoting tea drinking and encouraging tea drinkers to explore new teas and take their level of understanding and appreciation of tea to new levels of sophistication. In addition, we are committed to making tea drinkers aware of issues of sustainability and fair trade as they pertain to tea. We are eager to work together with tea companies to achieve these goals.

Ways we can help you: Links to your website and product pages Visibility for your brand name, logo, and individual teas Free Promotion of your company and its teas through our use of Facebook, Twitter, and other means. We are especially interested in highlighting companies promoting sustainability. Data and Analysis to gain valuable insight into people's preferences for your teas. Guidance in how to structure your website to effectively market your teas. Let your customers know about us! This will encourage them to rate and review your teas, which will increase your visibility on RateTea and help new people learn about you! On the right, we have graphics you can use to link to your company listing or individual teas.

Graphics for Your Website: Universal Links: You may use these graphics to link to us, subject to the following conditions: You must host the image(s) on your own website. You may resize the images, but if you wish to modify them in any other way, you must obtain our permission first. Let us know if you would like a picture in dimensions or a style that we do not offer. The image must contain an active link to RateTea. It may link anywhere on our site. We recommend linking to the listing for your company, and linking the listing for each of your individual teas to the page for that tea on RateTea. If you allow spiders to crawl your page, you must allow them to follow the link (i.e. no "nofollow" attribute). Posting on private or non-crawled pages is fine. If you would like more or different graphics, let us know!

If you want want your company listed:

1. Sign up for an account.
2. Suggest your company on the "brands" page if it is not already listed.

OR you can simply contact us using the link at the top.

We encourage, but do not require you to link to our website. Linking to our site will encourage your customers to rate your teas!

We lists brands of tea at our discretion, and we reserve the right to refrain from listing any brand for any reason. We do not list companies that sell or resell other brands of tea unless these companies have a brand of their own.

Recommendations for your Website:

We want to help tea companies to succeed. The best practices for web design that we recommend will help you not just in terms of visibility on this site, but will make it easy for others to share and link to your pages. This will make it more likely for people to locate your website in search engines.

• Make your website easily navigable without java or flash player. Not only is this good practice as it makes your website accessible to all, and helps search engines to find and index your pages, but we will not link to pages that are flash-only, and we avoid when possible linking to pages that are image-only. Using flash player to add additional interactive or multimedia content to a website that can be easily navigated without flash is fine.
• Make an individual page for each tea you offer. If you have such pages, we will link the page for each tea back to your official product page. If such pages are not available, instead we will link back to whatever page(s) we can find on your website that offers the most information about that tea.
• Use simple, intuitive product URL's. For examaple, yourdomain.com/teas/makaibari-estate-first-flush-darjeeling is more descriptive than yourdomain.com/products.php?product_id=2318731
• Do not change your URL scheme, even if you redesign your site. If you do change your URL scheme, use redirects to send traffic from old URL's to the new ones. If you change your URL scheme without using redirects, all existing links on the internet will become broken, causing you to miss out on valuable traffic; the loss of links to your site can also cause your site to perform poorly in search engines. Use as specific a redirect as possible, rather than just redirecting to the homepage.
• Allow all users to view all possible regional websites or products. This is an issue primarily for large companies that have different products sold in different countries or regions. While it can be useful to use IP addresses to guess the region of your site's visitors, allow each user to specify their region or navigate to the websites for other regions. Users in one region may wish to view what products are available in other regions, so if you force these users by a redirect to another site, you may keep them from viewing the material they want to view. Ultimately, you want people to view your sites as much as possible, so allow them to look at whatever they want.

Interested in Sustainability?

So are we! If you are doing something to promote sustainability, please let us know so we can mention it on our listing. We want to highlight practices that tea companies are undertaking to promote sustainability, in order to encourage all companies to move in this direction.

Make sure to abide by our terms of use:

In particular:

• If you or someone in your immediate family is employed by or has an interest in such a company, you agree to refrain from rating this company's teas.