Greetings, and welcome to the first of an occasional newsletter for the Marketplace. You are receiving this because you’ve signed up for the marketplace. I don’t plan to make this a habit, but occasionally I will reach out to our members so they know what’s going on.
First of all, we are at approximately 25 members. My goal is to eventually have thousands of members, all joined together in a federation to help each other. In effect, we are building a network of similar-intentioned people in an effort to help us all. Yes, it’s inevitable that members will compete, but as long as it’s a level playing field, I’m good with that. And I’m going to do my best to NOT do the things that Etsy and Ebay and others have done that make money for the service, but cost the business. Hence the normal $30/year fee for your profile, I promise I will not do anything to search rankings or anything else. I DO reserve the right to offer ‘featured artisan’ privileges at an additional cost, but that will in no way affect your visibility in searches or anything else.
Goals of the Nexus – SEO for all members, and Patron search capability
The three non-voodoo components of SEO are ‘rich content’, ‘backlinks’, and non-static pages. Rich contents are your profile words, the things you all wrote up to describe yourself. Backlinks are links from YOUR website to your profile, because if you have a website, I already link to your website. Profile < – > website, if YOU have a website (or a business page on FB) where you can add a link BACK to your profile page, you MUST add that link. It doesn’t have to be obvious, most members are just adding it in to the ‘ABOUT’ section. This forms a matching pair of links, which enhances your SEO score. And the third thing is non-static pages. The nexus is continually changing, so that also should enhance SEO. I also submit sitemaps to google and bing on a regular basis. AND there are things I do when building the profiles that go into search engine scores, that are invisible to you.
Patron search capability is key to the nexus. A patron comes on to the site, and can type anything in the search bar… a product… a business name… whatever they want, and matches will come up for them. Say a patron wants to know who makes tricorns? They enter tricorn in to the search bar, and any tag or description that has that word in it will come up in a list. Then they just click on the results and drill down. Simple, easy, effective.
Growing the Nexus
We need your help to grow the nexus. Its in BOTH of our interests to build this thing up. The bigger we are, the more attention the search engines will pay to us, which benefits all of us. In other words, the more, the merrier. Since I am offering 1 year of free listing for the next 175 APPROVED applications, its in your friend’s best interests to get in while they can for free.
Future
I could go on for hours about where I plan to take this, features and capabilities I want to add, but people already complain that I write too much LOL. So we’ll just save it for another time.