Or… how does this all work, and why
There are two goals to this Marketplace. The first is to promote artisans, entertainers/performers, and service providers in a central, easy-to-use location. Patrons/Promoters/whoever can come into the Marketplace, search for products that match what they are looking for, and find profiles for artisans that sell those items. Or a promoter comes into the site and wants to find an family act involving lemurs and Capuchin monkeys. They can easily drill down into acts that do that in a matter of minutes.
In any case, the profile is the heart of the site. Each member is encouraged to do a write-up on who they are, what they do, where they can be found etc (we call that ‘rich content’). And provide links to things like other websites, online stores, facebook/etsy/ebay or whatever. And they are encouraged to use those other platforms to link back to their profile (we call those backlinks).
Which brings us to the words for nerds part. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is essential to being found on the internet. The higher you rank in the search results, the more likely you are to be found. Now, SEO is almost like magic. Its an extremely complicated topic, but we do know some techniques that can boost both the marketplace’s SEO scores, and YOUR SEO scores as well. We take full advantage of all available SEO techniques to attempt to boost EVERYONE’s rankings in the various search engines.