I think that this is a great idea also. In fact, this could be the
beginning of some exiting stuff- Orchid participants coming together
to engage in collective marketing both on the internet and locally.
Who is willing to coordinate/facilitate this? It would help if we
had one person who agrees to serve as a central contact.
I suggest that the best/easiest way to accomplish this would be for
us to all submit our URLs, along with a one-liner blurb describing
our business, to one person who would then compile the links into a
“Links Page” which each of us could edit as appropriate for
incorporation into our websites.
I also think that we should each retain the right to /not /link to a
site if we so choose, without explanation and without hurt feelings.
FWIW, my sitebuilding skills are fairly rudimentary and I have no
experience building newsgroups, etc, but I am willing to step up if
nobody more qualified is willing to take this on.
While I am not a search engine optimization expert I have been on
the web for 7 years now with my jewelry. I designed, built and
maintain my web site. I make most of my living from the sales that I
get from my site. I have studied this area a fair amount because it
is so critical to my financial well being. I hate to say this but
links pages basically don’t do anything for your search engine
ratings. The only time that high numbers of links will help is in
the case of comparing two sites that otherwise have the same scores
for keywords and all the other things in the search engine
algorithm, then the one with the higher number of links will be
listed before the one with a lesser number of links. Otherwise it
will not move you up the ladder in any significant way.
This is not to say that a co-operative marketing plan is a bad idea
but a better way to do it is to create a portal site that leads to a
gallery of group members that then link to the group members sites.
Then the effort is to advertise the portal page. What is a portal?
Think of Yahoo that is a portal. A better example of what we might
want to do is the Guild.com site. It would require a lot more effort
than just adding a links page to your site but it would have a
chance of actually making us sales. So if there is enough interest
then such a thing could be done but the reality is it would cost in
both time and money from the participants as things like web server
charges and domain name registration charges and unless someone
with the right skills were to donate the time a web designer would
need to be hired. Anyway it is a interesting idea if there is enough
desire on the part of the group.
Jim James Binnion Metal Arts Phone (360) 756-6550 Toll Free (877) 408
7287 Fax (360) 756-2160 http://www.mokume-gane.com@James_Binnion
Member of the Better Business Bureau