Leather Consortium UPDATE

[JohnBarton]

Little SEO info;

LeatherWorker.net isn't likely to come up on the first page for super popular search terms like "Leather handbags" but it is absolutely PERFECT for what people call the long tail of marketing which is when people put in obscure terms like "leather blackberry case that fits on a saddle" - Maybe LW doesn't come up on the first page but maybe page two or three and suddenly someone is browsing through LW and finds a few websites they want to look at for custom leather goods.

Ecommerce on the web is ALL ABOUT page one in google. However there are a lot of businesses that are benefiting from the "long tail" just by virtue of the sheer amount of content that is on the site and cataloged by google.

I personally find the idea of a virtual leather emporium to be great. I think that there is plenty of space online for two of them. I think that if they both link to each other it will give them both a little link-juice and help them in the rankings (although some folks feel that cross-linking cancels out the link love - fine, link to me in the middle then :-)

Link Juice is the bit of "authority" that Google says defines a site when another site thinks it's worth linking to. So in theory if 100 sites link to one then that one must be important. Of course like everything else in this world it has been abused so that links from low ranked sites or "link-farms" carry little to no Link Juice.

I am totally down for seeing my product on some high visibility sites. If you have a Page Rank 5 or better site and you want to show off my product for a percentage of sales then tell me what to do. I'd really like to get some link love too.

Going to fill out my profile now. :-)

[Kustom]

Little SEO info;

LeatherWorker.net isn't likely to come up on the first page for super popular search terms like "Leather handbags" but it is absolutely PERFECT for what people call the long tail of marketing which is when people put in obscure terms like "leather blackberry case that fits on a saddle" - Maybe LW doesn't come up on the first page but maybe page two or three and suddenly someone is browsing through LW and finds a few websites they want to look at for custom leather goods.

Ecommerce on the web is ALL ABOUT page one in google. However there are a lot of businesses that are benefiting from the "long tail" just by virtue of the sheer amount of content that is on the site and cataloged by google.

I personally find the idea of a virtual leather emporium to be great. I think that there is plenty of space online for two of them. I think that if they both link to each other it will give them both a little link-juice and help them in the rankings (although some folks feel that cross-linking cancels out the link love - fine, link to me in the middle then :-)

Link Juice is the bit of "authority" that Google says defines a site when another site thinks it's worth linking to. So in theory if 100 sites link to one then that one must be important. Of course like everything else in this world it has been abused so that links from low ranked sites or "link-farms" carry little to no Link Juice.

I am totally down for seeing my product on some high visibility sites. If you have a Page Rank 5 or better site and you want to show off my product for a percentage of sales then tell me what to do. I'd really like to get some link love too.

Going to fill out my profile now. :-)

John,

I have been doing SEO/web marketing since 2001. A lot of people get caught up on back link building and page rank when in fact they need to optimize their site for the proper search terms. I checked http://www.jbcases.com/ for you and that is without a doubt why you're not getting the traffic you want.

Hope this helps,

Steve

[JohnBarton]

John,

I have been doing SEO/web marketing since 2001. A lot of people get caught up on back link building and page rank when in fact they need to optimize their site for the proper search terms. I checked http://www.jbcases.com/ for you and that is without a doubt why you're not getting the traffic you want.

Hope this helps,

Steve

Thanks. I don't actually know how much traffic I get on www.jbcases.com. I haven't tried to optimize that site at outside of the site itself. Judging by the amount of inquiries I get for custom cases 1-2 a day with conversion of about 1-2 a week I'd guess that it's getting decent traffic. I have checked my placement from time to time on certain keywords that are important to me and we are coming up on page one or two for most of them so that works.

I am not sure what terms you think I could be better optimized for on my site but I am open to suggestion. I see a couple generic ones where I should change my text a little bit to have a better shot at those. I agree with you that I should do a lot more on JB Cases to optimize it but I really have done what amounts to the barest amount of SEO a person could do short of just putting up a blank page.

Most of my customers come from AZ Billiards where I do most of my marketing.

My comments about SEO weren't supposed to indicate that I am an SEO expert. I am not. I did a lot of studying of the subject a year and a half ago and regularly read the blogs to stay somewhat abreast of the topic. This was in preparation for trying to get an office together here to help my employer get his websites better optimized. But I found that the Chinese website developers have very little understanding of SEO and the ones that do have some are way into blackhat stuff that I couldn't allow any of our top ranked websites to be involved in lest they be sand boxed.

To me SEO is somewhat of a black art anyway. I feel that one could truly do it with a certain amount of success if one were able to constantly run experiments to see what is working and what is not.

For JB Cases I need to definitely do some work on it but for now I am letting it develop naturally and just build some history.

I'd definitely recommend to everyone here that you form some sort of a co-op - perhaps under Johanna's umbrella and pay someone to do some serious SEO on an online marketplace. Get that page on top for all the best leather goods related keywords and you all will see some real revenue rolling in. I would take a small share of that since my particular goods are very specialized.

Again, thanks for looking at Jb Cases. If you freelance send me your rates to jb@jbideas.com - I might have some other business for you working on some of our other existing websites and our upcoming projects.

John

[rdb]

I don't claim to be an SEO expert either, but there are a couple of things I have learned....(and have not applied to my own website either, John...lol). I have, however applied it to many of my past sites, and worked extremely well.

It used to be keywords were THE thing to do, but the Google's searchbot algorithims (sp?),have been redesigned to not count them so much. They do, however want to find CONTENT. Can't stress that enough!!!!

First: CONTENT

No matter what keywords, method, etc, if there isn't a lot of content, the search bots, just don't care. Not only the content, but ever changing content. Bots don't like static sites. Keep adding stuff, and the bots make like bears to honey.

LW comes right up there within searches, because of the vast, and everchanging content.

Second: SPREAD THE WEALTH AROUND.

Like UKRAy does. He's got blogs, sites, ebay...everything relates to the other. See one, get the other.

SteveB impresses me...His is up there, with his social network sites, youtube, flickr...you name it, but it works. Do a search for handcrafted leather, and quickly his sites come up.

I always like these kinds of topics. It doesn't matter how they got started, but soon valuable info appears! Everyone can jump in, and add their observations...pretty soon, there's a ton to learn from. Hope this one continues, or branches out...

[Johanna]

Kate and I are ahead of you guys. We are installing a link manager to LW, and you will get more details as soon as we have all the kinks ironed out.

If anyone needs help with their web site, please PM me or Kate.

Johanna