Archive for the ‘images’ Category

Never Limit What You Think You Can Do

Know Your Limits…

bleh. Reach beyond them

Due to changes in her school schedule, travel and time constraints our previous and wonderful yoga instructor sadly said goodbye to Community Martial Arts. Of course this left me in a conundrum. The Yoga class isn’t a huge class but has a few dedicated individuals who truly love being in the Yoga class.

I didn’t have a replacement.

But…I have done yoga for a few years personally and for several years it was a part of our training regimen for warm up before class in the adult program.

I could have said… well, this isn’t going well so we can just cut the class. But I know that there are genuine benefits to Yoga. It is extremely beneficial for so many things.

If you have never tried it before, you would be amazed at what Yoga can do for your body. Not only will you strengthen and tone your body, you will also lose weight and feel great.

A typical Yoga class involves slow gentle movements, holding postures, and finishing with a few minutes of relaxed meditation. All of which take the body gently step by step into a gradual progression of intensity and cool down. I always feel great afterwards.

As of late, I have had lots of digestive trouble. I have had to change my diet over to Vegetarianism which has seemed to do the trick. I also needed to add more exercise into my regimen. I could say that I am too busy. I could say that I don’t look like your average spunky supermodel-esque yoga instructor. It doesn’t matter. I am going to exceed my own limits and teach Yoga. You never know what you can achieve until you reach beyond yourself!

Yoga is hugely beneficial for martial artists as well! The Yoga program is a scientific sequence designed to improve martial arts and self defense movements with an emphasis on defeating the ego, your first opponent in any fight.

That is why I am giving away a HUGE SPECIAL to all my students…

Yoga is FREE FOR ONE MONTH

Just show up to classes on Monday or Wednesday at 5:30 PM

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Dances of Universal Peace Mt. Vernon

Linda Young of Mt. Vernon and Newburgh Indiana hosted Lance Sandleben to lead the Dances of Universal Peace session at Community Martial Arts Mt. Vernon.

It was a great turnout. It was fun and great to see so many turn out for our first event.

Dances of Universal Peace is a participatory community dance and are offered in a variety of ways such as ongoing evening sessions, day workshops, longer residential retreats and dance camps.]

With a repertoire of over 400 dances included themes of peace, healing of the earth, love, joy and understanding, the end goal is not for public performance but rather a celebration and welcoming diversity. Dancers focus on peace and armony while celebrating the underlying unity of all the spiritual practices of the earth.

Community Martial Arts was enjoyed being a part of this event. It was neat to see everyone genuinely enjoying themselves and appreciating each other. It really brings a sense of peace and community among the dancers. We gladly back welcome Linda and the Dances of Universal Peace community at our school.

Master Jeff Barnes

“You would have missed it in your hurry to get your web page out to the world…”

One of the magic bullets in your arsenal of web marketing comes from a fairly obvious but often overlooked piece of web page development. The secret is hidden behind images.

Images convey a feeling or perspective. It is something that we hope that our readers will find appealing or relate with. We use images to set our brand so our customers know who or what we are about. Images help break up the text and entice our customers to read further and gain more information. We want our customers to stay on our website for an extended amount of time to give us the opportunity to either get information from them or to sell something to them.

That information is probably not new to you. However, it is important that you do have images on your website because along with all the benefits of images I listed above, there is the magic bullets that I wanted to talk about.

When you start to add images to your website, I recommend the following:

Rename your images to help add search engine friendly keywords - Remember search engines ‘READ’ your website to grab all the text and information and stores it in a database. When you search for a particular query, your ranking on the search engine is partially reflected by the number of words on your webpage that match the search query. So, rename your images to match the target market you are trying to reach.

For example:

Target Market: Martial Arts Evansville
Image: A Girl Throwing a Side Kick

So when I edit the Image Tag on the web page I would rename the image to a search friendly name. I have highlighted my image name in red for you. Mind you that you really have to change the name of the image that you are using, not just changing the name in the HTML.

img style=”width: 200px; height: 200px;”
src=”martial_arts_evansville_indiana.jpg“

The second piece I add is information for alternative text in the image tag . For the longest time I never worried about filling anything in the “alt text” box that was presented to me in my favorite web editing tools. Most of the time I was in a hurry or on a deadline. This often resulted in poor search returns for my website. After implementing this secret to my websites, it has dramatically improved my search engine placement due to have a greater mix of the key words in my web page documents.

Continuing my example from above, lets add some key words into our image tag. I have highlighted the added change in red for you.

img style=”width: 200px; height: 200px;”
alt=”martial arts evansville indiana self defense karate judo“
src=”martial_arts_evansville_indiana.jpg“

Adding these quick and easy changes to your website will definitely improve your search engine performance. Take some time this week to look at your website and see where you can make these easy changes. While it will take some time to rename your images and have them reflected on your website, I guarantee the effort is well worth it.