The lovely ladies over at NMB are expanding their families, which means less time for running their fabulous Eco-driven baby store. Check out their store here http://www.newbornmom.com/ and email them at info@newbornmom.com if you’re interested. They’ve got a great rep, fantastic products, amazing press – they’ve done all of the legwork for you…now it’s up to you to keep it going!
Here are a few more sites that we’ve launched over the last year or so since I started slacking on posting our launches!
The lovely ladies over at Lovemore not only have amazing products, but they have amazing spirits. They’re out to inspire the world – one person at a time. Check out the love at chooselovemore.com.
Pebble is a earth-centric baby boutique in Vancouver, BC. They hand pick high quality, earth friendly products for babies and kids. With their sense of style and love for the earth, how could you not fall in love? Just a stone’s throw to pebblebaby.com.
Mulberry toys is run by former teachers and they carry a wide variety of toys that inspire creativity and learning. Each product has teacher tips to help you teach your kids while you play with that toy. They must know how much we love multitasking. Chase the weasel ’round mulberrytoys.com.
MomsBFit is a San Diego company run by a personal trainer who will come to you to help you get back in shape after you have that baby. She knows how hard it is to get out of the house while you adjust to having a baby to hit the gym, so how perfect to have someone come to your house to help you. She even sends text updates for your daily workouts. Work it on over to momsbfit.com.
Emily Green is a company that thrives on imagination. Featuring hand painted designs on melamine and place mats, these goodies are sure to make dinnertime more fun than it’s ever been. You can even get “doodle sticks”, which are Emily’s brand of washable markers to doodle on the back of your place mat while you wait on Mom to finish cooking dinner. Genius! Emilygreen.com
Girly Girl is a build-your-own handbag company out of New York. They do home parties too, you can become a consultant or just host one at your house for a girl’s night with a consultant in your area. Go shopping at www.girlygirlstudio.com.
Here’s a roundup of the first 5 backlogged launched sites, starting the furthest back.
My KidsQuarters is a Canadian company making custom goodies for kids. They have beautiful products, check them out at www.mykidsquarters.com
Squeezehugs carries fantastic designer items for kids. Monique has impeccable taste and is a whiz at choosing the best items for her shop, so rest assured you’re going to find something you love here. Shop it up at www.squeezehugs.com.
Party with Heart is just as inspiring as it sounds. Beth started the company as a way to provide products that help others through every purchase. Make sure you check them out for your next gift purchase at www.partywithheart.com
Cynthia started Nia Design as she was making incredible apparel sets for babies and kids. She’s got adorable personalized designs – go shopping at www.shopniadesign.com.
Sunbusters has the coolest SPF bathing suit sets! I could seriously deck both of my kids out in some sunbusters gear and they would look stylish AND keep their skin safe. You just can’t beat that. Get a jump on this summer’s bathing suit season – head over to www.sunbusterskids.com.
So I just tallied up 20 site launches that we didn’t announce here on the blog. I’m officially the biggest slacker ever! Over the next few weeks, we’ll be going back through announcing everything that we haven’t since…well…almost a year ago. Ouch! So, hold on to your butts, because here comes the avalanche!
Make this simple! If not, you’re missing an opportunity to get your potential client to absorb every corner of your web existence. Also, you may lose people if they get to one site or the other and can’t get back where they were.
Enable your sidebars for the following reasons:
*add your contact information
*your blog roll
*your blog categories
I know you don’t do this because you want to have gimongous pictures on your page, we’ll get to that in a minute.
You want this sidebar because it helps people find what they’re looking for, and it can help your SEO. Make categories for your posts that are search engine friendly. Say you like to shoot at a certain park, you could create a category for that park. Say I live in that area and love that park, if I google it you’re likely to show up as you have a category with this name in your blog. You can use tags the same way, just make sure that they’re accessible on every page via the sidebar.
Your blogroll we already discussed, but again I’ll say that it’s a great way for you to network and gives you an opportunity to swap a link with another blog.
Sticking this all at the bottom of the page isn’t going to be as effective as using a sidebar – no one is going to be looking at the bottom of the page, so no one is going to be using the functionality. Also, the further down the page the information is, the less relevant for google.
I know that you really want to show big honkin pictures because, well, you’re a photographer and that’s your work! The bigger, the better – it’s easier to absorb that way. The problem is that it’s just too darn big. Your giant 27” mac monitor is way larger than the average user, so even though it looks awesome on your screen, most average users won’t be able to see an entire picture in one screen. This is a huge disservice to you, because if you think it’s bad to have your photos a little smaller – it’s way worse if they can’t even see the entire picture without scrolling.
20-30% of all users are on 1024×768 screens. That means that your pictures really shouldn’t be any taller than 600. When you factor in the space for the toolbar at the bottom of the screen and the url/toolbar at the top of the window, you don’t have much space left, so make it count.
I’m assuming you’re already using this, but if you’re not – you can install it in your admin of your wordpress. Here are some tips to using it right:
*Each blog post should have a unique meta title, specific to the subject matter of the post.
*Go ahead and give it a unique description. This isn’t going to help you out a ton, but could hurt you if you’re entering in duplicate content every time.
*You don’t have to enter in keywords. Google used keywords many many moons ago, but now they rely on content instead. Keywords don’t count. Just in case you don’t believe me, here’s a link: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
Navigate to Settings > All in one SEO
*Make sure you’ve entered in a home title and description.
*Check canonical URL’s and rewrite titles. (this will make your url’s be search engine friendly)
*Leave the noindex options unchecked.
*Check Autogenerate Descriptions
Make sure that all of your categories have a slug using hyphens to separate words that’s descriptive of what’s inside the category.
What not to do:
Category title: Fun parks
Category slug: fun-parks
What to do:
Category title: Fun Parks
Category slug: park-photography-san-diego
This will make the url for this category yourdomain.com/park-photography-san-diego which reads like keywords to google.
Hopefully you’ve discovered a few tips here that can help you optimize your blog. Make sure you have a stat counter installed on your blog (I love getclicky.com), and watch how making changes on your blog will start to effect your traffic results very quickly. Let us know how it works for you and if you need any help, don’t hesitate to ask.
get going. jump on the train, gang.
