I started reading another Sitepoint book, Online Marketing Inside Out. I always enjoy reading books and emails from Sitepoint.

Click to download an excerpt from the book “Online Marketing Inside Out” by Brandon Eley & Shayne Tilley.

Press Releases

I was intrigued to learn about press releases (on page 8). I wouldn’t have thought to send out press releases, I thought it was just a thing of the past. In the book it states, “Start now! You simply cannot write too many press releases.” There are many different opportunities to send out a press release, a new service/product to announce, case study on how you helped a client, won an award, customer testimonials, and many more. Adding hyperlinks, photos, audio, video and buttons to social media facilities will further take advantage of it being online and further attracting the audience.

Modern Monitoring of Press Coverage (page 27)

When other people are writing about your company, you would want to know about it right? Monitoring what is said on the web is like keyword research, things to consider tracking are: company name, key employees’ names and phrases you want to rank well in. You can use RSS feeds, Technorati (blog search engine), Google Alerts, Trackur (social media monitoring), Twitterverse (type a word and you’ll see every time it’s been mentioned) and many more mentioned in the book to monitor online press coverage.

To learn more about online marketing you will have to purchase the book on Sitepoint.

With some experience optimizing web pages for SEO under my belt, it was great to learn more about SEO from workshops at work at Lowe’s. A company called Resolution Media came in to share their knowledge and show us how to improve our site on many different types of pages.

Resolution Media gave us a list of tips for 10 Design Best Practices for SEO, I thought it would be helpful to share. I’m sure some of this will just be overview for some of you out there.

10 Design Best Practices for SEO

1. Avoid Splash Pages because of slow loading time and no crawable text
2. Avoid Flash/Javascript menus because links aren’t crawable and they don’t pass on link popularity
3. Don’t overuse Flash, images, etc.
4. Change generic Anchor Text to be more descriptive
   • Click Here for Kitchen Appliances instead of just Click Here
5. Write informative Title Tags
   • Lowe’s Home Improvement: Buy Kitchen Cabinets, Paint, Appliances and Flooring instead of just Lowe’s Home Improvement
6. Describe images with detailed ALT tags
7. Use CSS to give spider cleaner code to crawl
8. Avoid embedding CSS/Javascript
9. Use Header Tags for
10. If you use Flash/Javascript, utilize Progressive Enhancement

Lowe’s launched the new holiday design today. See images below of the design for the new homepage. (Click images to see a larger version.)

The homepage becomes interactive.

It’s almost a complete redesign of the entire site. Notice how the background is no longer blue? Just to remind you what it looked like before, see the image below:

The left navigation was removed to allow for more space in the design and I think it makes it less busy. There is definitely more of a warm homey feel to the new design with the warm tan background and subtle areas of red and other fall colors. It introduces Christmas, but without it being too overpowering since it is only October.

Check out the site for yourself before the design changes: www.lowes.com.