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Hot Banana: The Enterprise CMS

Originally launched in 1999, the Hot Banana CMS is an award-winning content management tool designed with the small to medium sized enterprise in mind.  It places a strong focus on content optimization and online marketing, but also has a broad range of basic content management capabilities, which helps it appeal to customers with varying needs.  Hot Banana is integrated with Lyris’ suite of marketing products, most notably EmailLabs, its flagship email marketing solution.  This CMS aims to satisfy three key demands: content management, website optimization and marketing automation.  If power and ease of use is something that matters for your project, then Hot Banana certainly warrants a closer look.

Website Optimization

Optimization is a key element of Hot Banana, proven by the fact that it contributes numerous resources to tracking site and campaign performance.  Its SEO tools play a key role in content creation and keyword analysis through a comprehensive editing interface and reports.  Some of the other optimization tools include affiliate tracking, metadata management, automatic Google Sitemap submission and updates, automated tagging and instant SEO-friendly output.  Analyzing your components for optimization is as simple as clicking and entering keywords into the appropriate field.  Hot Banana is one piece of software that allows you to enjoy CMS usability the way it was meant to be.

Marketing Automation

In the Hot Banana environment, marketing automation and optimization go hand in hand.  The software provides a robust web form builder that streamlines the creation of forms and management of captured data.  It also integrates with SalesForce and other popular CRM platforms as well as EmailLabs, which enables form data to be automatically migrated to customer databases.  In addition, Hot Banana aims to ensure marketing optimization with a press release manager, blog administration, and event and survey management tools.  While EmailLabs provides an open framework for integrating with other email marketing managers, Hot Banana has a nice set of default email marketing functions in its own right.

Content Management

A clean and well organized interface makes content creation a breeze with Hot Banana.  The software packs a nice selection of templates with options ranging from standard web pages and landing pages to multi-column email layouts.  From there, your page can be created using the WYSIWYG editor, which offers tools for HTML view toggling and keyword analysis directly from your browser.  Advanced metadata can be inserted via a separate table while all of your content items can be scheduled for publishing dates of your choosing.  Though Hot Banana has a user-friendly interface to work with, it actually conceals many hidden treasures beneath all the open-space, making you dig a little deeper to perform certain actions.

Conclusion

Hot Banana is geared toward small and medium sized organizations whom for marketing, branding and ease of use are essential.  The major downside to the platform is that its based on Cold Fusion, which automatically makes it a turn off for developers not familiar with the language.  Disadvantages aside, this Banana offers enough out of the box functionality to greatly benefit small teams and businesses with a strong internal focus.

Designing Your Site for SEO

A well designed site is often one that leads to effective search engine optimization.  Genuine SEO can be achieved by a solid website design that is simple to navigate.  By making your site rich with content yet easily accessible, you not only provide simple navigation for your visitors, but also the search engine spiders looking to index your site.  This approach is one that could lead to long term success at search engine marketing.  Instead of trying to buy your way to the top of the rankings and trick the complicated search engine algorithms, you should create your pages with relative keywords and quality links.  When the spiders come crawling, they will usually reward the sites with good content and easy navigation.

Understanding the Spiders

Search engine spiders or robots, are programs designed to explore the web and visit website pages.  These programs automatically read text and click their way through links to view all the pages on a site.  A search engine spider usually collects information on titles and metadata and then combs the text on the page via its source code.  Most robots function like earlier web browsers, meaning they generally do not absorb frames, Flash content or dynamic scripting, all the more reason to keep your design simple.

Drop-down boxes, web forms and other dynamic creations cannot be comprehended by a search engine spider.  The best way to ensure a visit is to use static pages constructed in HTML.  If a dynamic script such as ASP is required, there are a few ways to keep your pages attractive.  One method is to use the rewrite capabilities of your server to transform complex URLs into simple ones.  If you must use Flash to make your pages more vibrant, use it sparingly rather than building an entire page with it.  Don’t let this technology get in the way of the search engine robots or your visitors.

Building an SEO-friendly site is fairly easy for anyone with minimal development skills.  Your main focus is to eliminate all the flashy content and stick with a simple, solid architecture.  Search engine spiders have no trouble comprehending text and have a thing for text links, more commonly known as anchortext.  When keeping your visitors in mind, the design process gets much easier.  Building for the search engines will increase your visibility on the web and help to bring new prospects in.

The most important you thing need to know about SEO is that search engines are attracted to the text on your website.  The more you stay on topic with a decent amount of relative links and keywords, the better the robots will be able to digest it.  After getting the information, it is delivered to a database and eventually translated into what you get in the search engine results.

Once your site has been designed, be sure to test it out for validation.  Check behind yourself to ensure that no programming errors exist as this will keep your pages from being indexed.  By designing with clean code and quality content, you can increase your chances of ranking higher and generating targeted traffic.