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Hot Banana Incites Marketers to SEO with v5.5

Hot Banana Software has been popping up at conferences in North America this week showing off sleek new features of its web content management system.

Everyone loves new features, but more fascinating is Hot Banana’s ongoing focus. Hot Banana continues to position itself as a tool for marketers, rather than a run-of-the-mill Web CMS product.

At the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo 2007 in New York City, Hot Banana introduced the features in its Version 5.5 release that help optimize its CMS product for search engines and allow marketers to improve the results generated by their web pages.

As Krista LaRiviere, a general manager of Hot Banana, points out, “Web sites that rank well organically with the search engines are more valuable than those that do not, they deliver more traffic and a higher ROI for the marketer.” The new features include the SEO Center and the Analytics Center, both designed to improve search engine rankings and results tracking without significant search engine or IT expertise.

SEO Center includes all the standard tools for search engine optimization, aimed at allowing non-technical personnel to keep pages updated to stay on top of the page elements required to maintain decent search engine placement.

The Analytics Center allows Hot Banana’s users to track data from a number of web analytics vendors — such as ClickTracks, WebTrends, Google Analytics and IndexTools — to follow items such as paid keywords. Analytics Center will add tagging code from supported analytics companies to each web page.

But New York isn’t the only place Hot Banana has been marketing to the marketers. At the Gilbane conference in San Francsico, Hot Banana presented a white paper demonstrating the benefits to marketers of CMS-driven marketing systems for delivering and tracking marketing results.

For those of you interested in perusing the paper yourselves, Hot Banana’s “Strategic eMarketing: Converting Leads into Profit” requires that you register yourself as a marketing lead (eating their own dog food!).

The crux of the white paper is that poorly-organized sites and one-off marketing campaigns don’t deliver a desirable return on the investment made to create them. That’s easy enough to agree with.

The white paper then continues to argue that a CMS marketing platform allows marketing professionals to implement and measure the return from that platform by mixing CMS and lead tracking systems. Since Hot Banana offers a marketing-oriented CMS system that includes lead tracking, the white paper is unsurprisingly designed to convince you to purchase Hot Banana’s product, particularly now that you can take advantage of the version 5.5 release features.

Of course, there are other companies eager to mix marketing and CMS, but that just makes the race that much more interesting for the consumer.