CFDJ: How is the recently announced WebTrends strategic alliance working for you and your customers?

KL: The Hot Banana / WebTrends technology partnership is working very well for us and has attracted a lot of attention in our industry as we were the first to announce the actual convergence of Web Content Management and Web Analytics technologies.

We’ve been fully integrated with WebTrends for over a year and it’s apparent that Web Analytics is an essential ‘must have tool’ and an integral part of Web Content Management. Web Analytics significantly adds to the understanding of visitor behavior and in turn helps to improve and optimize the performance of the Web site enabling business users to use all the analytics tools without outside IT help.

What we’ve found from our clients is that the combined, streamlined approach offered by Hot Banana and WebTrends enables marketers to take full advantage of actionable information on Web site visitor behavior and marketing campaign effectiveness. Marketers can immediately leverage those insights by making on-the-fly changes to the Web site content and marketing programs, improve their SEO process, email, banner ads, or offline campaign results.

This is a significant step forward for integrated online marketing.

CFDJ: You mention that Content Management Systems are not always good at search optimization? What is it that makes your CMS good at this?

KL: Many Web Content Management vendors have built their technology from a technical user perspective and therefore search engines find them clunky and difficult to search. Hot Banana on the other hand, has been designed with a marketing user perspective making search engine optimization mission critical.

What we mean by Hot Banana being search engine friendly, is that by following W3C standards, using XHTML and CSS to design a Web site – the mark-up code can be very efficient, light and clean.

Clean code, great design and a directory and file structure optimized and SEO ready are some of the fundamental attributes of what an SEO friendly Web site should be. With this, search engine spiders and robots will be able to find the site and easily navigate around and go deep, but will they like what they find for indexing?

Therefore, non-technical content providers need to easily control all the SEO attributes at a Web page level and for the Web site itself. This means that being able to control page titles, meta tags, heading tags (H1), content, alt attributes on links and images, internal and external linking, allows anyone to efficiently work the SEO process.

We have even provided a keyword phrase analyzer tool that is very simple to use and provides a reading on how well you have optimized the copy on the page based on a particular keyword phrase.

CFDJ: On a scale of 1-10, how important is good search optimization for online publishers? Does this importance vary depending on the type of company deploying a CMS? Would you say this is a mission-critical functionality these days?

KL: Yes, SEO is mission critical for all organizations and scores a 10. We believe it’s a fundamental requirement to do it well. The bottom line is if you are investing in a CMS and good content and you want people to read your content – then you must make it as easy as possible to find it.

Even if you’re a not-for-profit, association or government organization, people will be searching for your information, and you need them to easily find your organization online.