Hot Banana Raises the Bar for 'SEO-Friendly' Web CMS by Adding SEO and Analytics Centers

Marketers Can Now Improve Organic Search Rankings by Optimizing Web Sites for Peak Marketing Performance

New York, NY (PRWeb) April 11, 2007 -- Hot Banana Software, Inc. (www.hotbanana.com), a leader in Web content management for marketing, today announced a host of new Web site optimization features, including a unique "SEO Center" and a vendor-agnostic "Analytics Center" that helps marketers at small-to-midsize companies improve their organic rankings in search results - without IT support or deep SEO expertise.

The company made the announcement at the Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo 2007, in New York through April 12.

Web analytics and Web content management are naturally synergistic, which is why ClickTracks and Hot Banana are such a strong fit

"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," said Krista LaRiviere, general manager, Hot Banana. "Hot Banana is the most SEO-friendly Web CMS out there, not only building great Web sites, but also ensuring that they are optimized for search engines. Our SEO Center has all the key SEO tools, based upon Web standards and best practices. Combine this with the Hot Banana Analytics Center, and our clients can choose any Web analytics vendor to track, measure and quantify organic and paid keywords, and optimize the Web site to perform even better."

Hot Banana, built from the ground up as a search engine friendly Web CMS, now makes it even easier for non-technical users to increase site traffic, determine which keywords work best and fine-tune their sites for peak marketing performance.

The new SEO Center helps marketers manage SEO-friendly Web sites that are built using well written and clean code; plain English URLs, page titles and headings; h and alt tags; meta tags; robots.txt files and a keyword analyzer that shows the keyword density, frequency and weight.

The first-of-its-kind Analytics Center makes it easy to work with several pre-configured, leading Web analytics vendors, such as ClickTracks, WebTrends, Google Analytics and IndexTools. Other Web analytics vendors can be easily manually configured. Once configured Hot Banana automatically adds the analytic vendor of choice's preferred tagging code to each Web page, so marketers can easily track keyword conversions and Web site visitors. Hot Banana has also added its own lead source and conversion tracking mechanisms for Google Adwords, Yahoo! and MSN conversion tags and EmailLabs Action Tracking conversion tags.

"Web analytics and Web content management are naturally synergistic, which is why ClickTracks and Hot Banana are such a strong fit," said John Marshall, founder and CEO of ClickTracks. "Once you see how visitors interact with a page, you can make intelligent choices about improving that interaction. Hot Banana makes it easy for marketers to adopt and use Web analytics, so they can improve SEO site performance."

Hot Banana's numerous built-in SEO tools and controls enable search-engine robots to crawl deep inside Web sites, indexing practically everything. Hot Banana Web sites are all built to the W3C, XHTML and CSS Web standards that search engines prefer, with logical navigation. Marketers can update the myriad page elements that influence search rankings on the fly - even if they know little about SEO best practices.

New SEO features in Hot Banana's latest release, Version 5.5, include:

• XML Sitemap - automatically creates XML standards-compliant sitemaps and registers them with Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
• Automated Title Attributes In Hyperlinks - sets the hyperlink titles in the Rich Text Editor as the default page-title attributes for search engines. This way, if marketers use the right keywords and naming conventions when they create the content, they automatically carry these benefits over to the search engines.
• Duplicate Content Redirect 301 - automated tags tell search engines not to spider cloned and printer-friendly Web pages.

About Hot Banana Software, Inc.

Hot Banana (www.hotbanana.com) is an award-winning Web CMS that helps marketers build and manage SEO-friendly Web sites that can be automated and optimized for maximum lead generation and conversion performance. Hot Banana is available as a Software as a Service (SaaS), hosted offering or as a licensed software ColdFusion CMS, with everything an eMarketer needs, including Web site optimization and marketing automation tools. Specifically designed for small-to-midsize companies, Hot Banana has more than 200 clients worldwide.

Headquartered in Barrie, Ontario, Canada, with a U.S. office in Menlo Park, Calif., Hot Banana is a subsidiary of J.L. Halsey Corporation (OTCBB:JLHY), a leading provider of technology solutions for mid-size marketers. Halsey is also the parent company of Lyris Technologies, EmailLabs and ClickTracks.

Media Contacts:

Ken Greenberg
Edge Communications, Inc.
818/990-5001

David Terry
Vice president, Marketing, Hot Banana
705/792-3880 x. 2222

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