The Work Media Internet Marketing Blog

We thought we would take the time today to talk about some online advertising methods we are either already doing or are thinking about implementing.

We are working with a mortgage lead generation business that is using Google video ads. We are running the ads on news web sites local to our target markets. Google video ads are bought on a cost per thousand impressions basis, although it's still a bid model. So far we have had limited success due to lack of sufficient impressions. We are dealing with fairly small markets, so we don't really have enough data yet to make any conclusions. Our feeling is that given enough exposure, the video ads would be very effective at both generating traffic and brand building.

We are looking into using www.turn.com. It is a CPA ("Cost per Acquisition") ad network. In other words, you determine how much you are willing to pay for the accomplishment of some kind of action - a newsletter sign up, a sale, etc. - and that is what you pay. So rather than paying for just a click to your site, you are paying for the conversion, thus eliminating risk.

We are also looking at trying out some ad networks. One that looks interesting is www.mediatraffic.com. The way Media Traffic works is that the advertiser's offer is displayed in a popup or popunder window to users who have downloaded utilities by Vomba Network. The company claims there are 7 million of these users. Advertisers bid on keywords and URLs used by the Vomba Network users. When a match is found, it triggers the ad.

If you would like help running a more sophisticated Internet marketing campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: ad networks, advertising, branding, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, marketing, web marketing, web site marketing

Knowing what hours of the day your pay-per-click ads are running and when in the day you are generating the most clicks is very useful information to know. For instance, it may be the case that your ads are not running at all part of the day because your budget is getting spent too soon. Or it may be the case that there are particular times of day when action is hottest. If you know these kinds of things, you can make adjustments to your campaigns to maximize its effectiveness by making sure that your ads are displayed when people are most actively looking for your kind of information.

Here is how to generate this kind of data for your Google AdWords campaign:

1. After logging into your Google AdWords console, click the Reports tab.

2. Click the "Create a Report Now" link.

3. Select a report type. If you are going to be looking at time of day performance at a high level (campaign or ad group), then select ad group performance or campaign performance. If you want to see more detail, such as time of day performance for a particular ad or keyword, click keyword, ad, or URL performance.

4. In the Settings section, set the "View" dropdown list to Hourly (by date) or Hourly (regardless of date), depending on whether or not you want to see aggregate data or data for individual dates.

5. Set the other necessary options, such as the date range for the report.

6. Click "Create Report".

Now you will have a report that tells you what times of day your keywords and ads perform best.

If your ads are not even being displayed throughout the day, then you might want to increase your budget. Or if there are certain times of day when your campaign performs particularly well, then you might want to set the campaign to run only during those certain hours and ramp up your campaign to show more ads during those times.

For help maximizing the effectiveness of your Google AdWords or other paid search campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, web site marketing

Imagine this scenario:

You own a construction equipment rental company. A piece of equipment being used by a construction crew somewhere across town breaks down, and they have to find a replacement as quickly as possible. Someone on the crew uses his phone or other mobile device to do a search on Google for equipment rental companies in the area. An ad for your company appears. The person with the phone clicks a button and is connected to your company instantly. You arrange to deliver the equipment the company needs. The cost of the sale to your company? A quarter.

This scenario is not that far-fetched. As mobile devices become ever more omnipresent, people are going to turn to them more and more for research purposes as well as communication. You might as well begin preparing for it.

To run mobile ads in Google, you just select the mobile ad option when setting up an ad group (you must select the "Ad Variations" tab). Mobile ads are even more sparse than standard Google text ads, as you are only given two lines of text with a maximum of either 12 or 18 characters, depending on your language. You can also have a "Call" link appear on your ads if you choose the option to allow customers to directly connect to your business via phone (and why wouldn't you?).

You can also choose to display a mobile web page to the user who clicks the ad. This is where things get a little tricky because mobile web pages are different than standard HTML pages. They are created with an alternate markup language specifically for mobile devices, such as WML or CHTML. You will need to format the page so that is displays properly on mobile devices, which means it is probably going to need to be a lot more narrow and sparse than your standard web page. When setting up the mobile ad, you select the language in which your mobile web page is written.

Currently, mobile ads can be targeted to Google users in the following countries: the U.S., the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, China, Ireland, India, Russia and Australia. You can also specify to show your ad with particular mobile phone carriers, or to all carriers.

You don't want to be the last one in your industry to be on the cutting edge by displaying your Google ads to mobile searchers. You're better off getting in before the market catches on.

For help running Google mobile ads for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: Google Adwords, internet marketing, mobile ads, mobile pay per click, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search marketing, web site marketing

Pay-per-click marketing is a fantastic way to engage in a targeted advertising campaign - this you probably already know. But what most people don't think about is what a quick and cost-effective testing ground search engine marketing is.

For example, if you sell a product that has very little actual cost of production (such as an information product), there is a price point at which you would generate the most revenue. It's probably not the lowest price you could charge, and it's probably not the highest (although it could be). It's probably somewhere in the middle. The difference between $49 and $59 could mean thousands in additional sales, but you have no idea what the right price point is until you test it.

That's where ppc comes in extremely handy. In the old days (the 90's) of direct marketing, you would have to conduct expensive sales letter campaigns to uncover such data. It took weeks and cost a considerable amount of money to run a split sales letter campaign to test two different offers. With pay-per-click, you can begin generating data today, and the cost can be as little or as much as you feel comfortable spending to find out what you need to know.

Here's how to do it:

1. Set up an ad campaign in your favorite search engine.
2. Run two or more ads for each ad group, with each ad linking to a landing page with a different offer.
3. Within a week, if your product and landing page copy is decent, you should make some sales.
4. Compare the revenue generated by each landing page. The one that generates the most revenue is probably the optimal offer.

You may want to run the test campaign for more than a week. The more data you have, the more confident you can be in your results.

This procedure can be used for any product or service.

For help using paid search engine ads to test your offers or other variables, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: advertising, internet marketing, marketing, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

There is a growing trend in online advertising toward "pay-per-action". Pay-per-action is a pricing model in which the advertiser pays a specified amount of money for the completion of some action on his web site, such as a sale or newsletter signup. There are some ad networks that have already begun selling advertising in this matter, but now Google is getting ready to enter the market, so it's about to take off.

The ads will run on Google's content network, and Google content partners can choose what ads to run. They can view advertisers' product names, descriptions, logos, defined actions and offers. Advertisers can also supply a URL and other information to give potential advertisers more information. Ads can be text, image, or text link format. The text link format is interesting because it is a simple piece of text that can be placed in-line with the publishers' other content.

The new advertising model is being rolled out over the next few months on a rolling basis, so some advertisers will be able to begin using the model very soon. We expect that high volume, high revenue advertisers will be given priority.

Another interesting aspect of the new model is that Google is now competing with affiliate marketing networks such as ClickBank. You will now be able to offer a commission to Web publishers who sell your products, which is exactly what affiliate networks do. And Google has a leg up on the affiliate networks because advertisers can now integrate pay-per-action into their Google campaigns.

We highly recommend taking advantage of pay-per-action whenever it becomes available to you. Pay-per-click greatly mitigates the risk associated with traditional advertising by only displaying your ad in front of targeted prospects. Pay-per-action takes it one step further by eliminating the remaining risk, because you only pay if the specified action actually occurs.

For help managing a pay-per-action campaign for your web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: affiliate, affiliate program, internet marketing, pay-per-action, ppa, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, web marketing, web site marketing

The bounce rate of a web page is the percentage of visitors to that page who leave your site from that page without visiting any other page on your site. This is a very important piece of information.

Most analytics software should report on the bounce rates for the pages of a site. In Google Analytics, for example, there is a report called "Entrance Bounce Rates" that is located in the "Navigational Analysis" section. It shows the number of entrances, number of bounces, and bounce rate for every page on a site that acted as an entrance point.

To start with, if the bounce rate of your home page is high, then you're in trouble. You need for people to use your front page as a starting point to explore your site. The exception is if you have a one-page site, such as a salesletter-style site. If you have a one-page site intended to accomplish some purpose such as getting newsletter signups, then a better metric to examine is the conversion rate.

The bounce rate can also help you determine the effectiveness of landing pages. For example, if you are running a pay-per-click campaign and split-testing two different landing pages, the bounce rate of each page will give you a good idea of each pages' "stickiness" (although, as always, the conversion rate is the number one measure).

Use the bounce rate of pages on your site as a gauge of how effective those pages are. Do everything you can to compel the reader of your web copy to perform some action - to visit some particular page on your site to make a purchase or fill out a form. If your bounce rate is high, then readers do not feel sufficiently comfortable or interested enough to spend more time with you. That has to be fixed. Try different things, using the bounce rate as your guide. If the bounce rate starts going down, then you're headed in the right direction.

For help tweaking your site to improve your web page bounce rates, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: analytics, bounce rates, Google Analytics, internet marketing, web site marketing

This blog has become a place where we can discuss things related to projects we are working on, sort-of spilling our experiences onto paper (or screen, more correctly). It's a chance to learn and educate at the same time. We have written a couple of Internet marketing guides, which are available on the Work Media book store page, but we are nearing the launch of our first real book effort - the Yahoo! Search Marketing Manual 2007 (tentative title). We will be attempting to push the book out using an aggressive Internet marketing plan incorporating natural search, paid search, content, and an affiliate program.

The affiliate program thing is new to us. This is our first foray into the world of affiliate marketing, so we thought it might make for another interesting topic for a series of blog posts. So for the next few weeks, while we figure this thing out, we will be making occasional posts describing what we are learning about it. And so we will continue learning while educating at the same time.

A good place to start is answering the question: just what is an affiliate program?

Wikipedia.org defines an "affiliate program" as:

a method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale provided through his/her efforts. Compensation or commission may be made based on a certain value for each Impession (CPM), click (Pay per click), registrant or new customer (Pay per lead) or (Cost Per Acquisition / CPA), sale (usually a percentage, Pay per sale or revenue share), or any combination of them.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing

There are lots of different kinds of affiliate programs, as the above definition shows. The kind that we are going to be looking at initially is paying a percentage of the net income earned on the sale of a downloadable product. This is what we will be doing with our new book.

We will likely be using the services of a company called Click Bank (http://www.clickbank.com). Click Bank describes itself as "the Internet's premier retailer for digitally delivered products." Basically, they make it possible for sellers of downloadable products to sell their products through the Click Bank network, using affiliates who are signed up with Click Bank. By becoming a Click Bank customer, we will expose our book to thousands of affiliates to sell on their own web sites. If greatly multiplies our selling ability.

I wish we had time to go into much greater detail about affiliate programs, but there is much work to be done, so we need to get to it. There is much more to tell, so come back often and we will tell you everything we learn.

For help setting up an affiliate program for your own web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: affiliate, affiliate program, internet marketing, Yahoo, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Search Marketing

is registering a domain name that incorporates the brand name of an existing company in order to capitalize on traffic that might result from owning the domain, or to sell it back to the company that actually owns the domain name. It used to be a way for a little guy to make a quick buck off a big corporation with bucks to spare. But The practice of "cybersquatting" may be coming to an end, thanks to Microsoft. Cybersquattingthose days may be over.

According to a recent article in FT.com, a British financial web site, Microsoft has begun aggressively suing companies that have registered domain names that infringe on its intellectual property. For example, it settled a lawsuit with a company in the UK called Dyslexic Domains for $46,000, which supposedly represents all of the profit the company had earned by using the domain names.

How does this affect you? Simple. Don't do it! You don't want to mess with a company like Microsoft. They have way more lawyers than you do. If you are in the business of profiting from domain traffic (such as by registering domain names that contain popular keywords), avoid the use of registered trademarks or brand names.

For you own domain name, it is fine to include keywords. In fact, you might want to register a domain with some keywords (www.keyword-keyword-keyword.com), and then also register a domain that represents your company name. Then you can do a permanent redirect from the company name-based domain to the keyword-based domain. This way, you will have a keyword-loaded domain, which can be extremely useful for SEO purposes, and a domain name that sounds better and is better for branding that you can use in other media. But avoid using the brand name of another, or you'll be asking for trouble.

For help registering a domain name for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: domain names, internet marketing, Microsoft

A recent article in MediaPost.com titled "Hiring Line: Keep Your People Happy Before Someone Else Does" touched on the fact the new media advertising industry (such as paid search) has zero unemployment and workers are very hard to find and difficult to keep. There are just not very many people with any kind of experience in this industry.

So if you are reading this and are looking for a direction for your career, we encourage you to consider search engine marketing. There are basically two paths you can take: natural search engine optimization (SEO) or paid search marketing (pay-per-click, or PPC).

SEO is the process of optimizing web pages to achieve high natural search engine rankings. There is some talk about the diminishing importance of SEO given the rise of social search (sites like technorati.com and del.icio.us), but we think it will be a while before you can disregard natural search. Look at it this way: as long as people continue continue to use computer-based search engines like Google and Yahoo, and as long as your competitors are ranked in those search engines, then you need to be an aggressive competitor and get your site to the top of the rankings.

PPC is the process of running paid search ads alongside natural search results in the search engines. As search engines continue to make it more difficult to generate natural rankings, paid search has become more and more important. It is the single most targeted form of advertising there is. You place your advertising message in front of people are looking for exactly what you have to offer. PPC now includes image ads, video ads, and various other formats. But in its most basic form, it is still the use of words to compel the reader to take some action. It's an advertisement.

SEO and PPC involve two different skill sets. Although there is an element of copywriting in both, SEO involves coding, knowing how to write clean HTML and use stylesheets for formatting, as well as a lot of manual labor in the form of generating links to a web site. PPC is more like a traditional advertising medium, although you have to be skilled at managing bids, which involves some math.

If you seriously want to get in the search engine marketing industry, we advise you to become skilled at both SEO and PPC. You will become a highly desired employee and will have no trouble finding employement (well, that partly depends on where you are - search engine jobs are not found here in the South yet like they are in other areas).

To learn SEO and PPC, you are largely on your own. There are few training courses on the subjects. The best way is to learn it is to set up a web site for yourself, get your hands on as many books on the subjects as you can, and just start experimenting.

Labels: advertising, internet marketing, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine optimization, seo, web marketing, web site marketing

Keywords are the lifeblood of your pay-per-click marketing campaigns. If you don't have a strong list of keywords, then you are going to lose quality traffic. Don't just rely on the keyword tools within the search engines for your keyword research. Here are some ways to generate keywords to try in your campaigns:

Comb your web site for keywords. Every different way you have described your business on your site is a new keyword or set of keywords.

Think from your customer's perspective. Are the words you use to describe your business really the way other people would describe it? Ask around. Whatever words people are using to search for your kind of business are the words you need to target, regardless of what terms are used in your industry.

Nichebot.com. We really like this web site. First sign up for an account. It's free to sign up. Then type a starting keyword related to your service or product in the text box at the top of the page and hit the Search button. You can change the middle dropdown list to "Overture" to get a better idea of the actual keywords people are using to search in Yahoo. But don't overlook the "Word Tracker" option, which will generate a lot of keyword data. The data will be returned with information such as the number of searches performed for each keyword, the amount of competition, and the KEI for each keyword ("KEI" is a value for the keyword based on a formula that considers the number of searches for the keyword relative to the number of directly competing web pages).

You can also look through your web logs for the search terms people have used on your web site or to find your web site.

If you sell products, you can combine brands with attributes of the products (color, width, size, etc.) to create many specific, late buying cycle keywords.

Try to think of keywords that reflect different stages of the searcher's buying cycle. Early in the buying cycle, they will be looking for more general information about your type of service or products. Later in the buying cycle, when they are much closer to making a decision and doing business, they will use more specific keywords, which might include particular brands and models, or even locations to make a purchase. Try to use keywords that cover the entire buying cycle.

And remember that you are looking for groups of keywords. Unless your campaign is very small, it is unlikely you will want to run a 1:1 ratio of keywords to ads. It will be a very unrulely number of ads to have to create and monitor. So you will be assigning ads to small groups of related keywords, and writing ad copy that applies to all of the keywords. So if you're going to run ads for "gardening", you might as well run them for "flower gardening", "spring garden", and "planting". Yahoo and MSN have some nice dynamic features that make it pretty easy to customize an ad for multiple keywords.

If you would like some help generating keywords and managing your pay-per-click campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, keyword research, keywords, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, Yahoo, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Search Marketing

Today we're going to give a quick lesson on how to set up keyword tracking with your destination URL's in your Google AdWords campaign. In Google, as in all the search engines, you want to try and use a separate URL for every keyword in your campaign, so that when you look at your stats, you can instantly see exactly what keywords are generating traffic. It used to be that Google would only allow you set up a single URL for each ad in an ad group, but not for each keyword. Now, if you know how to do it, you can set up a separate URL for each keyword. Here's how:

First you have to set up your ad group. We're not going to go through all the steps on setting up ad groups. We're glossing over that part because you can't set up the keyword URL's during the process of setting up your ad group. You have to go back and set up your URL for each keyword in a separate step.

From the Campaign Summary screen, click the name of the ad group for which you want to set up keyword tracking.

Then click the Keywords tab.

Click the checkbox next to "Keywords" on the left-hand side of the keywords table header. This will select all of the keywords.

Click the Edit Keyword Settings button (this is not the same as the "Edit Keywords" link).

On the next screen, fill in your destination URL for each keyword, which will include the keyword itself. You might want to first type a URL without the keyword, such as www.mywebsite.com?keyword=, into the first text box and then click the "V" button next to the top URL textbox to copy the URL to all the other textboxes. Then you can just go from box to box adding the keyword to the URL.

Then click "Save Changes" and you're all done.

Now when you look at your web stats, you will be able to tell what keywords generated the most traffic because you will see URL's ending in those keywords.

If you can't get Google's own conversion tracking script installed, this is a great way to generate your own data (although it won't tell you which ones actually converted into customers).

For help managing your Google AdWords campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Labels: internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, pay-per-click, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, Yahoo, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Search Marketing

I have a friend who has a vegetarian recipe web site. It's a blog in which he posts every now and then with a new recipe. He asked for some advice on generating traffic to it. My first piece of advice to him was to make more posts. For a blog to be an effective marketing vehicle, you must post often. I recommend a minimum of 3x per week. But at the very least, regardless of what business you are in, at least post once a week. That is the rock bottom minimum for your blog to be legitimate.

But while I was checking out his site, making suggestions for his title and whatnot, I decided to do a little keyword research just to see what kind of traffic there was related to vegetarian and vegan recipes. As was expected, there was a fair amount of traffic for broad terms like "vegetarian recipes". Competition for those broad phrases was also fairly stiff. But what I found interesting is that there were a lot of less trafficked terms that had much less competition.

Our primary keyword tool is Nichebot's Keyword Tracker. The main way it counts competition is the number of web pages with the keyword in the title. Search engines place much stock in web page titles. If you have a web page indexed with a specific keyword in the title that few other web pages have, that page will likely rank highly for that keyword, regardless of external factors such as the number of backlinks the site has.

So I found lots of keywords with just a few searches, but also just a few competitors. My suggestion to my friend was to use those "long-tail" keywords as the basis for future blog posts. As a hypothetical example, if our data showed that there were ten searches for the phrase "low fat vegetarian lasagna", with eight competitors listed, then a blog posted with the title "Low fat vegetarian lasagna" would have an excellent chance of generating a first page ranking.

A first page search engine ranking for a search phrase being used by a few people is way better than a page 23 ranking for a search phrase that lots of people are using. You have to think specifics. Think niches.

Think in terms of finding keywords you can dominate and serving content directed toward small pockets of people, rather than trying to compete for broad, general phrases against thousands of other web sites. Keyword research can help you find those small pockets of people.

Getting back to the vegetarian recipe example, if my friend were to use the long-tail keywords as a guide to what kinds of recipes to post, eventually he would have a large collection of blog posts (and corresponding web pages) that focused on keywords with little competition. And he would have some real nice search engine rankings to go along with it.

If you would like some help performing keyword research for your web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: blog, blog marketing, blogging, blogging advice, internet marketing, keyword research, keywords, search engine marketing, search marketing, web marketing, web site marketing

Yesterday marked out 80th blog post. We're proud of that because it really took us quite a while to get the hang of it, but we're on a roll now. If you've been reading this blog for a while, then we thank you for sticking with us. If you're new, then we thank you for helping us grow. Now onto something related to Internet marketing...

Today we're going to talk about how to use del.icio.us to promote your site. We're beginning with the assumption that you already have an account and have already installed the tool to bookmark web sites.

When you take the action of bookmarking a web site, you will have the options of typing a title, comments, and tags for the site, separated by a space. The title should incorporate the most popular search phrases people are using to search for your product or service. And it should make the reader really want to click the link. Strong copy writing skills are handy at this step. It is also a good idea to type some comments because others may read your comments before deciding whether or not to visit or bookmark the site.

Then you will type in a list of keywords your customers might use to find your web site. It would probably be a good idea to do some keyword research to find the search phrases people are using to find web sites like yours. Keyword research is a detailed topic unto itself, so we will not discuss general purpose keyword research in this document. But one good way to find keywords searchers are using is to do a search related to your business in the del.icio.us search box, then select one of the top results to inspect it to see what tags people have applied to that web site.

For example, if you search for “log cabins” in del.icio.us, the top result (at the time of this writing) has a header that starts “Log homes & log cabins from scratch –“, which is a link to a builder of log homes. Highlighted in pink next to the listing are the words “saved by 30 people”. Clicking that pink link will show you the comments people have made about the site, as well as the most common tags used for the site (on the right-side of the screen). Clicking “list” in the common tags box shows the exact number of times that each tag was used. In our example, the tag “building” was used 8 times, and the tag “loghomes” was used 5 times. The “cloud” view does the same thing, but visually rather than with numbers (heavier used tags are bigger). The term for displaying tags in this manner is a “tag cloud”. You will also notice that above the search results is a section called “Related tags” which will show you more tags related to your search.

Using the above technique will give you a good idea of the tags other people are using to bookmark web sites in your industry, which is a good way of building a list of tags for your site. We recommend bookmarking one page from your site every day, with a set of tags that apply specifically to that page. If you can get some of your co-workers, friends, employees, etc., to also do this on a regular basis, you expose your site to many more people who, hopefully, will like your site good enough to bookmark it themselves.

For help using social bookmarking sites to promote your web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: del.icio.us, internet marketing, marketing, social bookmarking, social media, web marketing, web site marketing

I have had a fair amount of experience working on optimizing web sites that were built on top of some kind of sophisticated content management systems (CMS), and my first thought is almost always the same: man, I wish they had contacted me before BEFORE building the site. The very nature of a CMS works against what you want to accomplish with your site from a search engine marketing perspective. I've said it a number of times, but it bears repeating: you want to maximize content and minimize code. Unfortunately, when you are dealing with a system that has to flexible enough to accomodate all kinds of different content of different lengths, widths, and attributes, the code to make that happen is often very poorly optimized.

But if you follow our suggestions, you will be more likely to hire a company (and a CMS) that will allow you to effectively manage your content and also rank well in the search engines:

Look at examples of code generated by the CMS for other web sites. If you don't have a strong grasp on what well-optimized code should look like, hire a search engine professional to do this for you. It will be money well-spent. If the CMS provider can't provide samples of cleanly coded web pages, move on to another company.

Ask for a list of other companies who have used the CMS. Then search for their web sites in the search engines (by industry, not by company name) to see if you can find them. If they don't appear in the search engine rankings, then that is a clue that the CMS provider creates web sites that are not search engine-friendly.

Ask the CMS vendor about search engine optimization. They will probably say things like you can insert keywords, meta descriptions, etc. That's not what you're interested in. You want to know if they really know anything about search engine optimization - listen for terms such as "keyword density", "CSS", "layers", and "optimization." Again, it may be very helpful to hire a search engine expert to take part in this conversation.

Call companies who have used the vendor's CMS and ask about their satisfaction and if they are getting much natural traffic from search engines.

If after doing the above things you don't feel very confident that the CMS will work well AND will help you establish high search engine rankings, then look elsewhere.

If you need help choosing a content management system for your web site (this needs to be done BEFORE you build your site!), call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: CMS, content, content creation, content management system, internet marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing, seo, web marketing, web site marketing