I wanted to take a minute to discuss the various tools available. Which tools should you have? How should you use them? And what do you get for your investment? Let's start with content management (CMS). This is not an area where you want to pinch pennies. Your web content is the life blood of your web presence. Your CMS should allow you to edit textual content in every area of your site. This is important, because changing text placement and content has a dramatic effect on your search optimization and marketing effectiveness. It should be easy to create links within the site, as well as create, delete, and modify menu items. Finally (and this is a big one), your CMS should have powerful and versatile image tools that allow you to easily link pictures, resize, and ad alt image tags.
It's impossible for me to talk about a CMS without mentioning search engine optimization. Google indexes all the content on your site, so every time you update content it tends to help. But, in addition to content a CMS 'power tool' should allow you to easily customize your meta data, meta keywords, title tags, as well as the aforementioned alt image tags. Your CMS should also allow RSS feeds, and allow you to create a 'call to action page' such as a 'request a demo' or 'quote' page. Getting visitors to this page is the #1 reason you paid for someone to design the site for you, so it's important that it's done right.
The most powerful weapon in the savvy marketer's arsenal is their blog tool. Again, it's important that you get this right. Take a look on the right side of this page. Those are categories. Each of those categories catalogues blog entries relevant to that topic and each one is associated with its own URL which is updated dynamically each time a new post is added. This means that by writing this post I am updating many other URL's. This is a very very good thing for my search marketing campaign. The point is that there are tons of web tools out there, but not many 'web power tools.' We've all got budgets to work with, so spend your money wisely. Make sure you're getting the most marketing bang for your marketing buck.
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