While organic SEO in itself boils down to a few simple techniques and a lot of hard work, most tedious of those is always adding and managing content. If you're a webmaster lost in a world of dead links, missing pages, distorted images and a site structure that beats any maze, you're not alone. Such is nightmare that many Dreamveawer-and-Notepad type of webmasters hide.

What is CMS?

CMS, or Content Management Systems, is a great alternative to using manual WYSIWYG HTML editors, website builders, and all others kinds of expensive website tools in market. CMS applied solely to purpose of creating and managing websites are also knows as Web Management Systems. A short excerpt from StepTwo.com on definitions of CMS:

" A content management system (CMS) supports creation, management, distribution, publishing, and discovery of corporate information. It covers complete lifecycle of pages on your site, from providing simple tools to create content, through to publishing, and finally to archiving. It also provides ability to manage structure of site, appearance of published pages, and navigation provided to users."

Advantages Of Using CMS for Your Website

Here are a few often overlooked advantages of using CMS for your web project, from a search engine marketing point of view:

1) Easily Create, Publish and Manage Content

With page editors that resemble a word processor program, adding content with a CMS interface is simple and fun. Most CMS software also allows you to change location of your content pages and links easily, while back end processes takes care of updating links throughout your site.

Done manually, reorganizing a website's content, particularly a large one, can cause a webmaster some pretty restless nights.

The Internet is vast...truly vast. It is comprised of, at last count, over 8-billion web pages and that number increases daily. People need a map to chart this unimaginably large landscapes and search engines are maps. SEO provides pointers to your business on maps; rebuilding your website does not.

If you understand following statement, then decision is very easy to make - in order to become visible to their second audience (the visitors), websites must first receive adequate top rankings (the first two pages of listing results) by their first audience (the search engines).

Search engine optimization Search engine optimization is probably single most important marketing technique that a website owner can do to increase visibility and visitors. Greater visibility and highly targeted visitors improve sales, which in turn, improves bottom-line.

Numerous studies have proven just how important SEO is for online businesses: -50% of those who bought from online retail sites arrived via search engines (Aggrandise.com, 2002). -Between 85 and 90% of people use search engines to find websites they've never visited before. -The Financial Times reported August 2002, that every day over 340-million web users rely on search engines to locate new businesses (DISC). -57% of Internet users search web each day, making search second most popular Internet activity next to checking email (81%) (DISC).

Studies have also proven that SEO has best return on investment (ROI) of any form of advertising in terms of cost-per-acquisition (CPA). Savvy website owners who realize just how fierce competition on Internet is use SEO to position their business ahead of their competitors. If you are not incorporating SEO as part of a website marketing/promotion strategy you are losing out, because your competition mostly likely is!

If done properly, results from SEO are very impressive. One of our long time clients in printing industry has been operating same site for almost five years. Instead of rebuilding their website which has a very simple design, they decided to perform SEO. That same site now delivers so much business that SEO is only form of sales and marketing they use (both online and offline). Another client now does as much business in one day as it used to in seven. And this client originally wanted to rebuild their site first. And to this day, site is still same except for some minor regular updates. In past, client did a lot of print advertising, but because of great SEO results, they have cut their advertising costs in half and achieved sales growth of 700%! For more great examples, read case studies on Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) website.