"We at Kentico are fully driven to deliver the most comprehensive, reliable and fully customizable web content management system,” says Eric Webb, President of Sales & Operations at Kentico Software, LLC. “Moonstone Interactive has demonstrated itself as an expert for Kentico CMS implementation.” Moonstone Interactive has attained this distinction by proving its effectiveness in implementing Kentico CMS on several websites.

"Our focus is providing business effective websites and related online marketing solutions. Kentico has proven to be a great value for our clients; easy to use, robust features, great support and cost effective." says Stephen M. Herz, President at Moonstone Interactive.

About Kentico CMS
Kentico CMS is an affordable Web Content Management and Customer Experience Management solution providing a complete set of features for building websites, community sites, intranets and on-line stores on the Microsoft ASP.NET platform. It supports WYSIWYG editing, workflows, multiple languages, full-text search, SEO, on-line forms, image galleries, forums, groups, blogs, polls, media libraries and is shipped with 250+ configurable Web parts. It’s currently used by more than 12,000 websites in 84 countries. The clients include Microsoft, McDonald's, Vodafone, O2, Brussels Airlines, Mazda, Ford, Subaru, Samsung, Gibson, ESPN, Guinness, DKNY, Abbott Labs, Medibank, Ireland.ie and others. Kentico CMS is available at http://www.kentico.com and is delivered through an extensive network of solution partners, like Moonstone Interactive.

About Moonstone Interactive
Moonstone Interactive, Inc., headquartered in the San Francisco Bay area, is a leader in delivering integrated online marketing and website solutions that help their clients improve business results. Moonstone has a team of specialists that provide all dimensions of a comprehensive online presence including; online marketing strategy, search engine optimization (SEO), Pay per Click Campaigns, Directory and Link Placement, Social Media Campaigns, Web Site Design, Web Site Development, Content Management Systems, Ecommerce solutions, custom online applications, database architecture, website maintenance, website analytics and performance reporting. We've found that our proven approach of addressing ROI fundamentals increases our clients' bottom lines. Moonstone has been serving its clients since 1996. For more information, please visit www.msinteractive.com.

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The evaluation process which topseos.com utilizes to evaluate online marketing companies has been used to benchmark various web design companies based on the work they provide, the satisfaction obtained from their customers, and how the design has affected the overall business of their clients. Moonstone Interactive has achieved their rank as a result of this evaluation process which delves into various aspects of evaluation.

A dedicated team of researchers spent time evaluating each company using a set of evaluation criteria which cover the most important aspects of web design services based on proprietary research. This set of evaluation criteria includes the following areas of evaluation: Navigation, Visual Appeal, Compliant Code, Consistency, and Download Time. Since 2002, topseos.com has worked to improve the evaluation process to ensure the best companies are included in the evaluation, providing an accurate depiction of service providers who offer solutions which benefit their customers in numerous aspects ranging from their visual appeal to their online marketing efforts.

Moonstone Interactive has been found to exhibit strong marks across all five verticals of the evaluation while also offering a strong level of customer satisfaction. topseos.com connects with three or more customer references for each web design agency interested in the evaluation to ensure that customers appreciate the services provided by each of the service providers. Moonstone Interactive’s customers were vocal about the benefits they received from a professional website design.

Companies listed as a top service provide in web design are companies who have proven to topseos.com their competency in providing professional web design services. Each web design firm has a history of success and customer satisfaction which offer their customers peace of mind and comfort in knowing that a team of professionals are creating a design which will appeal to their target audience. Those looking for a web design service which matches their ambitions should consider Moonstone Interactive for their professional web design services.

ABOUT topseos.com

topseos.com is a well-known independent authority on search vendors. Established in 2002, the goal of topseos.com is to recognize and rank those individuals or companies providing the best online marketing services all over the world. A specialized team of researchers examine thousands of applicants each month who are seeking to be ranked as a top internet marketing service provider by the independent authority. This website is being visited daily by thousands of visitors all over the world looking for the best services available. The website also provides various types of facilities other than the independent rankings which provide useful information to customers and providers of online marketing services.

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The office will be managed by Christopher Laurance. His previous experience includes; Managing Director, SVP for Y&R, SVP for Grey Advertising, Team Manager for FedEx and various CMO and Chief Strategists positions.

"We are very excited about having Christopher head our office", Steve Herz said. His background and network will help us in our b2b and b2c efforts. As an expert in Augmented Reality, Mobile and traditional digital development, Christopher fits perfectly into our own strengths and offerings.

Moonstone Interactive is committed to making certain that basics such as ROI and proper Lead Generation tools are in place for our clients. Although we are experts in both online marketing including SEO, Pay-per-Click advertising, Social Media, Email and Mobile campaigns, and custom website design and development. We've found that our proven approach of addressing ROI fundamentals increases our clients' bottom lines.

The new Moonstone Interactive, Inc. office is located at 101 Hodencamp, Suite 114, Thousand Oaks, CA 91360.

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-- Consider your target customers and whether they go online to make buying decisions. For instance, pay per click often works better for consumer sales than for business-to-business sales.

"If someone is an office manager looking to put a new phone system into their high-rise building, they\'re not going to be looking on Google," said Lael Sturm, an online marketing consultant with LPS Solutions in San Francisco. "They\'re more likely to have a network they draw upon or someone who has come in and given them a business card."

-- Design your Web site to include specific actions that customers can take. This might be online shopping, signing up for a company newsletter, downloading a coupon or filling out an electronic form asking for more information. But unless you give visitors the opportunity to take specific actions, you won\'t have any way to find out if you are getting a decent return on your investment.

"If you don\'t have a Web site with a \'call to action,\' pay per click is not for you," said Jennifer Laycock, editor in chief of the Search Engine Guide Web site.

-- Send visitors to the right page. If an ad appears in response to a search for "silver charm bracelet," the link should take viewers to a charm bracelet page, not a page about jewelry in general. You may need different landing pages for different ads.

-- Understand how many sales you must generate to make pay-per-click advertising profitable, and how much you can afford to pay for each click.

Suppose you\'re paying $1 per click, and 1 click out of every 50 turns into a sale. That means you\'re spending $50 for each sale. That could be worthwhile if you\'re selling laptop computers for $1,000. But it\'s a recipe for disaster if you\'re selling handcrafted note cards at $30 a box.

-- Start small. Begin with a handful of keywords so you can track which phrases and ad wordings are more successful. "Start with 25 keywords, because until you figure out what you\'re doing, you\'re going to be overwhelmed by more than that," Laycock said.

-- Choose narrow rather than broad keyword phrases -- "German chocolate cake" rather than "cake." This will help you in two ways. There will probably be fewer bidders for narrower phrases, so the cost-per-click may be less. And narrower phrases will attract customers who are more likely to buy.

"It comes down not to how many clicks you get, but how did those clicks convert to sales?" said Stephen Herz of Moonstone Interactive, an online marketing firm in San Ramon. "The person who types in \'restaurant\' is probably looking around and not very hungry. But the person who types \'classic Mexican restaurant in Alameda, California\' is probably on their way out the door. They know what they want to eat and, by God, they\'re hungry. They will probably convert (to a sale) better and cost a lot less."

-- If your business has a local focus, avoid clicks from people elsewhere. For instance, a San Francisco plumber who buys the keywords "licensed plumber" could end up paying for useless clicks from homeowners with busted pipes in Texas.

Some search engines allow you to specify the geographic area from which you want to receive clicks. Another approach is to use geographical terms in the text of your ad, such as "Expert plumbing service for Bay Area homeowners." That would presumably stop some of those Texas homeowners from clicking on your ad and eating up your ad budget.

-- Limit your ads to search-result pages, rather than content pages, at least when you\'re starting out. Suppose you own a Thai restaurant. You\'ll get better results from advertising on a search page where people are actively looking for "Thai food Oakland," than from advertising on a page about the history and culture of Thailand.

-- Aim for the top -- but not the very top. You\'ll get more clicks if your ad is one of the top three listed on the page. But you don\'t need to be No. 1.

Sturm tells his clients that the best place to be is the No. 3 slot, which often costs a lot less than the top two but still has high visibility.

-- Analyze your results -- and keep analyzing them. Google offers a free program called Google Analytics that allows you to track which keywords and ads bring the most visitors to your site, along with how many of your visitors convert to customers. (There are paid programs to do that also.)

Use this information to refine your choice of keywords, headlines and ad text. Keep tinkering and monitoring the results.

"One keyword might be losing money, one breaking even, and one might be where all your profit comes in," said Laycock.

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The Animal Nanny is one of a growing number of low-tech small businesses that are experimenting with a high-tech form of marketing -- pay-per-click or paid search advertising.

Pay-per-click advertising can take a lot of time to figure out and implement well -- more time than many small businesses have.

But if done right, experts say, it can be a great tool for small businesses because of its low cost and tailored reach.

"You can compete with the big guys and not break your bank," said Laura Betterly, an online marketing consultant with the In Touch Media Group in Florida.

Terri Mayall, a Santa Cruz real estate agent, agrees. Mayall started pay-per-click advertising about two years ago, and now generates one-quarter of her home sales from ads that cost just $200 per month.

"When you consider all the other money I spend on advertising, this is real bang for the buck," Mayall said.

Pay-per-click ads are small Internet text ads that typically provide a few words of description and a link to a Web site. Advertisers bid to have their ad show up when users search for certain keywords. They pay only when someone clicks on their ad and goes to their Web site.

U.S. businesses will spend an estimated $8.3 billion on pay per click in 2007 -- up from about $1 billion in 2002, according to eMarketer, an online market research firm.

These advertisers so far include only a tiny percentage of America's small businesses. More than half of small businesses still don't have Web sites, let alone online advertising strategies.

But young companies -- those in existence for less than 10 years -- are twice as likely to use pay-per-click advertising as their older counterparts, according to a study by the Kelsey Group.

And some analysts predict that the number of small businesses using pay per click will grow significantly during the next few years.

"Within five years, 10 percent of small and medium business advertisers will be do-it-yourself pay per click," said Internet expert Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence. "Anecdotally, it's clear to me that more small businesses are trying to pursue online marketing, and paid search is a subset of that."

One of the biggest advantages of pay per click for small business is its low cost. Businesses can start out by spending as little as a few dollars per week.

Bandworks, an Oakland rock music school, pays about 25 cents per click when its ads pop up during a search for "rock music camp."

The school drew 17 visitors to its Web site during one recent week for just $9.

"The main reason we do it is it's so cheap," said Jeremy Steinkoler, president of Bandworks. "It doesn't cost us a whole lot compared to other advertising, which can be very pricey."

Pay per click also gives businesses immediate feedback on whether their ads are succeeding at bringing potential customers to their Web site. They can change or halt their campaign at any time -- something that's not possible with traditional media like the Yellow Pages.

"With the Yellow Pages, you spend money for a year and have no idea of the effect," said Stephen Herz, an Internet marketing consultant with Moonstone Interactive in San Ramon. "Here you can gauge the effect day by day."

Finally, pay per click is an efficient way of finding qualified leads -- potential customers who are actively interested in a company's product.

John Lyddon runs a San Francisco company called Star Hill Jawz that makes a tool for removing trees, brush and rocks that attaches to a tractor or loader.

Lyddon's ads showed up 22,231 times when people searched for the phrase "tree removal" on Google during a recent two-month period.

All those appearances led to a tiny number of clicks -- just 134. But they were from people who were actively interested in his Star Hill Jawz device. And they cost him only $22.41.

"When a person clicks on our ad, they're making a choice, versus looking at a display ad that just happens to be on a magazine page," Lyddon said.

Running a successful pay-per-click campaign typically requires a detailed understanding of how to choose and price keywords, and write effective ads. It also involves tracking results and tweaking the campaign on a frequent basis.

So small-business owners face a tough choice between channeling their own limited time into pay per click, or spending big bucks on a consultant.

Faramarz Mahdavi of Pylon Solutions -- a company that sells telecommunications equipment -- found himself spending up to three hours each day on pay per click when the company was advertising heavily.

"It needs to be monitored on a day-to-day basis -- how many clicks you have, what keywords are working, what products are getting clicks but not turning into sales," Mahdavi said.

Pay per click is also not right for every small business.

For instance, service businesses such as home contracting may do better with what is known as pay-per-call advertising, where Internet ads lead to phone calls rather than Web site visits.

And some small businesses face large, deep-pocketed competitors who drive up the cost of pay-per-click ads to unaffordable levels.

Harold Hoogasian, who owns Hoogasian Flowers, finds it tough to bid against nationwide e-commerce companies like 1-800-flowers.

"You can not advertise for 'florist San Francisco' for less than $3 per click on an everyday basis, or up to $6 before holidays," Hoogasian said. "Pay-per-click advertising can get you more orders, but it's hard to be profitable."

Many small businesses have been scared away from trying pay per click by news reports about click fraud.

This occurs when businesses try to sabotage their competitors by repeatedly clicking on their ads to drive up their costs. Or it occurs when a Web site owner asks friends to click the ads on his or her site in order to increase advertising revenue.

But some Internet experts say the risks of click fraud have been overblown when it comes to small businesses.

"A lot of the companies that get click fraud are large companies," said Andy Leff, who writes about online marketing on a blog called IncPlace.com. "If you're a mom-and-pop store, the competition probably isn't going out of their way to knock you."

Experts like Neff advise small businesses to expect a certain number of bad clicks, and build that into their budget.

They also advise businesses not to view pay-per-click advertising in isolation. Rather, it should be part of a larger marketing strategy.

Steve Collins owns a San Francisco house-cleaning service called Marvel Maids that gets about 60 percent of its business from paid and unpaid Internet search results.

Collins has found that real-world marketing measures such as having the company logo on its cars boost his pay-per-click results.

"People won't go with the No. 1 ad; they'll go with the one they've heard of," Collins said. "So we may be No. 2 or 3, but they click on us because they've seen our cars around town."

The San Francisco accounting firm of Sterck Kulik O'Neill combines pay-per-click advertising with Web site optimization, which means designing its Web site so it shows up near the top of the unpaid search results.

"Some people say they saw us on the paid side and the free side, and they kept on seeing us, and eventually they just gave up and figured they'd give us a try," said Galen Workman, the firm's marketing director. "That's all we need."

Steinkoler of Bandworks said that, as cheap as pay per click is, it's still no substitute for word-of-mouth referrals. "Nothing is going to replace personal recommendations from a friend through word of mouth," he said.

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The new design features cleaner navigation with more easily updatable features and utilizes professional imagery and design to emphasize the company's vision and message, directed at specific target audiences in the bio-tech and medical industries.

To increase the site's effectiveness, we developed specific calls-to-action, deploying them throughout the site. To get users to do what you want them to, you have to know how to ask!

Results:
In the short time since the launch of the new website, reaction from both internal and external audiences has been positive. The site has been a beneficial tool for the company in reaching its goals.

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Both interactive CDs contain product datasheets, Flash demos and other marketing materials such as product presentations, newsletters and service information. The CDs also allow for FCPA to update content which in turn notifies the sales reps or end users to download the updates automatically from the web, resulting in everyone always having the most current, up-to-date information at their fingertips.

Results: The result of these CDs is a cost-savings in the printing and distribution of markting materials as well as the ability for the sales team to establish ongoing communications with potential customers, leading to increased sales potential and volume. New versions of the CDs have recently been released.

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Results: In the short time since the launch of the new website, reaction from website visitors has been positive. The site will be a useful tool for the company in reaching potential students, parents and teachers for years to come. With Moonstone providing ongoing support and maintenance, the website will continue to improve and expand as Whalen Learning Center grows.

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