Digital Internet Marketing

Significance of Sitemaps

Today there are many SEO techniques that help you to optimize your site, but one trick whose importance is undervalued at times is a Sitemap. A Sitemap is really a page on your site that indicates the complete structure of your site including various sections, links between them, and so on. In short it gives a detailed listing of your web site layout. Sitemaps have become helpful because they create site navigation easy for the visitors as well as help search engines index the site.

Sitemaps usually fall into two categories. The first is a HTML version which is for human site visitors so helping them navigate through the whole site and find the information they are looking for. The other Sitemap is an XML version that is meant for the search engine to know about all the pages on the site including all the URLs that may go unnoticed by the search engine spidering the website.

Sitemap benefits

There are many great things about using sitemaps that are detailed below:

Easy Navigation

A sitemap helps a visitor know where to locate particular information he is searching for on the site. It acts as a guide to enable easy navigation through the site without wasting time to find information.

Search Engine Indexing

Sitemaps help search engines learn about any updates which you make on your website. It is not guaranteed that the search engine bot will instantly index the updated webpages, however, the modifications will certainly be indexed considerably faster when compared with when there isn’t any sitemap.

New Site

For those who have a brand new internet site with very few links in it, sitemaps can be beneficial. The reason being the search engine spider crawls through documents by following links from one page to another and if your site does not contain proper links, it might be challenging for the bots to index them.

Broken Links

For those who have a web site which contains lots of content webpages that are improperly linked to one another or have broken links then using sitemaps will help search engine bots to index your pages better.

Dynamic Content on Site

Sitemaps are also very helpful if you have a site where your content is updated or changed frequently. The search engines can be immediately informed of this change through your sitemap. However, this will not assure you that your changed pages will be indexed right away.

Sitemap Process

To create a Sitemap for your website there are some simple steps you need to follow. First, a Sitemap needs to be generated and then it should be uploaded to the website and last but not least Google ought to be advised about it.

Sitemap Generation

A sitemap might be generated in two ways. The first is by making use of a web based tool that may help you generate the sitemap along with the other is by downloading it and setting up a sitemap generator. The first alternative is less of a challenge compared to the second one as there are numerous online sitemap generation methods available free of cost that make your work simpler. The other option of downloading and setting up a sitemap generator is a little difficult but lets you obtain a better control of the end result.

Uploading and Submitting Your Sitemap

As soon as your sitemap is created, it has to be uploaded to your website and Google should be advised about it. So that you can notify Google you should add your internet site to your Google Sitemap account. However, in case you do not have already a Google Sitemap account, this is the time that you should produce one. Furthermore, it is important to know that adding a sitemap to your account needs a confirmation indicating you are the lawful owner of the web site.

Additionally it is important to know that Google does not guarantee that all the URLs in your sitemap will be spidered and indexed. For instance, if there are any image URLs in your sitemap, these will not be crawled and indexed. However, your sitemap can help the search engine to know more about your site layout which will help it to crawl your site better and faster when compared to not having a sitemap. Webmasters usually benefit from submitting sitemaps and will not be penalized for it.

A Financial Management firm can create a strong web presence by designing and developing a business website on the internet.  However, this step alone is not a digital marketing plan. Just putting up a Financial Management firm website on the internet is similar to establishing a physical business like a shop or an office, and then just sitting back and waiting for the customers to flow in. More than likely, it will not happen and your website will resemble a billboard in the desert.

Financial Management firms must understand that they need to spread the word about their firm, talk to people, inform, engage with potential clients and communicate their services using the internet.

The focus of web searchers looking for accountants has changed, and instead of turning to the yellow pages, people prefer to search the net in order to find an Financial Management firm.  To search for a Financial Management firm in Tunbridge Wells

·         Visitor 1 may type “Tunbridge Wells Financial Managers”

·         Visitor 2 might search for “Financial Management firms Tunbridge Wells”.

·         Visitor 3 might search for “IFA Tunbridge Wells”

Different people search in different ways and it is important to make sure that your Financial Management firm website captures this valuable traffic.

What should Financial Management firms, large and small, do to be found on the web?

Financial Management firms need to invest in a digital marketing strategy that will specialise in Financial Management firm search engine optimisation, Financial Management firm marketing and website design. A professional digital media marketing consultant will have the relevant business expertise and will know how to handle this. Other important factors are:

·         Digital media marketing starts with your Financial Management firm website design. The website must be structured with elements of search engine optimisation, where the meta tags are properly written and executed. The website is designed with SEO in mind. The starting point is keyword research and when this is done properly the right keywords are embedded in the content.  Images and graphics are optimised to make the Financial Management firm’s website search engine friendly.

·         While the above will greatly help in organic search engine rankings, the digital marketing strategy may need some quick traffic through a Pay Per Click campaign. Organic search engine optimisation will take a few months to get going until the web site attains authority in the search engine rankings. During this time, the sponsored listing or paid advertisements will help to project the Financial Management firm and traffic will start to flow to the website.

·         In parallel, the digital marketing strategy will also lead you through other digital media marketing mediums such as announcing your Financial Management firm website presence through press releases and news. Syndication will help that news to reach as many readers as possible

·         While this will draw enough website traffic to start getting web visitors and leads, the digital media marketing strategy will also start building a social network campaign through Video, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to draw the Financial Management firm close to social communities on the internet.

·         The strategy will deploy legal blogging, article writing and submissions.  Through blogs and articles, it is possible to create an air of trust by writing about the Financial Management firm, and educate readers about Financial Management. This will project the Financial Management firm as an authority on the subject and people will tend to trust the firm with their business.

·         We have heard the phrase “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” and this is still very applicable today and even more so in a period of recession.  In this context, the digital marketing plan will use web analytics to collect data from the website to determine which aspects of the site are working towards the defined business objectives for the website. 

Web analytics is a continuous improvement process and a key part of an effective digital marketing plan. It is not enough just to produce reports each month, you need to analyse these reports so you can ensure that the website is always responding to the needs of its visitors. Once you have gathered your data, analysed the results, proposed changes and implemented these changes you repeat the process all over again.

Financial Management firms and who think that digital marketing for their firm is a thing they can do without are severely cutting themselves short. Consider these facts from January 2010:

·         Over 60,500 searches being conducted in the UK for the term “Financial Advisor”

·         Over 33,100 searches for the term “Financial Advisors”

·         40,500 searches conducted for the words “Financial Advisers”

·         18, 500 searches for the term ”Independent Financial Advisors”

·         100s of thousands of more searches for related terms

The question is: Can Financial Management firms and keep themselves away from a focussed digital marketing strategy? 

Learn more about a specialised digital media marketing strategy for your Financial Management firm at http://www.wsionlinebiz.co.uk or give us a call at 01580 819529.