Enhanced Listings Can Bring More Traffic to Your Site

Google, SEO tips

When performing a search on Google, you may have noticed subpage links located directly below the main URL. These are called “sitelinks” and they exist to help users navigate your site. Basically, Google’s algorithm, or spider, crawls your website and determines the most relevant links based on your content and site architecture; links will only be displayed if they are beneficial for the user.

There are certain criteria that a link must have in order to be chosen as a sitelink.

• First, the link must be located on the homepage – the spider won’t find links located on subpages within subpages.
• Second, it needs to be in html – no java or flash.
• Also, your website needs good architecture so that Google can easily segregate your website into its main categories.
• Using sub-domains significantly help when wanting Google to generate sitelinks for your listing.
• You must have a minimum of four sitelinks available to be considered.
• Your listing needs to rank number 1 for the search phrase
• You can’t pay or ask Google for sitelinks. It is the Google algorithm that determines whether you get sitelinks or not.

Based on these criteria, the spider will choose anywhere from 2-8 links to display below your URL. If it happens to choose a page that you feel is irrelevant, you can use your Google sitemaps account to block that particular page. However, sitelinks will only be displayed if your URL is ranked number one for the searched keyword.

Ultimately, sitelinks are helpful to you for one big reason: trust. Having sitelinks listed below the URL gives the site more weight for the user, as well as giving them additional information about what’s on the site before clicking on it. Anything that makes your site easier to navigate is a plus for the user and is likely to draw more traffic to you, which of course is the overall goal.

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admin @ April 1, 2008