Internet Marketing in 10 Minutes

What are they? How do you obtain them? How do you find them once you obtain them?

I’ve had many clients ask about them and I’ve seen other Internet marketers ask about them on forums, webmaster related chat rooms, blogs and even the most recent Google phone conference last week (March 28th 2008).

What Are Sitelinks?

So what exactly are Sitelinks? Well first off they allow people who might be searching for your website to pick and choose which page of your site that they might be looking for. At this time Google decides which of your internal pages are displayed… if any.

This is one example of what Sitelinks look like when they show up for someone searching.

News, Games, People and places and so on in the above image are considered Sitelinks. At this time you can have a maximum of eight Sitelinks. Keep in mind though that if within your Webmaster Tools your site is only displaying three or fewer Sitelinks then Google will not show Sitelinks for your website.

Speaking of Google Webmaster Tools, you can find what pages Google has identified for Sitelinks by going to Links and then to Sitelinks.

If Google has declared any Sitelinks for your website then you’ll see something that looks like this inside Google Webmaster Tools.

How Do You Obtain Them?

I’ve already mentioned that Google decides which of your internal pages are displayed. However the decision isn’t entirely out of our hands. Like anything else with search engine optimization, there are things that can be done to help Google along.

For example, if you want your contact page to show up then make sure you have one or more of the following on site optimization techniques covered (preferably more than one).

1. Name the page according to what it is about. Creating ‘Contact-Us.html’ gives search engines and visitors a pretty clear idea of what the page is about.
2. Include the page within your Google Sitemap AND your on site Site Map if you have both of them; if you don’t then you should.
3. Within the content of the page use the words, ‘Contact Us’ and see about using H1, Bold and other formatting to help make it stand out.
4. Link to the page from other pages of your website using the anchor of ‘Contact Us’. Make sure this isn’t just done in your navigation though as search engines pick up constants on a website like navigations.
5. Link to the page from other pages of your website using images that have Alt Text of ‘Contact Us’; maybe even go as far to have the image named ‘Contact.jpg’ or something similar.
6. Off site linking to that page should also help as it gives an outside referral that search engines will hopefully detect.
7. If you are building your meta tags properly then you will naturally be mentioning ‘Contact Us’ somewhere in your title and description.

You’d obviously want to repeat the above steps for other pages that you want to stand out a little more than others do.

How Do You Find Them?

Google displays Sitelinks based on what the searcher has searched for. Google will return the most useful and relevant results. If Google thinks that some of your pages listed within Webmaster Tools are relevant then they will display.

Above I showed you an example of five Sitelinks that can possibly show up for my wife’s tutoring company in Southern California. However I have not yet conducted a search within Google that has caused the Sitelinks for that site to show up. Others on the other hand may have done so and seen completely different results than I have due to the types of searches i’ve performed and they have performed.

If you’d like to see a live version of Sitelinks simply search for MSN on Google and you’ll get some results.

Sitelinks Management

There are some pages within a website that just shouldn’t be displayed as a Sitelink yet alone indexed by a search engine. Removing a specific page from Googles index is a completely other post but you can choose to block a page from showing up in Sitelinks. Notice the third image above? Simply select Block next to the URL you don’t want displayed and Google will take it out for 90 days. Of course 90 days comes and goes pretty fast so you’ll want to make sure that you are purposefully MANAGING SITELINKS.

In Conclusion

Sitelinks have been around for some time now. They help increase your advertising space within Googles SERPs and help potential clients locate exactly which page of your website they are looking for if you take the time to help Google determine what should and shouldn’t be considered a Sitelink. You won’t always see them when conducting searches and just because Webmaster Tools shows that you have them doesn’t mean they will always display.

For more information on Sitelinks directly from the horses mouth, I’d consider this Google page titled, "How does Google compile the list of links shown below some search results?"

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

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