In the past Google Sitelinks were nothing more than a nice way to ensure that when people searched for a particular company they either clicked on that companies website or an AdWords advert. They were great for brands but since they only appeared for brand name queries it didn’t really matter what they said because the searcher wanted to visit the site anyway.
With only about 5% of people clicking on the sitelinks compared to the actual site not many webmasters bothered to adjust them and even fewer thought about optimising them.
With one-line sitelinks becoming official SEO’s need to get up to speed very quickly on how to make sitelinks work harder.
Google has just given us all an extra line of text in the search results and we need to learn how to optimise it.
The key is to use sitelinks for clickability – make your listing more attractive than all the others. Take the fake listing below which I created using my website editing tool. See how you can make your listing more attractive than all the others?
The prediction from Google (and we can assume it’s correct) is that lots of users will be clicking on these links.
For webmasters, this new feature means it’s possible that your site will start showing sitelinks for a number of queries where it previously didn’t. We expect this will increase the visibility of and traffic to your site, while also improving the experience of users.
The actual optimisation process is simple:
- Edit a page title of an existing sitelink to be more “clickable”
- Wait for Google to re-index and update your sitelinks
- Monitor your click through rates
- Keep testing
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Don’t forget accuracy. Turning it into an advert may have the opposite effect, it may loose you visitors who see as soon as they click through you have deliberately manipulated your site links.
Good, thanks for the information.
Fantastic, thanks for the news.
Does this mean that the 2 column sitelink will be removed after the update?
take the top result here – http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=van+hire+dorset, their sitelink text looks optimised in this way however if you visit their homepage this text is taken from the alt text of the image linking to this page (the vans from £32) not from the title tag of the destination page, just something that might have been missed!
Goo article. For our web site http://www.vendorland.ca Small Business Directory we got a vertical one-line sitelinks in Google by some reason, not gorizontal like in your sample. Is those links can be presented different for UK and Canada Google?
It seems that I can’t find how to do it
I am blind?
Sounds interesting…Thanks for the tip. And thanks to Martaay, too, for the example. ^_^
Man, I wonder how many more ways/ideas is google going to come up with that is going to significantly change the way we do SEO
Hi Everybody,
We are doing the same SEO job, In this if your website does not reach the top 10 search engine results within 6 months for your specified keywords after using the program you get your money back.
This is an interesting development for SEO. Implementing one line sentence links could be very beneficial when Google indexes your website. In the past, an adWords advert was used to link to a site but this only encouraged 5% of the overall amount of users. Now this will hopefully encourage more traffic similar to how page titles operate.
oh my god , guess there are many more tricks and tips to come up in first page of google search , we really can’t understand how google works in future and with what startegies its going to come as well need to wait and see till then .. so far it seems to be gud .
sounds a winning strategy but pardon my ignorance (i am new in SEO at Wisitech.com) , how do one get the site links? Does one has to apply with Google and other searche engines?
Thank you for the usefull article.
yes we need to work on the site links.. These site links depends on the traffic of the site. We need to get ready as google starts replacing the site links in horizantal…
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