Google Search Enchantments: Sitelinks
Recently Google announced it will be making some changes to the way sitelinks are presented on the search result pages. You may be wondering; how will this affect my website?! What do I do?
What you should do?
Stay completely calm. All information provided by Google presents these changes as positive enhancements. It may be possible for your site to start showing sitelinks for a number of queries where it previously didn’t. You could experience in the visibility and traffic to your site. Overall, these changes will hopefully improve the users experience and help them find relevant sites based on their query.
Here are the facts:
Before: Sitelinks only appear on the first search result, and so at most only one site could have sitelinks per search query.
After: With the new enhancements, a single row of links can appear for the results that didn’t show sitelinks before, even if the results are not in the first position. Now, multiple results can have up to four sitelinks. (Screenshots provide by Google)
The new sitelinks show users a sample of relevant sub-pages in the site to give an idea of what the site is about.
The one-line sitelinks will be generated just as the original sitelinks, using an algorithm that decides when to show links and which links to show, based on the expected benefit to users.
What can I do to optimize my site to take advantage of these new enhancements?
Review your site’s page titles. Staying away from 50 word titles has always been a recommended best practice. My suggestion is to shorten it up to a maximum of 100 characters, keep it short, sweet and to the point. From the looks of examples Google is limiting the title to the first 30 characters. When writing the page titles put the page title first, then add the section, then company name. For example, “Meet Turner My Pug| JamesBake.com”.
Enhance Anchor Text. Stop saying Click Here when you want visitors to Maximize Marketing Efforts with Search Engine Strategies. By using relevant keywords within your anchor text you provide users with more insight as to what they can find when they link on your link. Plus, it is said that search engines use anchor text as part of their indexing algorithm.
Provide Relevant Content. Nothing beats well written, relevant content. If you write it they will come.
More as these enhancements make their way to main stream.
