You should already know what is SEO…right? Google Sitelinks, once considered the holy grail of SEO have finally got a facelift from Google. They come in the form of “extended sitelinks”. Basically, they look like this (and I love showing these off!).
The old Google site links were great in that they gave your website more exposure. This helped would be visitors to quickly access areas of your company website that were relevant to what was being search for. With the new Google Sitelinks, your web site takes up all the space above the fold. The fold is the view of the monitor (1024 x 768 resolution, 17″ monitor) without having to scroll up or down. So lets look at this real quick, 1024×768 monitor resolution has the largest global usage share when it comes to web visitors. With Google’s Extended Sitelinks, when a visitor does a relevant search for your page, or for keywords/keyword phrases, your site takes up the whole screen! Is that awesome or what? A potential client will see this and think you have taken over Google! (maybe not..) But you see where I’m going with this, right?
What changed with Google Extended Sitelinks
Visibility. The links have been boosted to full-sized text, and augmented with a green URL and one line of text snippet, much like regular search results. This increases the prominence of both the individual sitelinks and the top site overall, making them easier to find.
Flexibility. Until now, each site had a fixed list of sitelinks that would either all appear or not appear; there was no query-specific ranking of the links. With today’s launch, sitelink selection and ranking can change from query to query, allowing more optimized results. In addition, the maximum number of sitelinks that can appear for a site has been raised from eight to 12, and the number shown also varies by query.
Clarity. Previously, pages from your site could either appear in the sitelinks, in the regular results, or both. Now we’re making the separation between the top domain and other domains a bit clearer. If sitelinks appear for the top result, then the rest of the results below them will be from other domains. One exception to this is if the top result for a query is a subpart of a domain. For instance, the query [the met exhibitions] has www.metmuseum.org/special/ as the top result, and its sitelinks are all from within the www.metmuseum.org/special section of the site. However, the rest of the results may be from other parts of the metmuseum.org domain, like store.metmuseum.org or blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/about.
Quality. These user-visible changes are accompanied by quality improvements behind the scenes. The core improvement is that we’ve combined the signals we use for sitelinks generation and ranking — like the link structure of your site — with our more traditional ranking system, creating a better, unified algorithm. From a ranking perspective, there’s really no separation between “regular” results and sitelinks anymore.
– From Google Webmaster Central Blog
How do I get Google Sitelinks for my website?
There is no one easy answer for this. The trick is to realize that SEO is an on-going process. It does not ever take a break. So you need to hire an SEO company, that understands SEO strategies and techniques in order to get your site to the top of search engines.
With that, you should also realize that SEO starts on your websitebest SEO company could not SEO a “sub par” website. Your web design needs to be free from errors, contain NO Flash, and have certain on-page elements established to ensure a completely search engine friendly web site.
That’s what we do at XTELWEB, we build search engine friendly web sites that rank HIGHER, because they are built with SEO in mind. It’s our passion. Contact us for a free consultation!
