Are you familiar with sitelinks and do you know why it is important? When you look at the search results on any SERP, you will observe that some results are displayed quite elaborately with the main page of the website together with some other links to internal pages. The internal links are the sitelinks that Google presents to viewers to help them understand what kind of information to expect from the website. It saves user’s time as they find the information quickly and Google can offer better user experience. Displaying sitelinks enhances the trust of websites as users can see what lies inside the site by looking at the search results and it ensures that more traffic reaches the website. For doing well in SEO, you must leverage the powers of sitelinks in the way described here.
Why Are Sitelinks Useful?
Besides saving user’s time and highlighting the relevance of websites in search results, sitelinks help to build trust that establishes the reputation of the brand. It contributes to increasing the click-through rate (CTR) and improves the strength of the internal pages. Also, it occupies more space on the search result page thereby enhancing visibility and effectively shortens the path of conversion.
You Can Create Internal Links But Not Sitelinks:
To show sitelinks in the search results, you must have the proper website structure so that the search engines can automatically latch upon it. There is no guideline for creating sitelinks, but following the best practices in website development under the guidance of Vegas SEO experts would automatically facilitate search engines pick up sitelinks to show in search results. If sitelinks are not appearing in search results, it could due to the weakness of your website structure or the links are not relevant to the search query. Following a structured process enhances the possibilities of having sitelinks. Read on to know how you can do it.
Bank On Unique Brand Name:
Sitelinks do not appear for all kinds of searches but show up only against navigational or branded searches. The discretion of showing sitelinks rests on the search engines, and you must prepare your website suitably so that it responds correctly when the situation demands. To enable your website rank for navigational searches you must build some elements into it that differentiates it from generic queries or standard terms. The most common practice of creating a differentiator is to use a brand name that is unique because most brand names occupy positions on the first page of search results together with sitemaps. Concentrating on a domain that is easy to treat as a brand is a good way giving the unique entity to the website that search engines would be able to relate quickly to navigational search queries.
Have A Sitemap.Xml In Place:
To facilitate better crawling by search engines and to ensure wider coverage of the web pages, do some handholding of search engines by creating sitemap.xml. When you create a well-structured sitemap that is comprehensive and accurate, you stand much higher chances to attract many more targeted sitelinks.
Create An Unambiguous Site Structure And Hierarchy Clear:
Create a website that follows a simple logical sequence in navigation that makes navigation easy and comfortable. Have a clear hierarchy of the website that facilitates navigation and search engines find it easy to crawl because it increases the potential of getting sitelinks. The navigation bar shows up the site structure that begins with the home page, which is the most visited page from where you lead the visitors to other pages of the website. The navigation must clearly tell visitors where they are heading.
Content Must Be Rich In Useful Information:
Since the purpose of providing sitelinks in search results is to provide the most helpful and relevant content to searchers, make sure that the pages carry lots of useful information that attract users. All pages including the main navigational pages must contain substantial content as it helps to improve several aspects of SEO and also enhances the site links.
Use Accurate Page Titles:
Unless you have captivating page titles that tell search engines what the page is about you cannot expect search engines to feel encouraged to show sitelinks. Make sure that you use page titles that describe the contents of the page.
Do Proper Internal Linking:
To help search engines fish out the relevant pages as sitelinks, you have to create structured internal links that search algorithms can make out easily. Emphasize on creating text links over image links because it is the best way of responding to the needs of navigational menus. Text links increase the chances of automatically guiding search engines for sitelinks.
Having done everything stated above, have the patience to let things fall into place to show the results you are waiting for.
About the Author:
Charlie Brown has set up his own SEO business in Las Vegas after spending almost 15 years as a professional in digital marketing. He is just too fond of writing and for quite many years has turned to blogging. Writing on various topics about online marketing gives him much satisfaction.
