I spent the past couple of days scouring the internet in search of a potential solution to display a website’s menu in Google search results. If you’ve ever looked up sites like TechCrunch, Netflix, and numerous others on Google, you likely understand what I’m referring to.
Achieving the desired outcome isn’t something that can be accomplished overnight as it is solely under the control of Google search. Nevertheless, you can take steps to optimize your site, as well as submit it to ODP (dmoz.org). Unfortunately, when I attempted to access the Open Directory Project website, I encountered a 403 error. However, according to the Google Webmaster Tools documentation on Sitelinks, I discovered an explanation of how this feature operates. It’s important to note that establishing your site as the top-ranked result requires substantial effort, and a relatively high search volume (i.e., people searching for your target keyword) is necessary for this feature to come into effect.
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The links shown below are some of Google’s search results, called site links, which are meant to help users navigate your site. Google’s systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.
1: The main search result
2: Sitelinks
Google only shows sitelinks for results when they think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow their algorithms to find good sitelinks, or they don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant to the user’s query, then they won’t show them.
At the moment, sitelinks are automated. Google is always working to improve the sitelinks algorithms, and they may incorporate webmaster input in the future.
There are best practices you can follow, however, to improve the quality of your sitelinks. For example, for your site’s internal links, make sure you use anchor text and alt text that’s informative, compact, and avoids repetition.
Many SEO experts are subjective on Google’s recommendation citing that Google just advises webmasters to build sites with clear navigation and a well-planned hierarchy of pages. These features may make a site more amenable to Google’s Sitelink analysis algorithms.
The precise workings of many Google algorithms, including Sitelinks, are kept secret to discourage people from manipulating the rankings, but we can still look at examples and try to understand where Sitelinks come from. An SEO expert who has worked on many sites with Sitelinks cited that these sites are similar in the following ways:
- Site ranks on the first page for the keyword(s) that generate the Sitelinks listing
- Easily spiderable, structured navigation.
- High natural search traffic.
- Strong click-through rates from the search results page.
- Popular internal pages appear as Sitelinks.
- Unique titles and meta descriptions on internal pages.
These factors may, or may not, be exactly what Google uses to trigger Sitelinks. Nevertheless, everything on this list is desirable for a web marketing program, so using the list as a guide would probably make your site more effective.
He also cites problem sites that did not get Sitelinks. Some characteristics that could hinder Sitelinks include:
- Few destination pages: the vast majority of traffic is directed to just one page.
- Pages all have the same title and meta description.
- Pages have thin content, either very little text or else text that is uninformative or duplicates other pages.
How to Improve the Odds of Getting Sitelinks
While we can only make educated guesses, we may as well do things that are also good for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and user experience. Even if these guesses miss the target, you won’t be wasting effort with these recommendations:
- Create structured navigation using the HTML 5 <nav> tag, or HTML features like unordered lists (UL) and text links. Use CSS to style menus with the desired appearance. Lists can be displayed horizontally or vertically, and be any size or color. If desired, add background images, colors and border to create the appearance of a box or button. All this decor can be added to text links.
- Organize navigation to present a smaller number of logical destinations that visitors will choose frequently. Don’t overwhelm the visitor with too many choices on the main navigation. Psychologists have discovered that most people can efficiently handle a maximum of 4-7 choices; more choices is overwhelming. Make sure the main navigation items are the things that users want. To get Sitelinks you want to present visitors with a reasonable number of pages that they will actually choose to visit.
- Brand the website with a unique name. If the name is too generic, no matter what we do, the click-through rates on natural search may not be very good, because the user will have too many choices on the search results for similarly named sites. Google probably won’t give Sitelinks to a site that is just average for a particular search term.
- Craft unique, informative titles and meta descriptions, especially for the home page and pages linked from the main navigation, to improve click-through rates from the search results. Make sure the meta information is accurate to avoid misleading searchers. We don’t want people to arrive, and then leave, because the site fails to match expectations.
- Make the site really useful. Even if the site’s information is not exactly what the visitor wants, providing useful outbound links throughout the site will help the visitor the page they need, rather than returning to the search results. Remember, Google can tell if a searcher returns to the search results, and if that happens too often, it’s probably not helping a site’s reputation.
This content may contain some information from hotchman consults and google webmaster