Dear Kalena…

I’d love to have Sitelinks shown when people search for my site on Google. Is there anything I can do to improve the chance of Google displaying sitelinks for my site?

Thanks
Matthew

Dear Matthew

Shirley has also asked about this, so hopefully the following information will help answer both your queries.

To borrow a quote from Google’s Webmasters/Site owners Help about sitelinks:

We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

From this we can take two important points – firstly, you need a good, SEO-friendly navigation / architecture for your site.

Assuming you know about sitelinks and are reading an SEO blog, you’d most likely already have this in place… so the second thing to work on is convincing Google your site is useful.

There are two main ways to accomplish this:

1. By focusing on building good deep links to your most important internal pages
2. By increasing the click-through rate (and reducing the bounce rate) to the pages you want to have as a sitelink

One way to improve the click-through rates, deep link to a few of your pages and convince the big G which pages are the most important is by putting a strong call-to-action on your homepage’s body content and then linking to each of these core pages.

Even with all this, there’s still no guarantees that you’ll get sitelinks, but it should help.

If anyone else has any advice or feedback about sitelinks, let us know in the comments.

Cheers

Peter Newsome
SiteMost Search Engine Optimisation

Spread the joy!