Every website needs to improve its Google search rankings to stay ahead of the competition. Sitelinks play an important role in this.
Today we will discuss the Sitelinks and the methods through which a website can get Sitelinks and improve its rankings in Google searches.
What is a Sitelink and How it is added?
Sitelinks are hyperlinks to the subpages of the same website that appear under certain Google listings in order to help users navigate the site. You can see them in the form of subheadings under the website’s main link.
But the issue is that the owner of the website owner cannot add any of the Sitelinks on his own. These are added by Google automatically using its own algorithms.
Moreover, they are displayed to the user only when required and this decision is also taken by Google.
Google Search Snippet and Sitelinks:
Whenever a user searches for something on Google, it provides a search snippet. A Google search snippet contains four parts:
- Title of the website
- URL of the website
- Brief description of the website
- A number of Sitelinks
The first three parts can be decided by the website owner, but the last one is decided by Google.
Importance of Sitelinks:
Even though the Sitelinks cannot be decided by the website owner, they provide a lot of help in improving the Google search rankings of the website.
Let us discuss some of their advantages:
- The website information gets a big space in the search results due to the presence of Sitelinks. Thus the visibility of the website is increased and the chances of getting clicked on by the user and also increased.
- Because of the presence of Sitelinks, the user can have a view of the internal pages of the website and he or she can visit those pages directly. This can improve the traffic to the important web pages of your site.
- If Google provides Sitelinks for your website, then it means it trusts your website and this creates a positive impression on the users. This can improve the site’s Google search rankings.
- They help in improving awareness about the brand by providing extra information to the user. If someone searches for your company, then the Sitelinks will offer him briefings about various services provided by you.
Getting Sitelinks from Google:
Well as you know that Sitelinks cannot be generated from the owner’s side and they are automatically provided by Google, you must know the way how you can get Sitelinks from Google. You should incorporate certain things in your website so that Google’s algorithms feel that your website is eligible for providing Sitelinks.
Let us check out various things to keep in mind to achieve this:
- Include all the details in robots.txt that are needed by Google to index your website without any issues.
- The robots.txt file should be accessible by Google.
- Inclusion the name of the brand in the title of the homepage as well on the homepage using an HTML tag.
- Inclusion of enough textual information on the page to give details about the brand.
- XML site map of the website should be hierarchical in structure and try to keep the levels of hierarchy at three.
- Keep the menu of the website similar to the site structure.
- Include the most important sub-pages in your website’s menu so that they become part of the Sitelinks listing.
- Links to the important sub-pages should be available on the homepage.
- Assign good titles to those sub-pages and give their brief meta descriptions which you want to be selected by Google for Sitelinks. Also give links to these pages in the sidebar part of the website.
- Well-made internal links to the important sub-pages.
- Create a table of contents if the page contains lengthy information. These contents will be the links to the headings and sub-headings.
- Get high-quality SEO done for your website.
Sitelinks can neither be added on your own nor removed. The decision is entirely of Google. you can just try your best to be a good candidate.
