How to Optimize Your Website for Google Sitelinks

Sitelinks are unique search results displayed in Google SERPs

Sitelinks are unique search results displayed in Google SERPs for websites of immense importance. As a part of its commitment to improve search results utility for users, Google added sitelinks as a unique feature to its search results. According to Google Webmaster guidelines, sitelinks are meant to help users navigate a site easily and find the information quickly.

Essentially, sitelinks are an automated process that analyses a site’s link structure to find shortcut to useful information available within the website. Understandably, there is no specific set of rules mandated by Google for achieving sitelinks; however, analysis of websites credited with sitelinks offer useful insights on how webmasters can improve their chances of achieving sitelinks for their website.

Here are some of the tips to help your website create sitelinks on Google SERPs:

Google Friendly Site Structure

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines strongly suggest every website have a clear hierarchy and text links in order to help crawlers and visitors understand the website navigational structure to find the information with ease. Websites having complex navigational structures tend to get ignored both by search engine spiders and visitors alike.

Therefore, it is difficult for Google to credit sites having poor navigational structure with sitelinks. For example, if Google can’t figure the logic behind your subpages, it can’t award your site with sitelinks. So, if you think your website has a poor site structure, fix it.

Useful Meta Description

Useful Meta Description increasingly helps website’s chances to achieve Google sitelinks. More importantly, landing pages should be optimized with user-friendly meta description. From Google’s perspective, if visitors find your landing page irrelevant and bounce off your website, your website doesn’t qualify for sitelink considerations.

In other words, if your homepage has a higher bounce rate, your website is less likely to be eligible for Google sitelinks. Therefore, you should optimize the meta description of your main pages to help Google as well as your potential visitors. And, websites that ignore meta description should also consider including suitable meta description for their website.

High Quality Inbound Links

Many experienced webmasters know that Google offer a great deal of value to websites that have quality inbound links from authority websites. When it comes to Google sitelinks, the number of quality inbound links of your website plays a critical role in achieving Google sitelinks. If you want other websites to offer quality backlinks to your website, create a great blog with useful posts with user-friendly information. If your website doesn’t have a blog yet, create one right now. Make sure your blog should be a sub-domain of your website.

Necessary Outbound Links

From Google’s perspective, outbound links tend to help users with rich information that is available on other website. However, many websites are concerned about offering outbound links to other websites as they feel their visitors might jump off to other websites.

Wary webmasters should consider creating really useful and relevant internal linking strategy to deal with this requirement. However, they should also consider offering a couple of outbound links to authority resources such as Wikipedia.

Lots of Quality Content

For obvious reasons, websites offering highly relevant information are considered more important to Google’s sitelink considerations. Apart from having a great navigational structure, smart internal linking and lots of quality inbound links, websites can consider adding quality information to their blog. Webmasters should consider creating user-friendly posts with proper categorization as part of their blog content optimization. This can go a long way to help their website achieve Google sitelinks.

About Susanta Sahoo

I'm the founder and content marketing head at Top League. Our team can help you build great content that helps you rank high on Google and generate high-quality leads. Get in touch with us and let's discuss your project. I'm on LinkedIn & Twitter, just so you know.

Reader Interactions

3 Reactions

  1. kalandi

    exceptional blog lots of spectacular information. this is the real fact always use some valuable meta tag and meta description because that is really help full to get rank from Google..

  2. Kedar Nayak

    The last para of your description deals this post in a shortcut manner.
    I must use the above fruitful points in future for achieving Google Sitelinks.

  3. surya

    Its a good topic by useing this we optimize website for google site link.