Regarding sitelinks in google search

Question

I would like my site to display additional site links when preforming a Google Search..

How can this be achieved?

Answer 1

The exact mechanism is currently only known to Google, you can find their cryptic help document here.

What you need to do to get this process started is the following things -

1. Have a well defined menu and proper internal linking. The best way to do this is first figure out the Information Architecture of your site and then go about linking the pages. For. eg. If I have a site which sells three different courses, each having sub-courses, then I could use a folder-wise approach ... site.com/courses/course1/subcourse1 ... If I have multiple geographies .. then it could be site.com/centers/location1.
2. Have breadcrumbs for the site. Indicate this in the mark-up (usually id="breadcrumbs" does the trick).
3. Ensure that your inside pages which you want as site-links are also able to generate traffic and act as landing pages. So you need to divert traffic from your home-page to your inside pages ... get those optimized for your keywords

Answer 2

Google will populate the site links automatically in which they believe is the most important and useful to site visitors. It is important to note that this data is not displayed on all 'search phrases' and only displayed if you are number 1 on the search result.

Once Google has populated your site links you can then review the ones you think visitors will find useful and the ones that are not so helpful you can demote them within Google Webmaster Tools.

Displayed below is a screenshot of what you should be looking for and what you can see once you've demoted your site links. To demote a sitelink just enter /the/path/of/the/url/ and click demote.

Sitelinks Google Webmaster Tools http://www.bybe.net/downloads/sitelinks-google-webmaster-tools.png

To find demote site links in Google Webmaster Tools you can find it like so:

1. Login to Webmaster Tools
2. Click the site that you want to edit.
3. On the left side you have expandable options, expand configuration.
4. Clicking the 2nd one down (Sitelinks).