HTML Remix

A bit old topic. But still there is a talk on it among webmasters. Google’s SEO, Matt Cutts agrees that keywords in URL will help you in SEO. But still some famous blogs are using numbers in URL. 

But when I tried a search with “how to get google sitelinks” is Goog, The first result was a blog post by Jonathan Hochman on which the URL contains only sitelinks as keyword. But another post by DavidLee have the entire words in URL, got SERP ranking of seven in the same search. So, here some other facts overcome the priority of the URL.  May be the title text matters. But both are having the same titles. What I fount here as the plus point for  post by Jonathan Hochman is, the domain authority. Here domain authority wins over URL.

Another search for “Nantucket” returned a result of nice number of pages with keyword in URL. But sites like www.ack.net finds its position in top ten result.

My conclusion:

The keywords in URL is one fact among thousands of other points. So, keeping targetted keyword in URL will help you for SEO.

It is a big question. And the answer is simple. You can’t ask Google to set site links for you in SERPs. It is determined by the so called Google algorithms . Any way Google gave you the right to block the URLs you want to remove. You can do this in webmaster tools . Now mail factor of the selection is link popularity.

Facts depending on site link

• You must have a stable position on SERP for that keyword.
• Your website should have at least two years of age. It seems that younger websites don’t get Sitelinks.
• The number of search and number of clicks for a keywords may be considered. Keywords that aren’t searched often enough don’t get sitelinks.Your website has to get many clicks for the keyword by other means.
• The anchor key that other sites used to link to your website is also considered. (Anchor text is still important ? )

Now its my turn. I will tell you how to get sitelinks for your website. Of course, not a rocket science

While we can make only educated guess, we may can follow some guidelines to show the importance of links in our website.

Create structured navigation using HTML with clean hierarchy.

Use unordered listing (ul) to arrange the links. Use CSS to display and style the navigation. Don’t give so many links with same priority ( Limit the number of links in the main navigation.) May be you can give sub navigation using CSS menus .

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 SERP for similarly named sites. Google probably won’t give Sitelinks to a site that is just average for a particular search term. We want to be the overwhelming first choice.
( example : “imthi” there is no chance of some once else getting a rank for that keyword than imthi.com .)

Add a very useful title and meta description.

As the click through rate is important, user should get good idea about the page from SERP itself.

Make the site more useful.

Even if the information that visitor want is not there in the page, have a link to where they can seek the information. At least have a Google web search option. Because http referral may can help you which is better than close.

Site age

We can not increase age but may be we can have old domain names if you have money for it.

Link building

Get linked by forums and other blogs in the same niche with the keyword as anchor text.( The main sitelink on imthi.com is “Wordpress PDA & iPhone Plugin” for which he is getting huge traffic because of link from wordpress plugin directory for his PDA plugin )

Now the wrap.

Never be link miser. Do I need to say ” Don’t be link spammer” too ?. Any way, most of users believes that sitelinks signify some importance. And it is nice to have site links for website :). You can find more information about sitelinks on SEO by the sea blog.

Seriously, don’t ask me anything about this yahoo

Last month, there was a big talk between webmasters and SEO experts regarding anchor text. The discussion was started by Patrick Altoft on Blogstorm. But Nick Stamoulis criticized it big time on searchengineoptimizationjournal.com within a few days of that post. Nick aslo linked to Google Webmaster Central, to prove his wordings.  Any way, I am not gonna talk about the same facts, but a nice idea that proves that anchor text still worth it’s value.

Today, we had a section by Iyad Tibi, Head of Search at Flip Media on Changing SEO strategies. To prove the importance of anchor text, he Googled “Click here” the most used anchor text. The Google result turned Adobe Reader Download page as first. When we analyzed the page, there was no text “click here” in that page at all!. And still the page is coming first out of 1,430,000,000 search results. The reason is, most of the websites links to adobe reader download page saying “Click here to download adobe reader”

Don’t this simply proves that anchor text is still important ?  So, it is better to have a link for title of item’s listing page more than having a repeated “read more” with that annoying arrow.