We have had a few clients recently, eyeing off the big panel of links that appear under some Google search result listings, and asking how they can set these up for their business.   In this article, I’m going to briefly outline what sitelinks are, and what the factors are that help you get some!

Google site links appear in two main forms.  A full/large panel of sitelinks, which looks like this:

And a smaller mini panel of sitelinks:

If you are keen to achieve sitelinks for your business, there’s some things you’re going to want to understand about them:

1.    The links are displayed, or not – at Google’s sole discretion.
2.    They are not linked to your business listing in Google (i.e. they are not displayed consistently to all users), but instead are shown depending on the keyword the user searches on, and how “authoritative” your website is considered to be.

For example, if you type in “Salsa Internet” into Google.com.au, you will see our Salsa Internet listing show up with the full spread of sitelinks shown, as our business is considered to be an authority in Google’s eyes in relation to that keyword phrase.  If however you type in “Google Adwords Melbourne” then you’ll see us ranking at position #1 also, but with no sitelinks, as Google recognise we offer this service, but don’t attribute enough “authority” to us in relation to that keyword.

So this begs the obvious question – what, in Google’s eyes – determines “authority” ?

Your site’s authority in relation to a keyword is typically determined by:
a)    How many times that keyword, or words related to / on the same topic of that keyword, appear on your homepage, and throughout your website
b)    The number, quality and type of inbound links to your website (ie an inbound link is where another website contains a link to your website from their website), which contain words in the link that are match the keyword, or are related to that keyword

If you want to achieve these types of sitelinks, you need to engage in link building targeting for the keyword in question or words related to that word, in the link text.  You’re going to want to have a lot of strong / high ranking inbound links for that keyword in order to achieve sitelinks.   Sounds like hard work ay?   Well achieving sitelinks for your business name, is often readily achievable, but achieving sitelinks for popular common keyword phrases on Google – takes a lot of effort.