How to achieve sitelinks for your website.

SEO is not easy. It takes lot of efforts for achieving high search engine rankings and maintaining them. We at CopperBridge Media, get many inquiries from our clients as to why search engines do not display their site’s one line links (read sitelinks). Well, it sounds a bit funny at times. Because after helping their sites dominate the first page of major search engines, they still aspire for more search engine visibility.

Now the SEOs / webmasters will know that with consistent efforts a site can achieve top rankings. But unfortunately, that’s not the case with sitelinks. Webmasters have absolutely no control when it comes to displaying the sitelinks.

Regular Google Sitelinks

Though Yahoo and Bing too offer sitelinks, but of course the inventor of the concept of sitelinks is Google. It introduced sitelinks to help users navigate a site so that it saves users time and allows them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

How to get sitelinks on Google?

I wish I could give you a simple solution for this. But that’s because you can’t force Google to show the desired links of your site as sitelinks. Google explains, “We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.”

Okay so as always, Google speaks from its own perspective with no help to the webmasters. But based on my observations for achieving sitelinks, here are a few tips that I can pass on:

1. Submit your site to all major search engines. Don’t wait for their crawlers to find you.
2. Monitor which pages of your site are attracting huge traffic. Normally, these pages would be the best candidates for being featured as sitelinks.
3. Keep working on your most viewed pages, i.e. optimize them. Put more focus on keyword density, content relevance and optimization.
4. Follow proper page naming conventions and keep a simple navigation structure for your site. I have seen that the sitelinks are mostly a copy of the links in the site’s navigation structure.
5. Cleverly follow cross linking strategy from your most viewed pages. This will ensure that other relevant pages also appear in the sitelinks for a single query.

Now a days, Google displays one-line sitelinks. These are not different from the regular sitelinks, except that they are displayed in only one column and allow a maximum of four links to be displayed.

Google One-line sitelinks

Even though, Google says its process for generating sitelinks is completely automated, you can surely help Google locate the most relevant pages of your site so that they appear as sitelinks. Use your SEO skills along with the tips mentioned above and see what happens.

Just in case, you think that Google is displaying inappropriate or incorrect sitelinks, you can block them so that they no longer appear. But for this, you will have to have your site registered with the Google Webmaster Central Tools.

Source ::
by Sameer
http://www.provenseo.com/2009/07/when-does-google-ban-penalize-or-sandbox-a-website/