A few weeks ago Google released news about it’s extended sitelinks.  Previously Google occasionally displayed eight sitelinks for a site and recently they bumped this number up to a whopping twelve.

Why are sitelinks important?  If Google displays sitelinks for your site in the serach results it’s the equivlant to taking up as much space as three or four listings!  This greatly increases your websites visibility, click-ability and traffic.

Google will display sitelinks for your website if it thinks that a website is the “exact match” for a search query.  Google generates the sitelinks for your website based on your website navigation and based on the links that point to your website.  Under each sitelink Google will also display a small snippet of text which you actually get to optimize.

How to make your sitelinks POP

This is where Meta Tags come back into play.  Google hardly ever uses meta tags for search results or takes Meta Tags into account for ranking decisions.  Usually people use Meta Tags for other search engines such as Bing or Yahoo.  However, Meta Tags are STILL important.

Google uses the first 30-35 characters of the Meta Description Tag of a web page for the snippets.  Thus it’s important to optimize the first 35 characters of your Meta Description to increase the number of potential clicks on a snippet.

The first 35 characters in your Meta Description should contain a clear description of the page and/or a call-to-action.

Each page of your website should have its own meta description.

Also follow the basic rule of thumb of not becoming spammy.  Do not include your keyword in a single Description or Title Tag more than two times.

The easiest way to write Title and Description Tags in WordPress is by using the All In One SEO Pack which allows you to customize the Meta information on each post you write.

Lastly, Ping Kaching will also utilize your Meta information.  If you are always entering Meta information on all your posts…then when you plug a URL into the software you can use the “Fetch Meta Data” button which will automatically fill in your Title, Description, Keywords and RSS URL for each post.  This makes the process of entering a URL into Ping Kaching into a few second process.

-Michael R Roberts

Related posts:

1. Sneak Peak look at the new Meta Fetching feature
2. Most Important Social Media Tool For Web Marketers