Paul Carbo Web Design & Development

By no means do I consider myself a knowledgeable source when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. I know a little about what’s important and what’s not, but I am pretty much ignorant when it comes to all the variables involved and how best to make them all work for you. That said, I was happy to find out I at least knew enough to convince Google to hook me up with some of those slick sitelinks.

I couldn’t really tell you anything I did on purpose to get these links to show up. Aside from the chance that Google all of a sudden started making them easier to acheive, I pretty much acquired them by accident.

How important are these things? In my case, not very. They only show up when a site tops the page, and I really only ever top the page when my actual name is searched for. In which case someone is actively searching for me and will enter my site, sitelinks or no sitelinks. So I am not happy in regards of traffic, they more so serve as an indicator that I am doing something right, or at least not doing things wrong.

A while ago, I was interested in knowing just how sites became deserving of these links and did a small amount of research. What I learned was that the process is automated and Google doesn’t disclose exactly what factors are most important and most determining. A few sites speculate the obvious, such as the number of links pointing to your site, making sure your markup meets the W3C requirements, the age of your site, the quality of your content, the amount of impressions and clicks you receive based off of relevant keywords, and meta tags. These all seemed too easy to be of any real importance or else most sites would already have sitelinks. There didn’t seem to be any kind of secret information or trick out there so I stopped caring about it.

I really have no clue how I got them. My site might receive a few thousand unique visitors every month, mostly from CSS and logo galleries. My site really isn’t that old. It’s been in it’s active state for a little over a year now. I’ve got a PageRank of 3 and a little under a thousand inbound links. I seldom post to this blog and I put no strategic effort into keywording or my meta descriptions. Maybe it’s a little of everything, or maybe it has nothing to do with any of that but instead is based solely on awesomeness. I’ll assume the latter going forward and hope losing these links is just as difficult as getting them… but I doubt it.