Ecommerce Web Design Blog

How many times have you entered a search term into Google, and the first result that comes up has some predefined sublinks underneath? For example putting oscworks into your browser reveals the sitelinks currently defined for our website:

You can see we currently have links to our Shopping Carts, Features and Layouts page for our ecommerce shopping carts as well as some other pages that Google considers relevant to users. These are some of the most frequently visited pages on our website as well as the pages that we refer to ourselves as relevant in terms of the way links are set up on our site.

Once you have sitelinks, they are updated on a weekly basis and can frequently change. You can't control what pages do come up, but if a page comes up that you don't want indexed with a Sitelink, you can block that page from having sitelinks by blocking it in Google's webmaster tools.

How Google determines which pages  have Sitelinks and whether your site has them or not is a closely guarded secret by Google. But here are some things we have observed about Sitelinks:

• You have to rank #1 on the term where the sitelinks appear, so in most cases they only come up when you search for your business name. There are very few searches in any industry where sitelinks are given
• Your domain usually must be two years or more old
• The pages you link to frequently in your site you are designating as important. These pages have a higher chance of coming up as sitelinks.
• Ensure you have a very clear page navigation structure and you don't have too many navigation links. Put your key categories in your sideboxes and use subcategories where appropriate. If you use too many navigation links, then Google (and your visitors) will have trouble working out what the most important pages in your site are
• Make sure your site has lots of links from relevant sites back to you. This ensures that your site is considered relevant as a whole (and therefore worthy of sitelinks).

If you don't have

When you visit a website on the Internet that you want to come back to, most browsers will let you mark it as a favourite or bookmark. But what if you want to share your list of bookmarks with other people? This is where the practice of social bookmarking comes in. Social bookmark websites allow people to keep lists of favourite sites on publicly available lists on the Internet and tag them with keywords. This makes them useful to share with other people or come back to themselves later.

Because they are publicly available, you can visit other people's lists as well to see what sites they find useful. Search engines can visit these lists too and index them in the search engines. This means social bookmarking can play a big part in helping your website rank in the search engines.

There are a huge number of social bookmarking sites available. Facebook and MyYahoo are probably two of the most well known social news and social bookmarking sites on the Internet, but there are many others too: digg, del.icio.us, Stumble Upon and Technorati are other examples.

How can you take advantage of social bookmarking for your search engine marketing activities? Here are a few things you can do:

• Write useful and interesting content that will make people want to bookmark those pages and come back to them. Use a blog if possible, as some social bookmarking sites focus only on blog/news links and not products.

• Offer innovative products with clear, concise product descriptions so people will bookmark those pages to show others your products (or come back and buy them)

• Add a social bookmarking toolbar to your pages or sideboxes (like the one below this article) to make it easy for your website's visitors to bookmark you. The easier you make it, and the more relevant the bookmarking sites you choose to feature are to your target customers, the more likely you are to be bookmarked.