Tuesday, April 21, 2009

One-line sitelinks



You may be familiar with sitelinks, the links that show up underneath the first search result and which lead to specific pages deeper within the site. Sitelinks enable users to jump directly to important parts of a site, which is often useful for large, complex websites. Sitelinks have the additional advantage of giving users an overview of a website's content by highlighting some of the popular parts of the site. For webmasters, sitelinks are also beneficial because they help to expose parts of your site that users may not know about. For instance, a search for NASA provides links to a gallery of images, a page about Space Shuttle and ISS missions, and so on:


Until now, sitelinks have only ever appeared on the first search result, and so at most one site could have sitelinks per query. We're now launching an expansion of sitelinks: a single row of links can now appear for results that didn't show sitelinks before, even for results that aren't in the first position. This means multiple results on one query can now have sitelinks. Up to four sitelinks can show up right above the page URL, instead of the usual two columns below the URL of the first result. Here's an example where the first three results each have one-line sitelinks:


These one-line sitelinks have many of the same benefits as the full two-column sitelinks, but on a smaller scale: they show users some relevant sub-pages in the site and give an idea of what the site is about. Comparing the sitelinks that appear for each result can even illustrate the difference between the sites. Just like regular sitelinks, one-line sitelinks are generated algorithmically and the decisions on when to show them and which links to display are entirely based on the expected benefit to users.

For webmasters, this new feature means it's possible that your site will start showing sitelinks for a number of queries where it previously didn't. We expect this will increase the visibility of and traffic to your site, while also improving the experience of users. If, however, you absolutely would prefer not to have a particular sitelink show up, remember that you can always block a page from appearing as a sitelink for 90 days through Webmaster Tools. In fact, as part of our ongoing efforts at improving the Webmaster Tools experience, we're speeding up our response time to blocked pages, so you should see a blocked page get dropped as a sitelink even faster than before. If you need a quick refresher on how to use the sitelink blocking tool, take a look at this previous blog post. Currently you can only block sitelinks on your site's home page, but we're working on expanding this capability so you'll soon be able to remove them from any other page as well.

We hope you find these improvements to sitelinks and Webmaster Tools helpful for both your site and your visitors!


Increase Keyword Density

Let's talk about what keyword density is and how to improve your keyword density on your web site. To improve your keyword density ratio there are three parts that we will need address.

Part 1: Content

When it comes to the Search Engines content is king! Yes king! Search Engines want web sites that are rich in content. Content is words that are embedded in text on your web site. Your keyword density ratio is one of the most important ingredients of getting good Search Engine rankings and influences the Search Engines on how to rank your web site accordingly.

For those of you who are not sure what keyword density is and how the Search Engines use it to configure their ranking structure, let me explain. Keyword density is the total number of times your keywords appear within the content of your web page, including text, hyper links, and the ALT tag of your images. I will explain each of them so you will have a clear understanding of the principles. Your keyword density is measured by a simple mathematical formula that is used to configure your keyword density ratio.

To configure your keyword density ratio you must take the number of times a keyword appears in the content of your web site, divide it by the total number of words and that's your keyword density ratio. I will give you a quick example of keyword "Marketing":

Example:

The keyword "Marketing appears 47 times in text on your web page and if you have 315 words on your web page, your keyword density ratio would then be 15%.

Obviously the higher your keyword density is, the greater influence you'll have getting the Search Engines to give you a better ranking. Becareful though, you don't want to over repeat the same combination of words and/or sentences just to increase your keyword density. Your website could end up looking like a broken record.

Part 2: Hyper Links

How many times have you seen links that say "Click Here"? A lot huh! If you are currently using this type of linking or going to be linking, then you want to pay attention, because this is really important to your keyword density ratio. I am going to use my web site for these examples so that you can understand clearly.

Example #1

Click Here For The Absolute Truth To Internet Marketing & The Secrets To Online Wealth

If you were to use this type of linking in Example #1. The Search Engines would pick all the "Click Here" hyper links and would think that the words "click here" are keywords that describe the content of your web site.

So remove all the "Click Here's" and replace them with keywords that describe your web site. That is the only way to increase your keyword density when you are using links. You should end up with something like this in Example #2:

Example #2

Inside Internet Marketing The Absolute Truth To Internet Marketing & The Secrets To Online Wealth.

Part 3: Images

First of all if you have images on your web site, the images don't mean squat to the Search Engines. When the Search Engines robots crawl your web site, those images are nothing more than blank spots. The same blank spots are shown to the surfers that have arrived on your web site with the images turned off. You'll find that many surfers surf the web with images turned off.

This is where the alternate tag (ALT Tag) comes into play. The ALT tag is used to describe your image to the surfers that surf the web with images off and most importantly, improves your keyword density. Here is an example of how to install the ALT tag in your images:

When describing the image you want to be very descriptive and use keywords. Most people don't install their ALT Tag properly, for instance, on their logo image they'll use "My Logo" in the ALT Tag. Which is the wrong way to effectively use the ALT Tag, there are no keywords in "My Logo".