Adding Links To Your Google Search Result Snippet

It’s not often that Google gives away information on how to affect your search results listings. Sure, they have told us how to have some input into search results snippets, but even that is hit and miss sometimes. Google has added a new feature to search results in the form of deep links to content within your site. The following is an example from the Google Blog:

Whilst you have no direct control over those deeper links, Google does offer some advice on how you may affect these links. It should be noted that (1) not every search result will have a deeper link and (2), these links are generally to specific sections on the one page (although not always it seems).

How can you help your site generate these listings – from the words of Google direct:

First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1″), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors.

This could be very handy if your pages cover a variety of sub topics. It provides direct links to those sub topics rather than just taking the user to the top of the page and forcing them to find the information they are looking for.

Of course, for blogs, you may be better off breaking the sub topics up into separate posts. This will give you extra content with each post ranking for a keyword related to that post. If it’s not possible then consider using a table of contents within your blog post – WordPress has a plugin that makes this task a lot easier.

This feature won’t be for everyone and not every page will have the necessary elements to generate deeper links. For those pages that do then why not include SEO techniques that give them the best opportunity of having deeper links included.