Top tips for leveraging Google’s new mega-sitelinks

You may (or may not) have noticed that Google recently started showing what I’d describe as “mega-sitelinks”.

Say it loud and say it s-l-o-w.

The official name is Expanded Sitelinks, but I like mine better.

Anyway, here’s how they look (mainly on brand related search terms):

Whenever Google changes something, you may have noticed us “SEO people” tend to pounce pretty quickly to try and figure out how to make the most of the change.

Change is your friend, change creates opportunities…

By the way, this is what they used to look like:

Apart from the fact that there are a lot more of them than there used to be, underneath each of the new Expanded Sitelinks is a small snippet of text describing what the page is about in a little more detail.

For the most part, this snippet is being pulled from each page’s Meta Content Description Tag. Even though the Meta Content Description tag doesn’t help your SEO (keyword optimising it for SEO doesn’t help your rankings) Google and the other search engines usually bold the words you’ve searched for in the results.

Here’s a website we all know and love dearly which really isn’t working its sitelinks to great effect:

It’s quite possible that the ATO has the worst SEO of all the Government department websites.

They have rubbish results like the ones in the screenshot above because none of their pages utilise the Meta Content Description Tag; Google simply resorts to using “on page” snippets. Google’s also using the DMOZ editor description for the home page “two line snippet” in the results.

I could go on, but I can feel a tax audit coming on…

So what can you do to get more traffic and more sales with this new change?

The first few words of your Meta Content Tag are really important now. You’ve got at most about 35 characters to play with so use them to try and encourage a click. Brookstone in the US does a fantastic job. You can see they’ve added great action words and phrases, “Be the first to get the new…” and they kick off their opening words with calls to action, “Buy kitchen tools, appliances…” They’ve also used benefit driven copy, “Brookstone coupons save you money…”

There’s more information from Google here, especially useful if you have embarrassing site links.

In your Google Webmaster Tools account you’re also now given the option to “demote” a page showing in the sitelinks, so you have a better chance of a more important page showing up.

There’s more useful information about Expanded Sitelinks here.

Work those meta descriptions.

For more Online Sales expert advice, click here.

Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.