Sitelinks are the small links which appear in the SERPs below the meta description. They do not appear in all the results, but some of them. e.g.
We see that there are two types of sitelinks. The first are those which appear below the site url and the second are those which appear below meta description of an article (or below the meta description of a site).
These sitelinks are also shown in Bing SERPs. Check the following examples:
I did not find sitelinks in other search engines like DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Baidu etc. However we should not forget that our major traffic comes from Google followed by Bing.
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Importance of Sitelinks in SEO
Well, I believe that sitelinks makes the site look trustworthy and also increase CTR (click-through-rate).They help the user to understand the subsections of the content.
However we should keep in mind that sitelinks mostly appear for search results on the first page of google/bing.
As far as sitelinks below the site’s name are concerned, they do not appear easily. First the site needs to rank on #1 position for a brand keyword and then it should have some authority (built over time).
e.g. the brand keyword “English Notes” won’t show any sitelinks for my site englishnotes.com because it does not rank on #1 position.
In this blog article, I am going to talk about sitelinks which appear below a blog post because they are easier to display than those which appear below the site’s url for its brand keyword(s).
Use of subheadings in the content for each section
The first thing which we should do while writing an article is to divide the content into sections. It will make the content look well organised and easier to read.
So, how you find subheadings for the article? Well there is an easy method. e.g. you need to write an article on “Keyword Research”, you can find plenty of ideas relating to the topic using Explore Keywords Marketing Keywords Generator Tool, Question Keywords Generator Tool and A-Z Keywords Generator Tool.
Using these tools, you can find hundreds of ideas which you can organise into sections. From the data above, we can select many keywords like,
- Best free keyword research tool
- keyword research for amazon
- keyword research with semrush
- keyword research in digital marketing and so on.
It makes easy for us as well to write the content because it provides an outline of the article and new ideas.
Using Table of Contents for showing an index of all the subheadings.
The next important step is to include Table of Contents in the article to show a list of all the subheadings present. e.g. Wikipedia uses Table of Contents
For that we can use any Table fo Contents Plugin.
I personally use Easy Table of Contents Plugin. You may use any of these which you like (based on their features). Here is a WordPress site which uses Table of Contents Plugin:
Using an SEO Plugin
I recommend using RankMath plugin as it has extensive features for SEO. It will help you customise the appearance of the snippet of your article.
Hope the article has helped you. Feel free to ask any question in the comment box.