How does Google compile the list of links below some search results?

The links shown below some sites in Google’s search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Their systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

They only show sitelinks for results when they think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow thier algorithms to find good sitelinks, or they don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, they won’t show them.

At the moment, sitelinks are completely automated. They’re always working to improve their sitelinks algorithms, and may incorporate webmaster input in the future.

Referenced from: Google.

Alt Image Attribute Usage – Hear It From Google

Dont’ forget your alt tags! Not only does it provide valid XHTML coding standards but, it adds another layer of keywords that can be added to your page to help improve SEO. Images used in websites that have keywords in the alt tags provide Google with information regarding to what the image is if, they are used right.

Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team describes which ones are important in this video:

Must Read SEO Articles for any Web Designer

I come across a lot of really good articles while researching SEO and thought I would share them with you. I will revise this post over time as I gather more SEO information. Feel free to post anything you come across as well!

Compare Traffic with Google Trends for Websites

Google Trends

Google Trends is a tool from Google Labs that shows the most popularly searched terms based on one or more keywords from the beginning of 2004 to now. Google Trends charts how often a particular search term is entered relative the total search volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages.

This is an excellent tool to add to your SEO arsenal.

Adding 301 redirects using htaccess

It’s easy adding 301 redirects to your website using Apache’s htaccess. A 301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for web page redirection. It’s not difficult to implement and will preserve your search engine rankings as well.

So, basically how this works is when someone tries to access your website without the (www), it will redirect the URL to your website with the www.

To implement this for your website follow these instructions:

  1. Open up notepad or any other text editor and copy and paste the commands below.
  2. Change (yourdomain) to your domain name.
  3. Save the file with this name: (.htaccess). There is no file name.
  4. Upload it to the root directory of your website.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]