To add Sitelinks to your campaign (Ad Sitelinks will be the same for all ads in your campaign) you need to select the “Show additional links on my site” option in the “Ad Extensions” section under the Campaign Settings tab.

You can select up to ten links, but only 4 will be eventually chosen, depending on the keyword that triggered the ad and the ad’s quality score.

As you can see in the screenshot example above, Ad Sitelinks offer opportunities to segment users and direct them further down the purchase funnel. It’s also possible to organise Ad Sitelinks according to brand segmentation or direct users to the most converting pages, choosing brief but effective ad text for the links.

SEO for sitelinks in organic search results

Sitelinks are one of the solutions Google implemented to offer enhanced listings in natural search results, providing more options to users by allowing them to jump directly to important pages of a site, bypassing the homepage and navigation menu.

Pages ranked at the top position on the SERP can show eight sitelinks, arranged in two columns; other search results will feature up to four sitelinks listed in one single row above the URL.

Users can have an overview of a site’s structure and best content before choosing a search result over another, but not all sites will have sitelinks and they would be automatically generated by Google’s algorithms. In this example it’s interesting to see two different anchors Google used for the same destination page, “Streaming” and “Calcio Streaming”.

In fact webmasters cannot choose which pages would appear as sitelinks or the link text, but it’s possible to exclude a page from sitelinks from Google Webmaster Tools.

How to get sitelinks for your website on Google

Google hasn’t revealed the algorithm behind sitelinks: Webmasters can only speculate about it and test different theories.

Sites that show sitelinks in search results are well structured, have a clear hierarchy and consistent text links. Search engines need to be able to navigate the site, understand the navigation hierarchy, the meaning of categories and the topic of sub-pages.

According to Bill Slawski of SEO by the SEA, an authority in analyzing search engine patents, sitelinks would appear to help users in navigational queries. Pages could be shown depending on log file analysis and data collected from Google Toolbar: Web page popularity would be a primary factor, determined by CTR, traffic data and links pointing to the page.

Ann Smarty lists six educated theories that could explain the factors concurring in generating sitelinks. Traffic data, on-page SEO and internal architecture are confirmed as important factors, but domain authority, brand strength and the absence of competition on specific queries would also influence the appearance of sitelinks.

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If you know how to write an XML Sitemap file, adding images will be easy: You just have to add information about the images right after you specify the URL of the page where the image is residing.

The Sitemap would only show the location and the file name of every image, but Google will use meta tags and on page information like words “surrounding” the image, its alt and title attributes, to understand how to index it.

The following code is taken from Google Webmaster Central Blog:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:image=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1″>
<url>
<loc>http://example.com/sample.html</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
</url>
</urlset>

How to optimise your images for Universal SEO

Google images search can be an important traffic source and images take an important share of the Search Engine Result Page for many different queries: SERPs can show different kind of results, like images, News, Tweets and many more.

While adding images to your XML Sitemap would increase the chances for your images to be indexed, optimising images with proper file names, alt and title attributes are Universal SEO best practices that should be implemented in order to achieve better rankings.

XML Treasure Sitemap credit: Fabric Attic

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Registering an additional top level domain is not always a viable option: Some countries apply very restrictive requirements and most companies can’t afford all the expenses related to domain registration and local website hosting.

What many webmasters do is creating folders for pages in different languages (www.example.com/it/), or even better use sub domains like www.it.example.com (hopefully Page Titles, menu items and noscript content will be in the new language too.)

More important than the URL structure is page content. Translating the original content isn’t enough for multilingual SEO.

International SEO Localisation (and Localization)

It’s not just a matter of spelling: Content needs to be localised in terms of language and communication style that can differ from culture to culture. What can make a difference in SEO terms is localisation in keyword research.

Translating keywords would be a terrible mistake. Keyword research must be carried out by people that can understand the language, preferably by native speakers.

Other on page activities helpful in indicating the geolocation of your pages are the declaration of the primary language for each Web page with the lang attribute in the tag (<html lang=”it-IT”>) and using the meta language tag (<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”it”>.)

Set a geographic target on Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools gives you an opportunity to specify your target audience. Under Site configuration settings you can select your Geographic target or leave it as Unlisted to tell Google that your website isn’t associated with any country.

Submit multiple XML Sitemaps

Google Webmaster Tools lets you submit more than one Sitemap on the same domain. By creating Sitemaps for different subfolders or subdomains (uploading them on the specific root folder like example.com/it/sitemap-it.xml), you can then verify them and select the appropriate country setting.

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You would expect to find more online pharmacy results, apart from the Official Tamiflu website, Roche’s Tamiflu page, a couple of Wikipedia results and relevant results from authoritative medicine websites.

Well, this will happen if you search on Google or Yahoo. When I typed “tamiflu” on my Bing search box on Internet Explorer, I got the results you can see in the image below.

You could get different results, depending on your country settings on Bing, but what seems out of place are the results in French and German on the Italian Red Hot Chili Peppers forum.

Bing SEO Tips

What can we understand about Bing’s algorithm by looking at these high ranking results?

• Bing’s algorithm gives more weight to country code top-level domains (.it) than to the language of the page content
• On-page strong spam signals like click here links to Viagra and Cialis pages aren’t taken into account and don’t help Bing in spotting a commercial intent on a University forum page
• Website’s main focus (Red Hot Chili Peppers, music) doesn’t matter when deciding whether an off-topic (medicine) page is relevant
• University (and RHCP!) forums are considered more relevant than Wikipedia pages or medicine websites
• It seems that Bing isn’t able to distinguish between weird user profile names and legitimate Page Titles about a medicine, even when folder names and parameters in URLs clearly show what a page is (/public/forum/index.php?/user/ and /forum/index.php?showuser)

I guess Bing assumed that my intent was transactional (hey Bing, I didn’t type “buy” or “cheap”!), but actually I have to admit I didn’t know what Tamiflu is, and after checking Google’s SERP I clicked on Wikipedia’s result.

If Bing gave high value to forum discussions or Yahoo Answers type results for informational queries, we couldn’t complain about the quality of the SERP, but what’s striking is that University websites and active forums virtually about any topic can dominate a Bing SERP with spammy off topic pages where user input is minimal (those are user profile pages, not forum discussions).

Black hat SEOs can exploit Bing’s weaknesses and place spammy links on forum user profile pages (having friends studying in Italian universities could help…). Evidence shows it can be effective and cheaper than bidding for those keywords on Google AdWords. However it can’t be considered a safe link building technique for legitimate websites, because Google would spot what Bing can’t, unless you find a way to show a different forum user profile page to Googlebot.

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