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There are a lot of websites that look professional in Google results. Try searching for 'stackoverflow' and you'll see at the top a result with a title, a description and a table of 8 links to stackoverflow categories. That's what I'm interested in producing for future websites.
So what must be done? Does it depend on the number of visitors? How long does it take until the results start looking like that?
I think you are referring to "sitelinks". Google generally does not make it public exactly how those are created (to prevent abuse, for example). I suspect you need the subpages to be very strongly linked, perhaps about the same amount or more than the top-level page. No way to know for sure. The best way to get your website looking good in Google is to make it as user-friendly and human-friendly as possible. I think Google typically looks for clues as to whether the website will be relevant to humans and very likely penalizes content that detracts from the interface just to become search-engine optimized.
Make sure that each page (not just your home page) has a title.
Include description meta information, which search engines may (or may not) use for snippets to display.
If an unordered list (<ul><li><a href="http://..">Home...) is used for navigation on the page, Google will pick that up and display it underneath the page listing when it is the #1 or #2 position listing.
Google may also use the description meta, or the first few lines of text that appear on the page, underneath the entry. It usually does this for searches in the other positions.
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I am the developer of Infermap.com. We are regularly monitoring and working on SEO and presence on Google SERPs. In the past 3-4 days we have seen a sudden steep drop in the number of Impressions on Google.
Can someone suggest me the possible reason of why might this happen and by what ways I can prevent it.
Also I have added around 11k urls to be indexed out of which only 1.5k has been indexed. What are the possible reasons for it?
(note: this question should probably be moved to Webmasters Stack Exchange)
Looks like your 11k new URLs have not been picked up as quality content by Google. You might even be cloaking, when I click on a result I get a completely different text on your site.
Ways to avoid it:
avoid cloaking
avoid adding similar looking pages without unique content, e.g. make sure your pages are unique enough before publishing them
feed new content that looks alike gradually, e.g. start with 100 pages, wait a week or two, and add another 200. Once you are confident your pages are picked up well you can add everything at once.
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I am just starting to work on my first responsive site and am realizing some SEO things may fit on the front page of our site may not fit 'naturally' on the front page of the mobile version.
Is there anyway to ensure search engines see the full-size site?
Once complicating matter is that I am designing the site 'mobile first'. So the site does not default to full-size, it defaults to mobile sizes.
Assuming you deliver the same content to the end user regardless of device, and just show/hide or reformat based upon a media query, it really doesn’t matter. Google will still get the full content of the page so will index all of your content. What is visible in the viewport isn’t really significant to Google.
Google will, however, understand the use of media queries and give you some additional SEO benefits as a result. Google favours responsive design over separate sites/mobile specific pages. Responsive design also helps improve the indexing efficiency of the Googlebot.
One thing they do advise is not to block access to any of your ‘external’ resources (css, js, images etc)
Plenty of good information here
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I have a question regarding meta descriptions.
On pages other than the homepage, the meta description simply uses the post content (I'm using Wordpress). My question is, should I be trimming the content to 150 chars? That's what I normally do, and I even append a "..." to the end.
However I'm wondering if its more beneficial to forget about the 155 char limit to fit it perfectly in Google listings.
Any opinions?
Your description is just one of the sources Google considers when deciding what goes in the search result snippet.
Saying that, it is the most often used source so can be worth filling in, as it gives you a better chance of controlling what gets displayed.
Don't worry about its exact length or if it is different. The key thing is you have the chance to create a great snippet that encourages people to click to your article.
I'd install an SEO plugin that lets you override a default description. Then do that for your most popular articles so you can fine tune that snippet.
p.s. Don't append the "...". Google does that for you if your description is too long.
I think its okay. I don't know if they handle it as double content. For me it would be nicer to write a separate and real short intro with most important keywords that differs from content.
Otherwise you can leave out description on article pages and Google is picking an interesting part out by itself and this part is related to the users search terms, if I have seen this right?!
Also worth considering that the new style google site links lauinched within the last few weeks put an emphasis on the first circa 30 chars of the meta description.
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My company's web-site is all about online games, so accessibility is not high on our priority list. SEO best practices, however, are. Searching on the net we couldn't find any discussion of whether or not ARIA is such a best practice (which is a kind of answer already :-). I found this surprising because using ARIA roles seems like a natural thing to do - they contain a lot of SEO-relevant meta-data (overall page structure, what parts of the page are the "main" as opposed to "service" navigation area, what parts contain "actual" vs. "related" vs. "independent" content, etc.). What's more, given they effect the user interface (screen readers and so on) they would tend to be pretty accurate when they exist.
Does anyone have specific knowledge about whether any search engines actually use this data, if it exists in a page?
Search engines like Google are pretty smart no matter how badly you set up your page, SEO relevant meta data or not.
The main thing is to make sure your page is marked up properly, that it validates and that you don't employ any "black-hat" techniques that could cause search engines to black list your page.
As for ARIA, I'm not sure if it's really going to make much difference one way or another.
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If you google a specific entity, occasionally the website listed first is given a little listing of content, sort of like a mini site-map that the user can click on to navigate the linked site, bypassing the home page.
My question is this: Can I control this mini-sitemap when I am PR1? If so, how do I do so? I'm trying to build a list of relevant links so users can more effectively hit my site, but I'm not sure where to go about doing this.
Help?
No you cannot turn this on. Google decides this on their own wheter or not to generate them and for which search terms. If you sign up for the google webmasters you can see the status (if google has generated some for your site) and read more about their background.
Google generates the sitelinks itself, but only for certain sites. As for how it determines which sites get it and which don't, I'm not really sure, but I suspect it has something to do with the pagerank of the site and the amount of content you have.
For a while, I had sitelinks for my site (PR4 with about 40,000 pages indexed in Google) but then a while later, they went away. In my case it generated sitelinks for the main tabs on the site, probably because they are in the header navigation and therefore on every single page near the top of the page.
The only control you have over them is you can use the Google webmaster tools to remove sitelinks that you don't like, but you can't change the existing ones or suggest new ones.
They are called Sitelinks - there's a FAQ entry about them here.
You can't control them (except to remove ones you don't like) - the FAQ says "At the moment, sitelinks are completely automated."