Indented listings, authority sites and increased traffic

There are 1001 SEO blogs, tools and forums out here to learn from so I don’t think that I need to go into any great depth as to the basics, I personally learnt a lot through my own trial and error and reading Digital Point solidly for about a year, if there is one aspect of seo that I believe is worth concentrating on it is your indented listings.

An indented listing is where you get a normal organic listing but also a secondary indented listing below it to the same website.

Indented Listing
How do you get an indented listing?


Simple, get backlinks not only to your homepage but also to a strong & important internal page or pages, it is no coincidence that after Al’s great post on the top 100 blogs by feedburner that brought a surge of links to that one internal page and that triggered an indented listing for Self Made Minds, cheers Al!

Indented listings obviously give you two cracks at the searcher and two doorways into your website, you should however make sure your page ranks highly for your search term before diluting your efforts and spreading your inbound links across internal pages too much.

After that you can do the same for 2 or 3 of your main keywords, use your stats programme and concentrate on getting some internal links for your most popular keywords, that sounds like an obvious thing to do, granted, but I’ll show you how it can really come to fruition!

Related Search Results
Early last year Google confirmed their “related results” went live and out of testing, related results or midbox results or whatever you want to call them happen when you type in a search term that also has a very popular related term that may be of interest and these are displayed in the middle of the normal search results with the text See results for:

related

Now these extra/suggestive results in the middle of the page often show popular alternatives to the search term you use, if you have done your homework and also targeted these terms and rank well for them you can get extra coverage in the top 10.

Authority Listing
Further to ‘indented listings’ and ‘related search’, if you work hard on building your website to the point it gets a lot of natural backlinks you can become an authority website which means your site is listed but you also get multiple links to your main internal pages. This often gives 4 or 5 links to different parts of your website

Authority
Becoming an authority takes time, a lot of work and a damn good website that gives users a reason to link to it, it’s a nice achievement to see your site list like this, and no I don’t own the BBC website 🙂

So of the challenges that lie ahead some of the main goals in relation to organic listings would be

  • Rank in the top 5 for your main search term
  • Get an indented listing
  • Then rank for the top 5 most popular terms relating to your website
  • Get indented listing for them
  • Get an authority listing

Once you come to the end of that road cue the ‘who loves you baby’ image below

Who loves you baby

The results above are from Google UK and show my tattoo site holding 4 of the top 5 results, that’s a whole bunch of payback for years of work and you can see how that would help traffic flow through the site, more often the site has 3 of the top 5 for that term so when I checked to see 4 out of 5 that was worth a screenshot!

Nothing is for ever but the above is a very worthwhile target to aim for, you don’t stop when you get a top listing for your main search term you just change direction and keep on going.

Seeing as it’s Friday I thought I’d finish with a bit of breaking news….

Apple Computer announced today that it has developed a computer chip that can store and play music in women’s breast implants.

The iBreast will cost £499 to £599.

This is considered to be a major breakthrough because women are always complaining about men staring at their breasts and not listening to them.

About Scott Jones

Scott hails from the north east of Scotland and started earning online at the end of 2000 building websites for local businesses during which time he won an award from Lord Alan Sugar for Excellence in Enterprise. After having quite a bit of success with domaining Scott mainly runs educational evergreen websites which generate over 3 million visitors per month but is always on the lookout for a fresh thinking out of the box way to turn a buck. Follow on Twitter.

Comments

  1. Good points, oh yes breaking news is icing on the cake (pun intended) 😀

  2. Thats some killer rankings you have there on that keyword! Nice one.

    Thanks for the break down for those types of search results. I wondered why a couple were showing up as they were but never really went out to look for an answer. You saved me looking!

  3. Excellent post

    i have always wanted to know how indented listing works.

    thanks for the explaination scott.

  4. Everyday you provide new inspiration to keep working on this, and everyday I realize there is soo much more I need to do. Thanks for the inspiration. (first step-find out if I am getting any hits and find out where to track them)

  5. I had noticed these indented and ‘authority’ listings for a while but had never considered specifically targeting them. Great article!

    - Martin Reed

  6. Great post. Hit the nail on the head with that one. keep up the great work guys. This is a daily stop for me now.

  7. Once you’ve achieved the authority listing, what can you do to tweak it and make the best of it? I put up a site and got an authority listing without shooting for it solely because of the explosion in popularity and people linking me. Now I’m wondering if there’s any way to tweak it so that different pages and whatnot show up.

  8. Grate information and clear points you got inhere thank you for sharing and hope to get an authority listing with google some day using your directions.

  9. Great post. Hit the nail on the head with that one. keep up the great work guys. I had some questions on indented listings and your post amply made the idea clear to me.

  10. Great post, I’m sure I’l get the hang of all this SEO nonsense one day! I’ll just keep plugging away. 😉

    Tom Walsh’s last blog post..How to get free backlinks

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