4 things you should add to your website today
1. Advanced Website Search Options
This enhancement helps advanced users of Chrome and Google to search your website with an entry point being Google or Chrome. It eventually opens your Website Search Page
From Google Search
If you search Github on Google you will get to see a search bar right in the results. This is powered by the OpenSearch description tag and the open search document which specifies your search pass and how can someone pass on the query parameter to the page in order to search through the website
The same metadata which powers this feature also allows you to search the website from Google Chrome by typing the domain and hitting tab.
Implementation
There are 2 parts to this implementation.
- The Link tag which needs to specify the OpenSearch XML configuration for the website.
- The OpenSearch XML File
The XML File is pretty simple to implement, you specify the search team in the URL element and the search form which is the search page. Currently, Google does use the favicon specified in the OpenSearch file. In case you add a huge description it will take up a lot of space in Chrome (the second image from the top)
How long does it take for this to reflect on Google?
While there is no timeframe w.r.t when the changes reflect on Google, it would take a couple of days generally before it starts reflecting.
2. Knowledge Panel For Publishers
This feature is specific to Publishers and was recently introduced.
Google started showing up content which it deems fit either under authors or under categories depending on how you cluster your content.
For New Yorker, it's under authors while for NYTimes it's based on Topics. For NYTimes, it also lists down Awards as a tab which is quite interesting.
Click the following links to see for yourself.
To get this to work, you will need to set up a Google Business Page. Read more regarding this here.
3. Google Sitelinks
This is a tricky one, there is no metadata which allows you to customize this, but from what I see, it picks up links from the landing pages and uses some algorithm to understand if it is relevant to the user.
This is what Google says on its website -
We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.
You can read the full document
4. Metadata for increasing performance
If there is a case where you load images or other assets/resources from a subdomain or a completely different domain you can add the following tags to reduce the time to takes to do a DNS lookup.
While there are hundreds of other things you can do, these are the 4 small changes you can do today to improve your website.
