Now I hadn't paid too much attention to this new feature until we started testing a new search traffic monitoring tool we've built at OrangeValley, and I noticed that 5% of the traffic coming to my WordPress SEO article had such rich "jump to" snippets. I could see this because they entered the site with a URL with a fragment identifier (aka hash: #) in it.

Now 5% of the traffic didn't immediately make me go all nuts, until I started thinking about what this meant usability wise: instead of people having to search within the article for the content they came for, they're taken straight there. That's a bonus, right? I've yet to prove that this improves conversions, but I'd guess it would.

Researching jump to snippets

So here starts the research: how do we optimize for these rich snippets? In the post on the Google Webmaster blog accompanying the official release, they state that:

There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they [these jump to snippets, JdV] might appear on your pages. First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just "Section 2.1"), and that your page includes a "table of contents" which links to the individual anchors.

When I dove more deeply into our stats, I noticed a couple of things:

• almost every article that has an internal Table of Contents is getting this kind of traffic
• those articles are getting more search engine traffic in general (probably related to their length too)
• they use different ways of identifying the anchor, and all seem to work
• their tables of contents are always marked up using a list
• articles with "just" inline internal links to other parts of the article do not seem to get this kind of traffic

How to create internal anchors

Basically there's three ways of defining these anchors:

1. <h2 id="heading">Heading</h2>
2. <h2><a id="heading">Heading</a></h2>
3. <h2><a name="heading">Heading</a></h2>

All three options require linking to them like this:

<a href="#heading">Heading</a>

Where my WordPress SEO article uses option #2, our Magento SEO is using option #1, and the examples Google gives are using option #3. I can't see any real reason to choose one over the other, so I chose the cleanest one: option #1.

Optimizing for jump to snippets

So what do we need to do?

It turns out this is awfully simple, you need to do two things:

1. properly identify the different sections of longer articles, and identify their headings with fragments;
2. create a table of contents, linking to these fragments.

While the Magento SEO article has a clearly marked Table of Contents, the WordPress SEO article only has a listing of internal links, without any heading. They do have one thing in common: a list, either ul or ol linking to the different sections with their appropriate fragments.

So your table of contents should look like something like this at the minimum:

<ol>
<li><a href="#research">Researching jump to snippets</a></li>
<li><a href="#createinternal">How to create internal anchors</a></li>
<li><a href="#optimization">Optimizing for jump to snippets</a></li>
</ol>

I'll keep track of this kind of traffic from now on, and I'll let you know if I find any more optimizations. There's one caveat to this: this is not based on a very large data set yet, and it just so happens to be that all of the pages with ToC's I found getting this traffic have these ToC's marked up as lists. It could be that other ways of marking up a ToC work too, I just haven't found a working example yet.

Optimizing for Rich "Jump To" Snippets is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Notice something? I know I did: there's no description there. So I clicked on and checked the page to see what could cause that, finding it was easy:

<meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />

It was listed right above the EditURI line that WordPress puts in by default, telling me they forgot to uncheck a box (that get's checked by default on some auto installers, I've been told on Twitter):

One issue though... If Google had actually seen that tag, it wouldn't have listed the site at all. So there had to be something else. And of course, there is: meet Webdesigner Magazine's robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Sitemap: http://www.webdesignermag.co.uk/sitemap.xml.gz

The first two lines there prevent Google from indexing the site entirely. But it just became funnier... The fourth line was added by a plugin they're running, pointing search engine bots at their XML sitemap. Yes, the same bots they just forbade entry to their entire site... If you check out their XML sitemap, you'd notice they're running Arne Brachold's Google XML Sitemap Generator...

So: they installed an XML sitemap plugin, let's see what else they did: ah... Cool! They're running All In One SEO too! Now AIOSEO is "ok", except: it doesn't warn you for stupidities like these... Might be a darn good feature for an SEO plugin to check whether your site is actually allowing crawlers to come in, don't you think? Ah well, nothing can be perfect.

Anyway, this tells me one thing: Web Designer Mag needs help with their WordPress install. And they need it bad. If you work for them, and read this, feel free to contact me on Twitter or through the contact form. I'd be happy to help!

Web Designer Mag should fix its SEO is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The solution can be found in one single RedirectMatch line. This line should be placed above the Wordpress code, or in the Apache config. The line is the following:

RedirectMatch 301 /([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$4

This matches every URL which starts with a date, and permanently redirects it to the new URL for this post. Ofcourse you could be running your blog in a subdirectory, like I am, in that case, the line would be:

RedirectMatch 301 /subdir/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/([0-9]+)/(.*)$
http://www.example.com/subdir/$4

This way, all your incoming links will still work, and thus count for SearchEngines and you have the benefits of the new URL structure.

Changing your permalink structure is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!