Featured answers and good SEO

Last year I talked about Google’s featured answers and said that I’d post more once we’d experimented with it and figured out how it works.

I’ve had some to work with and have found that it can be a great way to catapult your site up the rankings by five or six spots or more.

Featured answers are those short questions and answers at the top of the page that you see if you search for a specific question instead of a phrase.

Getting your site on the featured answer spot means you’ll have a listing above even the #1 spot on the page. When it comes to rankings, you can’t get any better than this.

The way to have your featured answer picked up is twofold. First, you have to make sure your SEO is spot on. Make sure your titles are in H1 and H2 form, and have the key question you’re trying to rank for part of the title.

Ensure you have a clean, concise URL on your graphics that match the H1 phrase in the title. Clean up your site, remove spammy links, and do everything else you can to make sure your site only has clean SEO.

Once you’ve got the details down and your site is on the first page, you can work toward getting at the top.

A site needs to explicitly or implicitly ask and answer the question.

I like to do it explicitly so there’s no question about it. Put the question right on the page, in the title if possible. Answer the question directly below that. The question and answer should be the first thing you see on the page, along with a great graphic with the right keyword.

Mix all these things together and you can get your site at the top of its Google page.

For more information, visit StewArt Media.

Jim Stewart is a leading expert in search engine optimisation. His business  StewArt Media  has worked with clients including Mars, M2 and the City of Melbourne.