I never know what clients are going to ask me about Search Engine Optimization, but inevitably, a couple times a year, someone asks me “what are those nicely tabbed six links to subpages under the homepage on Google Search Results?”

The answer “Organic Sitelinks.”

The inevitable follow up question: “can we control them?”

The answer “No, with one exception.”

The video explains, but here’s more from Google on Sitelinks:

Sitelinks
The links shown below some of Google’s search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

1: The main search result

2: Sitelinks

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.

At the moment, sitelinks are automated. We’re always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future. There are best practices you can follow, however, to improve the quality of your sitelinks. For example, for your site’s internal links, make sure you use anchor text and alt text that’s informative, compact, and avoids repetition.