Structuring your pages and providing a table of contents:

• Assists screen readers as it enables them to navigate the document using headings
• Provides a good overview of the material that awaits the reader
• Adds a professional elegance and shows that you do care about content – after all content is king right?

After a couple of Google searches, I noticed links underneath the results that go directly to headings within the page.  This is pretty neat as it sends you direct to a block of content that may be more applicable to your search terms, rather than to the start of the document.

It turns out that Google has been doing this for over two years now.  Google doesn’t have a name for them so I’ll be calling them jump to links.  Google requires that the web page be setup in a compatible way before jump to links are added to search results.  To check out their requirements, see using named anchors to identify sections on your pages over at the Google Webmaster Central blog.

Existing Table of Contents Plus plugin users need not do any further work as the plugin meets all requirements.  Your headings should be included as jump to links within search results.  As an example, I searched for table of contents plus description and obtained the following search result:

Not only did it include a link directly to the ‘description’ section, it also included links to other sections of content on the page (as displayed in the table of contents).  Pretty neat huh!

So if you’re not already benefiting from this, start structuring your documents properly (eg using headings 1 through to 6), add the table of contents plus, sit back and relax.

You can find more information about the plugin in its WordPress repository page, or its homepage.