Question on the priveledge of being the first search result

I'm not sure what it's called, but when your domain is the first search result in Google organic search, sometimes Google will add additional links from your site below your main page.

For example, when you search "seo forum", seochat.com is the first result and it lists the following links:
Google Optimization
Google Page Rank
Link Popularity
Google News
Yahoo Search Optimization
Professionals
Tools
Google Adwords

My question is, when does Google do this and when do they NOT do this?

What can I do additionally to get Google to show more links from my site, when I am the first search result?

Pages that have site links under their main link are automatically generated for authoritative websites.

If google deems your website as authoritative they will automatically generate your site links.

Thanks for the response, but why will Google display the site links under my domain for certain keywords, when I'm the first result, and not for other key word searches, when I'm the first result?

It's like Google is saying, you're authoritative here, but not there.

I certainly believe that there is a method to their madness, I just want to learn how to get better results when I'm the first result.

As I understand it you need to be the most relevant for the search term by some margin in order for the sitelinks to appear.

If the site in #2 position is not that far behind you, you won't see the sitelinks.

Additionally, I would imagine that Google sees the sitelinks as being particularly relevant for some terms, and not others. Hence why you're likely to see them for your company name (it would be expected that most sitelinks would be relevant to such a search), whereas for a more specific search term additional links would be of less benefit to the user, eg "company x address" might not be enhanced by the addition of such links as "products", "forums", etc.

When you tackle a new keyword and see that #1 has sitelinks, you're looking at an uphill battle with a cliff face at the end.

You can still win #1, but you'll have to dethrown the site with sitelinks, which will be much harder than passing the other competitors on the way.

This makes sense. Thanks for the answer. I guess it's not enough to be the first result, you have something more to shoot for.

I just got sitelinks on a couple more of my domains, I'm not sure if this was always there or not, but GWTs has an option to "block" some or all of the sitelinks. They chose some pages on my site I wish were others so...

Has anyone tried "blocking" a sitelink or two and seeing what happens?

It'd be great if G choose another one or two for you to replace the "blocked" ones...Then I could just keep "blocking" till i got the ones i wanted to show up...

That would be nice. GWT has had it for at least a little while now. I have a similar issue, but would rather not mess with it and have 1 of my sitelinks less relevant than I wished.

It'd be nice to know if someone has explored the possibility of forcing a swap.