Owning the Snippets – Managing your Google Search Results

Your Google results show an automatically generated ‘snippet’ which features descriptions of your site and title. If you don’t optimize your meta tags or provide your own descriptions, your snippet may be lacking.

Just a little care taken with your meta descriptions can make your site stand out in the SERPs. Since Google has stated that your ranking wont be impacted within search results by the quality of your meta descriptions, but using the best words to describe your site practical!

Google’s goal is to return the best results for the searcher. If your site is accurately presented, there will be less unnecessary click through and back tracking. This in turns cuts down on user frustration and increases search engine effectiveness.

You can create good meta descriptions for your site by prioritizing your content. Use site level descriptions only for your home page (or other aggregation pages). When you move further into your hierarchy to your most popular pages, you need to have specific descriptions that best express each page and url.

Keep working your way through your website, until all of your pages have different meta descriptions. Your results on the SERPS will now be more targeted to answer searchers’ questions.

A meta description should be a condensed synopsis of the page. It’s worth revisiting a post I did last year that sums up the process:

If you have an item made of a certain material costing a certain amount and available at a specific location for a discount, you can deliver all of that information in a snappy form to help consumers feel that they will find all the best most pertinent information at your site.

For example, a good meta description could be:

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”PetsStyles, doggie coats, black and tan hound’s-tooth, product # 85294, $19.95, London 10% off, order now!”>

This lets customers know that the best black and tan doggie coat is available for $19.95 (10 % off if purchased from the London store) and here’s the product number, m’love, just order now!

What a lot of quick information, probably scattered around a whole optimized webpage, but delivered here in a form easy to read and understand while giving all the pertinent information.

If you have already been indexed using DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) you can direct Google NOT to use this next time they crawl you by adding a note to your robots.txt file in the form of:

<META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOODP”>

This tells Google – you guessed it – No Open Directory Project which means no DMOZ! Your meta descriptions will be picked up instead.

So what am I saying? Make the most of your snippet! Customize it! Own it!!