Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [33]
Perform a search for your company name or brand name. Check your snippet two ways. First, search for your company or brand name, and evaluate the snippet you find. Second, search for a general term, one that you know you have rankings, and evaluate the snippet. You will see that the snippet changes based on the words being searched. Is the company name in the title field (the blue underlined text)? The text content in the snippet will change based on the search. For example, a brand-name search will result in snippets that contain the brand name, and the search term will be highlighted in bold. If your website ranks for an important search term, the term will be bold in the snippet (Figure 4-2).
Figure 4-2: Google: the search engine results “snippet”
The text content is pulled from various sources; the meta description tag in the page header (in the code), the content on the page, or in the case of Google from the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org) if there is no other content available in the meta description or on the page.
Most search engines tend to build the text content of the snippet from the page’s meta description (though the text content may be pulled from the page as well). Marketers can impact the text content of the snippet but not control it. It is still arranged on-the-fly by the search engine in order to show the most relevant content from the page. Although the content in the meta description does not count as a primary field for rankings and relevance, it is used in the snippet, which is the primary information a searcher will use to evaluate your site against the other results in a search. The power of the text content in the snippet can draw more clicks to your website by showing the comprehensive content of your website.
Remember, searchers have a question, and they will click sites that appear to have their answer. Well-crafted titles and snippets can draw searchers to your website. In rare cases, the snippet will show content from your website’s listing from a directory, usually the Open Directory Project. This is not recommended, because you can better control the snippet with the content from the meta description.
Both Google and Yahoo! will honor the HTML instruction in your page’s code that will prevent the descriptions from these directories. These are called the "noodp" or the "noydir" attributes and are used in the header of your page’s code. Using the code Creating the Meta Description The meta description tag is in the code of every web page and is contained in the heading of each page. In a simple website, it can be modified by editing each page’s source code. In larger sites, content management systems allow you to manipulate this tag and make it unique to each page. However, not all content management systems or ecommerce software carts allow website owners or managers to edit this tag or control the content. Many times, the content management software simply repurposes the first few lines of product or article content, repeats the same description on every page, or shows nothing altogether. If you are using a newer content management system (CMS), one that is open source, or one that is custom-developed, you should have the ability to create or edit the meta description. If not, the development company or a programmer may be able to write the functionality into your website. My experience with larger CMS providers is that they do not respond quickly, if at all. If you are developing a new website, consider the ability to create or edit custom page titles and meta description to be a key requirement in your CMS. This description should be unique to