Anyone know how to force search engines to display your description meta tag in the search results rather than the section of the text that matched the customers query. Eg if my meta description is "My site is cool, visit it" but on my site it has the text "This is a cool site" if a customer searches "This is a cool site" that is displayed rather than "My site is cool, visit it" any help appreciated. Thanks
I'm not sure that's something you can control. the snippets of text shown in the SERPS are query-specific. For me, the only time when I've seen the meta description text shown is when someone searches for the domain name (without extention). The searcher then gets the front page accompanied with description text underneath.
All the fluff words are removed. so if a customer searches for that, it'd come up "cool site" and your meta description also says "cool site", so you should be good to go already
I know you think that's what you want, but really it's not. You want people to find your site, and specifically the portion of your site that is relavent to what they are searching for. So, for example, if they are searching for the very specific text string "This is a cool site", and your site comes up with "My site is cool, visit it" as the descriptions, they are going to think, "Well, that doesn't match my search, so I'm not going to click on it." You'll actually reduce you traffic. Besides, as enposte says, the text that is displayed next to your link is dynamic based on what the person searched for. There's shouldn't be one standard phrase that is always displayed every time your page comes up in search results. The text displayed should be whatever text on your page most closely matches the search phrase.
Meta is not what you want to worry about. Content is king. Your content should be keyword rich and unique. It does not have to be fancy or long. Proper web page title, headings. What is more important for you for search and rank is article content. Have content written or write yourself about your niche and rich in keywords. Your page link will be put in the content at the end of the article and in the sig blocks. Submit to article directories. Wait a couple of days and do a google search on your keyword and you will find you get ranked very quickly. Article submission is the easiest sure fire way to get ranked. Your content must be fresh, and unique. Don't use bots for it. The robots will crawl the article sites and will hit on your keywords and the links. I am still a noob trying to learn this game. I write content articles for $3. I tested the method and was got a rank of 3 on google with just one article. The more articles you submit the higher you will be ranked. Continue to submit your articles every week to keep your rank. This method works extremely well. Again, the meta data is skipped over by the search engines. Still use it. Just do not put that much emphasis on it. Good content, good title, good heading, niche keywords at beginning, middle and end. That goes for articles to submit as well. Anyone wanting affordable content, hit me up with pm or email me, dlbott(at)hotmail good luck, still looking to fill in the gaps in learning here, so anyone want to help would be appreciated. don
I hear what you are saying, but with your reasoning aside, im aksing, if I needed it, how would I do it. the NOSNIPET tag removes the description completly which is not what I want. Let me exaggerate my reason. If someone is searching for "cool site" but have excluded the word free from their search, and google selects the words "cool site" from a paragraph on my site that is not part of my paragraph that says "free cool site" then im not going to get my desired effect which is "free cool site". My meta tag description clearly describes what I offer and there is nothing someone can search for that will be a better selling point than my meta description, relevant or not, because my site will only come up when people what a Direct Mail List, and if they are searching for Fax Mail Lists, which is in my contect, I would still rather my description be displayed. Also dlbott I dont want to buy your $3 article, I dont even think that you read my question properly because having an article on a different site has nothing to do with the snippet google uses to advertise my site. -rep given.
I don't think we can control google if what text they would display. I have experience that before but google sometimes crawl the text within the content and sometimes the text in meta description.
A couple of points here. First, if a person searches for 'cool site' and google finds this term on your page, it will return the highest positioned 'cool site' phrase on your page. i.e., the one closest to the top. If the first 'cool site' phrase in your content is in the first paragraph that says 'free cool site', then that's the one it will provide it's description from. Second, as others have mentioned, what you are asking for is not possible. Google ignores the meta description, and meta keywords almost entirely. The reason is because they are not worried about what your desired results are, they are worried about what the searchers desired results are. Google's number one priority is giving the searcher content that most closely matches their search. They can't trust webmasters to provide that in the meta description, so they rely on your actual content.
As have others said, you cannot force the big search engines to use you meta descriptions as a snippet. Though...G uses my meta descriptions on a good number of my pages when people are searching for the main keyword phrases. If you want to increase the odds of G using your meta descriptions, I would recommend writing a really good meta description. That is: not spammy, as objective as possible, useful, short, to the point, and using the keyword phrase once. -> One simple sentence.
thanks for taking the time to explain it to me, it is appreciated. What I have taken away from this is that it is not possible, and is unlikely to be so in the future thanks