How do you get a Differnt description to show up in the search results?

How can/do you get a Differn't description to show up in the search results in google?

I noticed other sites are doing this..

Anyone know how?

Thanks,

-C

 

Google shows a 'snippet' of your content, or of your meta description that contains the key phrase that is searched for.

 

Yeah i know.. but for instance...

I want to have multiple descriptions for the homepage , is this possible?

-C

 

Your homepage should be optimized for one, two, or at most three key phrases.

 

IM noticing some sites have more than one description showing up..

How do u do that?

 

Generally speaking, the description listed in the search results will be that which you have put in your Meta Description tag. You can change that Meta Description anytime you want, and the new one should be picked up by the search engines the next time they crawl that page.

 

Yes, optimize your meta tags properly. And no need of optimiziing each page. Google automatically trace your first 20 -30 words from your post.

 

If you want the precise description that you want to appear in the SERPs, rather than a snippet from the page, you will indeed have to write a specific meta description tag for each and every page.

 

Thanks Jim,

However, some sites i see more than one description.

i.e - type in "music booking" and look for gigmasters.com , this site has a differn't description than when u simply enter "gig booking"

Im not sure how they are doing that.

Any ideas?

-C

 

Like I said, it either shows a snippet of your meta description OR of your CONTENT.

In your example, it's actually showing BOTH a snippet of the meta description and a snippet form the content.

 

Different descriptions for the homepage? Are you referring to, for example, when you search for "Beans" and get a results that is from one domain in which the snippet of text below the result says something about "Beans," but when you search for "Koolaid," the snippet has something about Koolaid?

I believe it has something to do with meta descriptions that are more than 150 words long, in which Google indexes the meta description tag for both keywords. That's only a theory, though. I've been unable to reproduce results that I've seen in the past.

It might also have something to do with the ODD described by Google here.

And one more thing, are you sure you're not talking about adwords ads? They can have dynamically generated descriptions and titles.

 

How does it choose which one it wants to show.... I dont understand.

-C

 

If the keyword is in the meta description, it will show that.
If the keyword is the content, then it will show the content.
If the keyword is in both, the sometimes it will show both.
If the keyword is not present in the meta description or the content, then it shouldn't show in the results at all.

 

I believe your exactly right thank you

Rep added.

-C

Thank you as well

Rep added (at least i tried to ,, Your already a hot shot around here lol )

 

When I search for "music booking" and look at the gigmasters.com Google snippet, I see:

When I search for "gig booking" and look at the gigmasters.com Google snippet, I see:

BOTH of the above snippets are constructed by Google by them selecting various sentence fragments from the content from that page. You can tell this because there are multiple elipses (...) in the snippet. Their goal is to highlight all of the keywords from the search phrase in the snippet.

Typically, if the meta description element from their page contains ALL keywords from the search phrase then the meta description is shown as the snippet. Again, the goal is to be able to bold ALL keywords from the search phrase in the snippet.

If the meta description does NOT contain all of the keywords from the search phrase then Google will construct one like the ones you see above.

Their meta description is:

If you search for "live music and entertainment" you'll notice that exactly the first 150 characters of the meta description above is shown as the snippet as follows:

The meta description is shown because ALL keywords in the search phrase were in the meta description. Google truncates after about 150 unless there are more than 3 keywords in the search phrase in which case they will sometimes show 300, 400, or more characters in the snippet.

Optimizing meta description elements is very important since showing a "good" snippet in the SERPs can often increase your click-thru-rates. Each page on your site "should" be optimized for a single keyword phrase (maybe 2-3 if they are all almost identical). The targeted keyword phrase(s) should be in the <title> of the page. If your page is well optimized, the phrase(s) in the <title> will be the phrase most often used to find the URL in the SERPs. So including all keywords from the <title> in the meta description should maximize the number of times the meta description is shown as the Google search snippet.

There is a little more to optimizing meta descriptions... They should accurately represent what your page is about so that the user finds what they are looking for should they click thru to your page. You'll also want to include a call to action so that searchers will be more inclined to click-thru.

 

Very well said...couldnt have said it any better myself

So it will display the meta or the content on the page , whichever is more relevant to the "keyword search term".

-C

 

Canonical, great post (all should read). Tried to rep you, but DP wouldn't let me (rep'd you too recently). I'll catch you again later. I appreciate posters putting such effort into a reply as you did.

 

Yeah exactly Jim...

I went ahead and 5 stared the post ,so others can read this. Just learned something really useful today.

Thanks guys

-C

 

Canonical's post, as you have summarized it, was indeed a revelation to me. I went and checked it out on my website. I used a random snippet from my home-page text as the search term. Lo and behold, it bypassed my meta description and put into the search results a snippet from the home-page text that contained the keyword phrase I searched for.

That is going to cause me to go back and take a careful look at all my meta description tags to make sure that they contain the exact keywords from each page that I want people to search for.

Thanks to Canonical for that insight.

 

Yep..

Just by changing the relevant informational text on your homepage can now effect (your sites ranking) in a positive way , by bypassing the meta.

This is HUGE, very very good information... i never looked into how the differnt descriptions were showing in google. (back when my old site failed).

Knowing this (Canonicals post) changes a lot of things SEO wise.

This thread may be worth a sticky?

Props again to Canonicals post!!!

-C