New to forum, pretty new to website ownership. Not sure if this is the correct forum, if not, please point me in the correct direction. If I do not explicitly type in "www.sitename.com" in the top bar, but instead type in "sitename" for a general search, my site is found, but the brief description that is shown is the last few lines (the bottom lines) of my web page. How do I change\set this so that the brief description shows what I want it to show from the web page? Is this keyword related, and, please point me to the novice\newbie description of keywords and how they should be used, how they are found, etc. Or a good novice book or website about this kind of information. Thanks.
To make Google, Yahoo etc, show the snippet, the few lines in your listing that describe your site, you need a good meta-description tag . It should be around 150 characters long, and be an attractive and accurate description of your site. Your meta description looks like this - <meta name="description" content="this is what my site is about" /> Keywords are the search terms that you want to be found for. In order to ensure that search engines know that this is what your site is about, place them in positions of prominence- in your url, page titles, navigation, hyperlinks and headers, and the anchor text of backlinks (links from other sites), and include them in your content. But don't overdo it. Use longtail versions and synonyms of your keyword so it doesn't look spammy. Reasearching what keywords are worth targeting is vital - choose one with too low a search volume and however well you optimise for it, you'll only get a trickle of visitors.Choose one with too high a search volume and you'll have too many established, successful competitors that you'll never beat to the front page. The most used and most obvious first-stop keyword tool is Google's Adword tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Always look for the exact match.