home page's description in google

Hi,
I use vBulletin script in my forum. You know about every forum uses guest message:

e.g. "Welcome XX forum. Please click here to registration to see messages..."

And I thought about this subject. Because in the result of google search my home page's description is this guest message.

So I want to ask that what can I do after that ?

1) Write site's subject. e.g. "This is a pc forum. You can find games topics,internet topics.."
2) Should I delete this section ? That time site's description will be first article after navbar.
3) Its up to you.

Thanks

 

Personally I think you should make the forum indexable to the search engines. You are hoarding valuable search engine landing pages. If you make the entire forum posts visible to the public you will get a lot more traffic.

 

No no
It's already visible posts to all visitors as you said. My question is different

 

Ohh sorry I think I understand now. Anyways, if you can, add a meta description for your homepage. Make sure this does not get repeated on every page of the forum. Make sure you include relevant keywords in the description to improve the chances of Google displaying that. Of course Google would rather display a chunk of text with the keyword instead of some forum welcome message. In addition to that it would probably help to add an extended welcome message somewhere on the page that also includes your main target keywords.

 

Thanks vansterdam,

I had only added guest message in homepage of forum. In showtread and forumdisplay there wasn't any guest message. Now I'm thinking to deleting this guest message and google will display first stuff.

For instance, in if my site was forums.digitalpoint.com/ google might display:
Forum Last Post Threads Posts Google (60 Viewing)
THE search engine. This....

So if you don't suggest that, what can I write specifically on the guest message ?

Thanks

 

When Google shows a URL (and it's associated "snippet" of text and <title>) in their SERPs, they typically determine the snippet or description that is displayed as follows:

1) Google looks to see if that URL has an entry at DMOZ (Open Directory Project). If so then they show the description from DMOZ because it is supposed to be an unbiased description written by a human who reviewed the page. If no DMOZ entry exists for the URL then they go to step 2.

2) Google looks to see if ALL of the keywords in the user's search phrase exist in the value of the content attribute of the <meta name="description"> element. If all of the major keywords from the user's search phrase exist in the <meta name="description"> element then Google display the value of the content attribute of that <meta name="description"> element. The idea is that Google wants to be able to highlight/bold EVERY keyword from the search phrase within the snippet. If all of the major keywords from the user's search phrase do NOT exist in the <meta name="description"> element then Google goes to step 3.

3) Google constructs their own snippet by searching the HTML (typically top down) locating sentence fragments containing each of the keywords from the search phrase. Again, the idea is that they want to be able to highlight/bold EVERY keyword from the search phrase within the snippet. These usually appear in the SERPs as "... sentence fragment 1 ... sentence fragment 2... sentence fragment n...".

I good SEO will make sure that each page on their site targets a SINGLE keyword phrase (or at most 2-3 phrases that are VERY close together). They will used these in the <title>, <h1>, <h2>s, content of the page AND as the link text on other pages pointing to that page. So any given page SHOULD rank best for its targeted keyword phrase. So if the SEO has done their job correctly people should be finding that page in the organic SERPs using the targeted keyword phrase from the <title> of the page.

That being said, a good SEO will make sure that EVERY word that appears in the <title> is somehow used in the <meta name="description"> element. Additionally, they will make sure the <meta name="description"> has a call to action to get the user to click thru to their site. If the SEO has all of the keywords from their <title> in the <meta name="description"> and that is how MOST people find the page in the SERPs then MOST of the time Google will end up showing their <meta name="description"> element as the snippet.

If however your pages do NOT have the keywords from the <title> in the <meta name="description"> then most of the time Google is likely going to be constructing their own snippet which might be ok or it might really suck badly, depending on which random sentence fragments they choose to display.