How can you influence the text displayed on search engine results?

Regardless of how high up you are on a search engine’s results, the text displayed under your link will be the bait to attract more visitors, or not as the case may be. It is therefore important to try to make sure that search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN display what is the more attractive bait, so as to encourage more ‘clickers’ and thus more traffic, which can result in more sales for your site.

Like fishing that requires attractive bait make sure your bait is attractive to your readers

The text displayed from your results in the Search Engine is taken from your title page. If you make your title page too long then it will normally be shortened to around 70 or 80 characters, so be sure your title is brief and to the point, and descriptive of what your site is about or what you want to sell.

The underlined blue link is the actual hot link to the website
The first sentence has been taken from the site which is the site title
The second sentence is a repeat of the title plus a few keywords the Search Engine has grabbed
The green text is the URL. The date is the last date the site was spidered by the Search Engine
The bold text matches the searched words which were – wedding dress uk

Google prefers to display the text that includes the searched words. If the searched words don’t appear on the top half of your home page, then it will grab it from wherever it is displayed and from different parts of the page as well.

If the search terms are found in your meta description tag, then that appears to be what search engines like Google will display.

To increase the chance of all of your meta tag being displayed, it is best to use correct punctuation other than spaces between sentences. If you want to influence the text that is displayed, make sure the search terms you are optimising the page for appear close together early on your page.

Posted by admin on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009