When returning results to a user, search engines use various resources based upon the particular search or query. The basic information published on a Web page may not be visible to a user, even when the page is displayed in an Internet browser, such as Internet Explorer or FireFox. Some of this information is used by the search engines to determine the topic (content) of a particular Web page.
Search engines use many specific characteristics to evaluate a Web page for a particular query string or keyword search. Many of these characteristics differ from one search engine to another and may even vary based upon the query string itself. Because of this, this user help focuses only on the “snippets” or information regarding a particular page, published in organic listings. These are the natural or non-sponsored listings, on search engine results pages, referred to as SERPs.
Traditionally, search engines provide three specific bits of information that make up the snippet in the SERPs. These bits of information are:
- Page Title
- Page Description
- Page URL
Each part of the snippet provides the user with important information related to their query and, as such, gives them partial information for their review. This allows them to select the best result for their specific request. Each search engine controls what is and what is not included in its index. The index contains all of the pages that it feels are relevant and would be important to users for specific queries. Just like the index, the search engine also controls what information is published as the snippet in the SERPs.
The search engines look for a few different things when returning results. They want to provide the most relevant results, so that users will return again and again. Therefore, each search engine applies a ranking algorithm to a user’s query and then orders the results quickly. Obviously, human interaction with results would be difficult, based upon the massive amount of information available and the almost infinite amount of possible queries. I am not going to discuss conspiracy theories that the search engines do or do not manually rank individual results for specific queries.
Publishers of Web pages have the ability to influence the proper ranking of a Web page in the SERPs by publishing relevant content, titles, descriptions, keywords and page names. Some of these can even influence the actual snippet in the SERPs. Typically, the Title tag, META Description tag and the URL with the Page Name, which are part of the web page’s code, are used in the SERP snippet.
For consistency purposes, the search engine may truncate, or cut off, long titles, descriptions or URLs if they are too long to fit in within its SERP template. These lengths do not change frequently; however, each search engine has its own standards. For consistency purposes, here are Best Practice Guidelines that will ensure your information is consolidated and your message is fully legible in the three major search engines: Google, MSN / Live and Yahoo.
Best Practices
Title – 60 characters with spaces
Description – 150 characters with spaces
URL – 85 characters
Why is this important?
- Marketing Perspective – ensuring that your snippet is consistent with your intent can be extremely important
- Optimization Perspective – ensuring that your snippet is consistent with your targeted keywords can be extremely important
- Visibility Perspective – ensuring that your snippet is written well enough to get the user to click is primary
The reason that your marketing, optimization and visibility need to be in sync is to convert those organic visitors into conversions.
The search engines may also use additional information located on your page or from a “trusted source” to return what they feel is the most relevant information in the SERP snippet.
Additional Information that May Affect Your Snippet
- Title – In the event that a publisher fails to let the search engine know what the title of a page should be, or if the page title is not related to the content on that page, the search engine may use other “trusted sources” to publish the title of the snippet. These “trusted sources” are typically DMOZ, also known as the Open Directory, and the Yahoo Directory. Both of these directories have titles, descriptions and URLs for domains that are in these directories.
- Description – The description displayed in the snippet may not be from the META tag. Sometimes, especially for longer queries, a search engine may return a short section of the content of the individual page that is related to the specific query.
- URL – The URL that is shown in the snippet may be too long for the taste of the search engine, so they may truncate the “http://,” “www,” or even cut out directories after the domain name to return keywords related to the specific query.
The search engines have given publishers the ability to control whether they want the snippet to be influenced by DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory. There are additional META tags that are supported by the search engines that can be included in the page code that will tell the search engines to stop using this information in the SERP snippets.
DMOZ
All Engines - <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
Yahoo - <META NAME=”SLURP” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
Google - <META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
MSN/Live - <META NAME=”MSNBOT” CONTENT=”NOODP”>
Yahoo Directory
All Engines - <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>
Yahoo - <META NAME=”SLURP” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>
Google - <META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>
MSN/Live - <META NAME=”MSNBOT” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>
Additional Information:
How to create good meta descriptions
Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn’t very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we’re less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don’t have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.
Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn’t just have to be in sentence format; it’s also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise.
Programmatically generate descriptions. For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions can be impossible. In the latter case, however, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and are encouraged. Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, as we talked about in the first point above. The page-specific data we mentioned in the second point is a good candidate for programmatic generation. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don’t give users a clear idea of the page’s content, and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular snippet.
Use quality descriptions. Finally, make sure your descriptions are truly descriptive. Because the meta descriptions aren’t displayed in the pages the user sees, it’s easy to let this content slide. But high-quality descriptions can be displayed in Google’s search results, and can go a long way to improving the quality and quantity of your search traffic.
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