When I talked earlier about meta data for seo I spoke about the meta description tag for each post. I also suggested that you add something into the optional excerpt area under the post when you write it. The area under the title including the two line description that will show when your page is indexed is part of what Google calls snippets and the text you enter in your meta description tag is likely what will be used by Google.

If Google cannot crawl the page it may pull the description from the dmoz open directory if your page is listed there or it may choose some text from the page itself. Generally however it will use the information in the meta description tag. Your snippet will also have highlighted keywords which show as bolded text if the search query that someone typed in actually used the specific keywords that are part of the title or description.

To help Google to help your blog there are two things you need to think about now. The first is click through and the second is relevance. Google wants to give searchers relevant results so picking keywords that will be used by searchers (and in the right order helps), and not picking highly searched for phrases which may have the right keywords but don’t have the right meaning is also important.

For example I chose to use the keywords “everyday online writer” to name one of my pages but although my intentions were good and it does describe a blog writer who writes online everyday in a journal, I picked it because of its (relatively) high search volume. What I didn’t know was that people using this phrase for search were looking for a book called “everyday online writer”.

Now although it’s also true that people may still see my result and be interested enough to click on it – the targeting is flawed. When people want something specific like this, that is what they want, not information about blogging as such. This leads to the other point regarding click through rate. The relevance may indeed be there when you use certain phrases but if searchers don’t want your offering your serp click through rate will show it. Your initial good result will fall through and the whole exercise was wasted time.

So first find something exciting and beneficial about something on the page you are describing. Next work some of your keywords into the description and title but not at the expense of meaning or message.If this can be achieved, you’ll have good keywords, relevant to a reader, with an exiting message that people want to click to find out more and will therefore show a good click through rate. Good for you and a happy Google. Google rewards this.

Doing this will make the best use of your snippets area from Google. As Matt Cutts explains in this video some of the snippet area is completely algorthmic – ie, there is nothing, as such, you can do to improve it (other than genuinely being an authority site). So make the best usage you can of what you can influence.

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