How to get Google, Yahoo, and MSN to Title and Describe Your Webpages the way YOU want them to!
 by Ian Cook

How to get Google, Yahoo, and MSN to Title and Describe Your Webpages the way YOU want them to!
...because searchers respond best to compelling, descriptive links!
— by Stephen Mahaney
 

Perhaps like many of our subscriber's lately, you've noticed that your web page titles and descriptions displayed on the search results pages have been changing—and generally not for the better. The question we've been hearing a lot lately is...

Where the heck are the search engines
pulling their site descriptions and titles from?

...and how does one control
what titles and descriptions these engines display?

Answer: It's tricky. But here's how you do it.

Your web page's search results titles (SRT) and search results descriptions (SRD) are pulled from a variety of sources. Obviously, since your title and description play a big role in enticing a potential customer to click your link, it's important to insure they contain well written, compelling marketing copy. After all, your goal is two-fold: high ranking and click-throughs, right?

Here's the breakdown for the top three major engines:

bullet    Google

Google pulls descriptions for their search results page from the following places:

  • your page's meta description tag
  • from the site's DMOZ (aka, ODP) listing, and/or
  • directly from ...

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