Search Result Header/Description

Well so far thanks to everyone's help I am making progress. I still have a few questions pertaining to what is seen when my website comes up after a keyword search in any search engine.

I got a few phrases to work that would make my site appear on the first page of the results, but they are not showing what I would like to be seen.

First question, Does your page title determine what is going to be seen in the header link to your site in the search results?

Second, other than meta description tags (which I changed but the information I put in the description doesn't appear in the results), what could I do to better what is seen in the description of my site when it appears in search results?

Thanks


[ Message was edited by: Dinkar 02/29/2008 07:09 am ... Reason: Sig. edited as per TOS. Please don't sign your post. ]

jees i cant believe no ones answered this.. this place amazes me sometimes.

its not down to you, its down to what section of your website google (or other) feels is relevant to the searched terms. This MAY be your meta description, it MAY be your Dmoz entry, or it may be a section (or jumble of sections)of text in your copy that matches the keyterms that the user has entered into google.

You can manipulate it to a degree.. but just keep doing what your doing (ie theming pages etc) and you should find it naturally starts to reflect what you want it to.

Google is returning matches, if it feels that a sectionof your website is more relvant to the search term than your meta description, chances are that is what will be returned in the results. However, given that your meta description SHOULD reflect your page copy and content, then its really all relative.

*** jees i cant believe no ones answered this ***

It was posted just after I went to bed, and not everyone is here every day... you need to allow 48 hours to catch a reasonable number of potential readers.

Good reply freeflyer - I missed the post, and many others have lives

I'd add that page descriptions (meta descriptions) should be unique to the page, and should reflect the theme of that page - that way, searches that find that page are most likely to find that description.

Keep your code as clean as you can, so that searches don't pick up meaningless stuff, and be sure to have carefully chosen and *appropriate* page titles.

SEs can only work with what you give them - so be nice