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Getting a nice, clean description in Google.
If you take a look at the Google results for "coolest guy on the planet", you'll
notice that most of the top 10 have a nice, clean description as their Google
entry (instead of the normal sentence fragments separated by ...).
Do you want to know how to get a nice description like that? It's actually very
simple.
To get a nice, clean description in Google, all you need to do is have your
meta description tag set in the <head> section of your page, and include
your keyword phrase in that description.
For example, the home page of this site uses this as its meta description:
<meta name="description" content="I'm trying to prove that I'm the coolest guy on the planet.">
When somebody searches for "coolest guy on the planet", Google sees that the
meta description of the page contains the query, and Google sees that it's
a well formatted sentence. So instead of showing broken sentence
fragments, Google instead chooses to show the meta description value.
This means it's possible to control how your pages appear in the search
results! And that's important, because next to your title, the description
that appears below it is the most important factor in convincing people
that they need to click through and visit your site instead of one of
the others in the results.
What's a SERP?
Just as a side point, you will often see the phrase "SERP" used at web master
and search engine forums. SERP stands for "search engine result page." Sometimes
SERPs (with the 's' on the end) is used as the plural form.
I was tempted to use the phrase on this page, but I'm trying to keep everything
here understandable by the absolute beginner in search engine optimization,
so I didn't use it. Then I thought that it might be a good idea to explain it
to you in case you didn't know what it was, since it gets used a lot in the
webmaster community.
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