How'd you get such a nice description in Google?


Am I the coolest guy on the planet?

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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.

 

All information contained here is Copyright © 2007 by Jonathan Leger.
Submit any questions or comments to me at AskJonLeger.com