I’ve heard this question over and over again from many friends. How do I control the appearance of my site info on Google SERPS. Many think that it is not possible to, but in fact it is very simple, provided you understand how Google sees it. Matt Cutts recently posted a video on this. So let’s take a deeper look at it.
1. The Page Title
In the above figure, marked 1 is the page title. As you may have guessed already the page title is the data that is pulled from your title information in the head section of your page.This is the data given in the <title></title> tags.
2. The description or the text seen right below the title (Snippets)
This information (numbered 2 in the figure) is normally seen as a text in around 25 words. This information is taken from three sources.
(i) The meta description <meta name=”description” content”what you want to appear beneath the page title in SERPS”>
(ii)The DMOZ open directory – If the site is listed in DMOZ, the description is picked from there.
(iii)When the information is not available from the above two places, google searches for contextual content from your sites copy and picks up relevant information from either a single paragraph or one or more sentences from all over the page.
One thing to note here is the it is approximately 160 characters long, so if you would like to write an attractive meta description that would prove as an ad-copy and more visitors would be prompted to click on your URL. Make it attractive as well as relevant.
3.URL
Of course, this is taken from the sites web url. It also takes into consideration your preference settings in the webmasters account. If you had preferred it as http://yourdomain without the www, it would show that way in the SERPs.This is the page Google will take you to when clicked.
4.Page size
Just next to the URL there is a tiny text showing the file size of the document you will be directed to when clicked.
5.Cache
Right next to the page size,a blue link is shown that will take you to the cached version of the website. The cached version is simply the copy of the webpage google saved when it last visited your website. If it had visited your site last week, then you’ll have the page from last week.
6.Similar pages
This link will take you to other similar pages to the one that is listed above.
7.Note this
This link will help you to use the Google notebook tool. You can save off the current link for reference later on the notebook. Just a quick one for noting down things.
8. Plus box and Stock info
If the website or the comany is listed at the stock exchange, google will display it’s shortcode, and if you click on it a small menu will be displayed showing the graph of how the company did at the stock exchange for the last few months.
9.Sitelinks
The site links are very interesting. Many people wonder why only a few sites(popular ones) have the site links shown while others does not. I know for a fact that Google does not take money from webmasters for displaying it. Because the company that I’m working for right now has sitelinks but we did not pay Google to show it, it happened automatically. I’ve discussed about sitelinks here, you may want to check out.
10.More results
This link will take you to more pages from the site. In the example, it will show the next few inside pages from the starbucks website, apart form the ones those are shown in the sitelinks.
Bonus
A few things worth mentioning here. Google sometimes shows maps of the office location etc of the company in it’s search results. This is triggered when the companies physical address is given in a very evident place in the page. Again like the sitelinks this is triggered only for websites with great traffic and user interaction.
Sometimes, near the cache link Google will show when they crawled the website last. Ex: 12 hours earlier. This happens only for fresh results. I believe there is a threshold value for the time so any searches made within that time will be shown the freshness of the Google crawl.
So that basically rounds up the basic anatomy of a Google search result and how we can SEO details on our website to control how the information appears on Google SERPs. Hope you enjoyed it.
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yay! thanks a lot!
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[...] Matt Cutts did a quick video tutorial on what’s the anatomy of a search result when he visited the Google Kirkland office. I have a nice writeup explaining what Matt says. [...]
Now that’s more like a Digg post, though those guys hate SEO.
I’ve had problems with the info below title, coz the content was after post meta info. Now that I moved meta down, content’s displaying. And I get better click-throughs!
Sumesh’s last blog post..Google Sandbox: All you ever wanted to know
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Thanks Mani.. Quite informative article. I never know that we control SERPS.. Thanks again. Keep posting good stuffs
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Thanks for your great info Mani.
I have keep searching how i control my blog SERP
Lowongan’s last blog post..Brand New Looks JakJobs.com
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thanks alot Mani Karthik!
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[...] if you’re looking for information on sitelinks, check here. Read More ¦del.icio.us¦ Digg [...]
Do we have control over site links displaying in Google search Results.
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Mani Karthik Replied:
Unfortunately No. But once they are there we can atleast block a link thats cropped up and we dont require.
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[...] this image – All the links that appear are automatically detected by Google’s robots. ( In this article about sitelinks, we discussed on how can we control the sitelinks by understanding how google detects the [...]
Hi!
My question is in regard to Page Title (no. 1 above). When my site is searched on Google or Yahoo, the search results return my site with the Page Title “Home”. When I saw that this was the case, I changed the name of my homepage to something more descriptive. That was a week ago and still no change to the way it’s indexed (my site has been crawled since then). Since I have no knowledge of html (I used iWeb to build the site and that program doesn’t require knowledge of html), I was hoping someone could chime in on what I could do to help these search engines title my website more descriptively in their search results.
Thank you for any feedback!
Amanda
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Amanda, if it’s a pure HTML site, it would be easy to change the title. Why dont you let us know the URL please?
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Hi Mani! Sure thing, I’ve included the url. Thank you for your help here! Just checked again and it still says “Home” as the title when I search it.
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Hi!
I just found your website; it has been extremely useful to me and I’ve been tweeking my blog as much as I can. I just have a question- I’ve been trying to change the way my Page Title appears for quite awhile. On Google, it still appears the way I first named the tag, yet I’ve changed it at least 5 times already. Any suggestions?
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Mani Karthik Replied:
Jessie,
The changes will not appear on Google immediately after you make the change. While it will show on the live website. Google crawls your site once in a while, sometimes daily, sometimes every week, this depends on various other factors. I’d suggest that you wait for a fey days to see the change (it might take only hours sometimes).
Alternatively, if you’d let me know the URL, I might be able to tell you how to get a better idea on this.
cheers!
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Hi,
Thanks for the quick response! I’ve actually tried to change it for over a month now, so I really have no clue what’s wrong. The URL is http://www.savory-bites.com. Thanks so much again, I really appreciate it!
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Mani Karthik Replied:
Jessie, the site is not well indexed on Google, there are only 6 pages indexed and the crawling frequency is not impressive either. You might want to post more content more frequently, and get some incoming links as well. This will ensure a good presence on Google. Do your tweaks once you are there, as anything done now may not reflect at all on Google.
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Hi,
It’s really strange because today, when I googled keywords, the Page Title showed up the way I wanted to. But, I will continue trying to improve my PR and establishing some backlinks.
Thanks for the advice!
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Hello! Your site is cool, I took a lot of info from here, but I still can’t figure out one thing: when i search on google a post of my site it appears : first the page title and then the post title. I see that on other sites appear only the post title. Can you help me uit with this? Please
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Mani Karthik Replied:
Hey Chris, it sounds a bit confusing. You might want to post the question here with a screenshot, and I’ll try answer it.
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I think, when you submited your site to the search engines, you posted in description section as your title. You just need to change it and resubmited again.
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Hi Karthik, mine is a new blog, just growing and growing !
I have a question. I heard that Google will penalize if we use same keyword thrice in description or keywords meta tags. Is that true?
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hii, Kartik, I have known most of the things but Bonus section is almost new to me. I have seen maps on first SERP several times, but I didn’t know the reason. I want to ask you one thing, why google shows youtube video on some search terms ? Can you throw some light on this.
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Thanks for the great information, thats help me
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[...] reading on Sitelinks at DailySEOblog Article 1,Article 2,Article [...]
Its really clear explanation. Thank for sharing. Btw, about the sitelinks, is it mean anything to the position in the serp?
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Mani
Thanks, it’s a great advice
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Thank!
Great info
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Thanks for the help[ with seo information.
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Hi Mani, it’s a good info, I am curious how to get the site link or people use to call it “authority”?
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[...] How can you change the way your site info appears on SERPS? [...]