Snippets and titles are very important for driving search engines users to the website. On the video Matt Cutts explains how Google forms snippets and titles in it`s search results. Below you may read what is he talking about.
Hi everybody. Today I want to talk about snippets and titles. Google tries to return the best snippet, the most relevant snippet as it can. Snippet is (whenever you type “flower”) what we show for a given website in search results – the title and the description beneath it. That we call a snippet.
We want snippet to be as relevant as possible. As you type “flower” we provide you snippets and context (quick – snippets) and we wanna tell users whether that page is going to be useful, and we can do that by highlighting some of the places where “flower” (or some other word you type for you search query) occurs on that page. If we only show first 50 words for the page, that wouldn`t be useful to let you know whether you wanna click through to it. So we always have the policy that we try to show useful snippets and useful titles.
It`s funny because in the old days some people used to call them random notes – snippets -- because it was like they were taken from the random places of the page. But users really appreciate it. If you type “computer power” we`re willing to generate really relevant snippet specifically for that query. For the different query the snippet for that page would look different.
By the same logic we`ve been willing to show the titles that we think are most useful. For example suppose that the title of your page is “Untitled” or if there is no title. If that`s the case we try to show a relevant useful title. In addition if you have the same meta description across the all different pages of your site or if you have the same title across all the different pages of your site, then we try to figure out what is the better title, what is the more descriptive title and snippet to show to users. And then finally if you have the title that is really-really long or contains different words in it, before showing it to user we may try to find the better title. So I think webmasters noticed that snippets can change based on the content of the page. We can sometimes use the Open Directory Project snippets, we can use snippets from the page – keywords and context or we can use the meta description tag and we do a lot of different things to find the best description as we can. But webmasters are probably not as used to the idea that we are willing to find the better title as well. So if you have a bad title or the title that we don`t think helps users as much, we can try to find the better title and the one that we think will be informative results and the users could now whether these results are good for them to click on.
So we just want people to know about that, because they used to the idea that things below the title changing, but they maybe not as used to the idea that the title itself can change in the search results as well.
Tags: Google, matt cutts, snippets
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