All your efforts, time and money to optimize your website for best search engine placement is futile if internet users do not click through to your website.You can not convert clicks to sales if you never get the click through in the first place.

You have got to make your search results attractive to your potential customers and this article will show you how.

I did a search for keyword ‘morditech’  Google and I got the following result for morditech.com.

Search Result for keyword 'morditech'

1. You should notice that the first line ‘Miva Merchant Hosting PCI Compliance’ is the title of the page and it will ALWAYS be the title of the page that  the search result points to.
2. Next you will see that the snippet on the second and third line down. The snippet shows the ‘description’ meta tag that we put in the source code of the page. Click this link to learn how to insert a meta description for any of your products and categories in Miva Merchant. The snippet does not always show the meta tag description though. I will show you an example of this further down in the article.
   • The snippet can be the ‘description’ meta tag
   • The content from the page
   • If all else fails they will use information from ‘the open directory project’ (dmoz.org).

When Google displays content from the page rather than your ‘description’ meta tag, it is becuase the search engine feels it found more relevant information to that particular search in the content of the page than it did in the description. Google will only use dmoz.org for your description if there is no description in the source code and the page content is not accessible (this seems rare).

What you really need to do is make sure your description meta tag is relevant to your page content and gear it towards the information that someone getting your website as a search result would like to see. Even though Google claims the description does not affect search engine results it DEFINATELY effects your customers clicks. You have got to make the description as enticing as possible to your target customer.

3. The last line of the search result shows you the exact page that the result points to, the cache (what google saw the last time they crawled this page) and any pages on your site that have similar relevant content.
   • A great feature about the cache is that it actually displays what it saw the last time your page was crawled and it also tells you exactly when it was crawled last.

I did another search on Google for a different key phrase which was ‘miva web hosting’ and here is the search result that came up for morditech.com

Search Result for key phrase 'miva web hosting'

1. Notice that the first line is still the title of the page
2. The snippet is different than the first example. This time the snippet shows content from the page. You can see the logic behind this when you look at search term and then look at the snippet content. The ‘description’ meta tag made no mention of ‘miva web hosting’ but the content on the page did and that information is in bold.

Here is a fantastic video of Matt Cutts from Google discussing how search engine results are formatted and how you can manipulate the display.