If you want people to click your snippet in search result pages more often, you’re reading the righ article. Making your site rank high enough for target keywords is not all the game. I mean, sure thing it’s an extremely important aspect. Especially if you were able to get it to the top of page one. But there’s more. Thing is, there are lots of websites out there that just seem not to get it. For the most part, people just fix their on-page SEO and start doing off-page without actually paying enough (if any) attention to how their sites look when the user actually sees them in SERPs (search result pages). That said, you should be dying to learn how to fix it.
If you don’t explicitly specify your desired snippet content, Google will try to figure it it out on its own. Chances are, it won’t be something you’d like to see. So, you really want to tell Google how exactly you’d like your snippet to look like.
Keyword in Title and Description
The point is that you need to absolutely make sure that you use your keyword both in the title and meta description of your site. That’s because while searching on Google or other search engines users pretty often take into consideration whether or not the keyword (the one they’re searching for) is mentioned both in the title and description. People tend to click snippets with keywords more often. That actually makes perfect sense because if the keyword is both in the title and description, most likely the page is exactly what I’m looking for. At least, that’s what the average Joe thinks.
The following snippet uses the ‘webdesign bureau’ keyword both in the title and meta description.
How to Optimize Your Snippet
Now that you know why you need to make a perfect SEO snippet, you most def wanna know what exactly you should do. If you don’t use a CMS, you’ll have to actually mess around with code in order to do that. You just need to make sure that your keyword is used between the <title></title> tags and in the meta description. Say, your keyword is ‘pizza in Sacramento’. In that case your title and meta description should look something along the lines of :
<title>Where to Order Pizza in Sacramento | YourSiteName</title>
<meta name="description" content=“This post highlights the places where you can find the best pizza in Sacramento .”>
As you can see, the keyword is both in the title and meta description. By the way, you need to insert that code between the <head></head> tags.
How to Preview Your Snippet
If you want to see how your snippet will actually look in Google, you should take a look at the SEOmofo snippet optimization tool. It allows you to specify your title, description and URL so that you get a preview of how exactly your snippet is going to look in SERPs.
WordPress Solution
Chances are, you’re using WordPress on your site. In that case you don’t even need to use the tool I talked about above. You can just install the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. It allows you to do all sorts of SEO things, including previewing your Google snippet right at the convenience of your WordPress dashboard.
Conclusion
Though SEO snippet optimization is not directly going to influence your rankings, you still want to make sure that your search engine snippet contains your keywords. That’s because if the user sees the exact keyword in a snippet, it’s more likely that he’ll click your snippet link and land on your site.
Let me know if you have any questions about the tools I mentioned in the post. Also, feel free to add your comments and suggestions.
