Google Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide User Manual
Page 5
Google's Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide, Version 1.1, 13 Nov 2008, latest
The beginning of the description meta tag for our homepage, which gives a brief overview of the
site's offerings
Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. Note
that we say "might" because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page's visible text if it
does a good job of matching up with a user's query. Alternatively, Google might use your site's
description in the
if your site is listed there (learn ho
). Adding description meta tags to each of your pages is always a good
practice in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet. The Webmaster
Central Blog has an informative post on
.
Snippets appear under a page's title and above a page's URL in a search result.
A user performs the query [baseball cards]
Our homepage appears as a result, with part of its description meta tag used as the snippet
Words in the snippet are shown in bold when they appear in the user's query. This gives the user clues
about whether the content on the page matches with what he or she is looking for. Below is another
example, this time showing a snippet from a description meta tag on a deeper page (which ideally has
its own unique description meta tag), containing an article.