We use a number of different sources for this information, including
descriptive information in the title and meta tags for each page. We may
also use publicly available information—for instance, anchor text or
listings from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ)—or create rich snippets based on markup on the page.
While we can't manually change titles or snippets for individual
sites, we're always working to make them as relevant as possible. You
can help improve the quality of the title and snippet displayed for your
pages by following the general guidelines below.
Create descriptive page titles
Titles are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content
of a result and why it’s relevant to their query. It's often the primary
piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it's
important to use high-quality titles on your web pages.
Here are a few tips for managing your titles:
- As explained above, make sure every page on your site has a title specified in the
<title>tag. If you’ve got a large site and are concerned you may have forgotten a title somewhere, the HTML suggestions page in Webmaster Tools lists missing or potentially problematic<title>tags on your site. - Page titles should be descriptive and concise. Avoid vague descriptors like
"Home"for your home page, or"Profile"for a specific person's profile. Also avoid unnecessarily long or verbose titles, which are likely to get truncated when they show up in the search results.
Create good meta descriptions
The description attribute within the
<meta> tag is
a good way to provide a concise, human-readable summary of each page’s
content. Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in
search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate
description than would be possible purely from the on-page content.
Accurate meta descriptions can help improve your clickthrough; here are
some guidelines for properly using the meta description.- Make sure that every page on your site has a meta description. The HTML suggestions page in Webmaster Tools lists pages where Google has detected missing or problematic meta descriptions.
