Pleased with Your Google Description?. . . If Not, Consider These Tips for Getting the Google Description That YOU Want! Part 2

Understanding How Google Builds Its Snippets

When you search for a phrase like “search engine marketing training,” Google doesn’t just pull a single block of text from a page and show it. It scans a variety of places - meta tags, headings, body text, and even image alt attributes - to find the most relevant snippet for the query. That snippet is what appears beneath the title in the search results, and it often determines whether users click or move on. Knowing where Google grabs its snippet allows you to shape the message that potential visitors see.

Take a look at three real websites that all target the same keyword phrase. The first, Online Web Training, places the phrase “search engine marketing training” deep in its body text. Google selects the first occurrence of the keyword and pulls the surrounding sentence. The snippet it shows is a chunk of the article that mentions the training program, not the meta description that the site actually supplies. This means the meta tag is ignored because the body provides a more precise match for the query.

In the second example,