How Search Engines Create Your Website Description

Getting high search engine rankings is an exciting accomplishment. It is also important that your web pages are displayed with an accurate and attractive description in the search results. If the description is not appealing to web searchers, then they might not click the link.

Each search engine has their own method of creating the titles and descriptions for the search results. This article will describe how the top 3 search engines, Google, Yahoo! and MSN/Live create their listings.

How Google Creates Search Engine Results Descriptions

Google appears to use the description from the META description tag if you search for a page by its URL, or if the searched keywords do not appear within the page.

If the web page found in the search does not have a META description tag, then Google appears to use the sentence that contains the searched keyword as the description.

If a web page found in the search is listed in the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org) then Google might also use the description that is used in the DMOZ directory.

How Yahoo Creates Search Engine Results Descriptions

Yahoo appears to use only the first part of the META description that is complemented by a text snippet from the searched page that contains the searched keyword.

If a web page does not have a META description, Yahoo will use the description of the web page from the Yahoo! directory, if the page is listed there.

If a web page has no META description and is not listed in the Yahoo! directory, then Yahoo! will display sentences from the web page found in the search that contain the searched keywords.

How MSN/Live Creates Search Engine Results Descriptions

MSN/Live appears to use the first sentence that contains the searched keyword as the description. If the searched keyword does not appear on the page, MSN/Live appears to use the first sentence on the page.

If available, MSN/Live will also use the DMOZ directory description in the results. An important note here is that MSN/Live does not use the META description tags.

What This Means For Your Web Pages

If you want to make sure that your web pages are listed with an accurate and appealing description in the search results, you should use META descriptions on your web pages. If you do not want to use the description that is used in the Yahoo! directory or on DMOZ.org, you should use the corresponding tags that prevent search engines from using these descriptions.

__________
Jim Hutchinson is the Project Manager for Website Managers. He has studied Internet Marketing from some of the most influential leaders. Many of those resources are available on Affiliate Referral Sources.

__________
Copyright © 2007 Website Managers, LLC. You may reprint this article providing that this copyright notice and resource links all remain intact.