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Feb

SERPs - Taking Control

Posted by Marge R (18 other posts) 3 views

Ok, I promised you some specific HTML tags for controlling your web page’s description in the search engine results pages. If you remember, the different search engines display different things … your meta description tag, the description from the Open Directory Project, or the Yahoo Directory description.

Under all circumstances, you want to add a meta description tag to your web pages, since this is the most utilized. This should be positioned in the HTML <head> section:

<meta name = “description” content = “Your page description here.” />

If you don’t want the search engines to grab the description from the Open Directory Project, use a robots tag to tell them to ignore that description:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” />

To tell Yahoo to ignore their directory description:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noydir” />

The other piece of information that the search engines like to use is a text snippet from the page content that matches the keyword searched. There is nothing you can do to control this. But really … as searchers, many of us like to see that there is content that matches our search on the web page before we follow the link to the page. So the text snippets are probably not a bad thing.