This Is How You Can Update Your Search Snippets

Google‘s newest ‘Search for Beginners’ online video is a short course that tackles the creation of effective search snippets for search results. As most of the discussed details in the video are actually for beginners, it’s expected that SEO experts are now aware of all these.

Whether you’re someone who wants to update your knowledge about search snippets, or you’re a complete beginner in SEO, here are some details discussed in the video.

What is the importance of the search results snippets?

Considered as a significant piece of information, search snippets are used by searchers when choosing which results they should click on.

More than just a mere meta description, a Google search snippet actually refers to both the description and title. Plus, it also covers other relevant details regarding the web page.

Apart from the description and title, a search results snippet could include the product’s price, page’s author and published date, if the product is in stock or not, and so on.

The titles of the page must define what the page could offer. On the other hand, a quality description is a page content’s summary that has one or two sentences.

What should you take note of when writing titles and descriptions?

When creating page titles, steer clear of vague terms such as “home” for the home page. Likewise, stay away from dragging titles since they can be truncated in the search results.

While you can utilise descriptive terms in your titles, make sure they don’t have excessive and repetitive synonyms included. This is important, so it won’t look spammy to the searchers and even to Google.

Utilising unique titles for every page is also essential. Numerous website CMS let you enter your page title manually.

This Is How Google Generates Search Snippets

Those search results snippets you see are automatically generated by Google. The goal of these snippets is to emphasise the page content that relates to a specific search from the user.

A similar page could display different snippets depending on the query of the searcher. In this, Google will try to select a helpful and relevant description and title.

That said, even if you create your descriptions and titles manually, Google could still select an alternative depending on the user’s entered query.

There are two ways of influencing what Google generates a snippet: meta description tags and rich results. The said video here focused on just meta descriptions. As for rich snippets, a separate video has already been created.

This Is What Google Suggests When It Comes To Meta Descriptions

Google says a great meta description is a precise and relevant summary of what a specific web page is all about.

Google indicates thinking about a meta outline as a “pitch” to persuade a potential buyer to go to your site. As a result, they must be exclusive and highly relevant to each web page.

There’s technically no limit to the length of a meta description. However, they are truncated in search results as required.

Why Having Too Many Non Searched Pages Is Not Entirely Bad For SEO

Google’s John Mueller received a question, and it’s if "having too many non searched pages on website are bad for SEO?" John didn't answer the question with a yes or no, but he instead stated on Twitter - "that's up to you." He stated what the purpose is if there’s no one that searches for it in the first place.

Mueller stated that this is merely a philosophical concern "From a philosophical point of view, if nobody searches for them, unless they're providing value (to you / your users) otherwise, why do you need them?"

Here are the said tweets regarding this concern on non searched pages:

This Is Why Having Fewer Pages On New Sites Is Recommended

John Mueller from Google stated that he would "recommend erring on the side of having fewer pages, especially when creating a new website." He stated that numerous web pages could make it difficult for Google to "find the unique value of each page."

Mueller said this in a Twitter post and added that for those who are adding plenty of web pages, ensure that they are very "significantly different" or else he was quoted saying "try to keep them together."

These are the Twitter posts:

Details in this SEO UK post were gathered from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-seo-101-heres-how-to-update-your-search-results-snippets/355098/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranking, and https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-new-site-ranking-algorithm/345342/. Visit these links to know more.

If you are a site owner who is looking for ways to get your website on the top page of the SERPs, hiring an SEO professional would be ideal. Head over to Position1SEO for further information.