ZydoSEO - 6:29 pm on Dec 20, 2009 (gmt 0)

I believe you can often alter the distribution of click-thrus provided by Tedster using a well written, well optmized meta description element.

If your page is well optimized, then your title element should contain the targeted keyword phrase(s) for that URL. And the keyword phrase(s) from the title element (and slight variations) "should" be the phrases most often used to find the page in the SERPs.

By using all of the keywords from the title in the meta description, you should maximize the percentage of times that your meta description is shown as the Google snippet. Google will almost always show your meta description as the search snippet if the meta description contains ALL of the keywords from the user's search phrase... assuming your meta description is not too short. If keywords exist in the search phrase but not in your meta description then Google will typically construct a snippet from fragments of content on the page. Their overall goal is to be able to highlight/bold ALL words from the search phrase in the snippet.

Getting the meta description to show as the snippet is only half the battle. The meta description needs to also contain a call to action to make the user want to click-thru to your site. And the description needs to accurately portay what the user will find should they click through... otherwise, they will bounce back.

So IMO a #4 ranking URL with a well optimized title element, meta description, and keyword rich URL might get more click-thrus than #3, #2, and likely in rare cases even #1 positioned URLs.