website menus appearing in description on serps page !

[member22]

I just noticed that when I do a search for on my keywords on google I find my website on the 5 th page but the description that I wrote doesn't appear, I have menus on the left of my site and the menus name appear in the the description.

Does anyone have any idea why and how to fix this issue ? , thanks

[Robert Charlton]

When your meta description doesn't contain words matching the search query for which your page ranks, Google will look elsewhere on your page to find material for the snippet, as it's called, that is returned in the search engine results page.

It starts at the top of your page code and moves down, pulling the best matches it finds along the way. Since left menus are generally high up in the code, it's not unusual that text might be pulled from them.

Best thing to do is to examine phrases for which your page is likely to rank, and to include that vocabulary in the first 150 characters or so of your meta description. Tuning meta descriptions is an art, and a good description can greatly improve click-throughs.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:55 am (utc) on Sep. 10, 2008]