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1. I would like for the site description (stored in the meta tag), to display when the site info is displayed on google. Sometimes it displays the first instance of text, sometimes info in a link. would like to primarily display the info stored in the description tag. is it possible to either force it to do so, or hide some "first instance" of text on the page.
2. secondly, is there a good reference, site instructions etc. to get the site a higher ranking! yes, I know everybody wants to know the answer to this one.
Any help and info will be greatly appreciated
Thanks
Firstly, you're in the right place for info, but you're gonna have to do a bit of reading i'm afraid. I'd start with Brett's infamous post here [webmasterworld.com], the Google Knowledge base here [webmasterworld.com] and have a look in the rest of this forum.
WRT your site description problem, i'm afraid your meta tags won't do you much good with Google, they stopped using them a while ago and now grab on-page content instead. You can however get a little description to go along side that, if (sometimes quite a big if) you manage to get into the Google Directory [directory.google.com]. To do this you need to get into this directory first... www.dmoz.org. It could take you a while, and it might not be the description you want, but that's the best I can do i'm afraid!
Cheers,
Chris.
Your second question is too broad to give short answers, you'll have to follow the discussions around here. Things to keep an eye on is incoming links, title and header tags (read document structure) in your web pages and your site structure. Start with the link jade233 provided.
The snippet that is displayed beneath the Link in the SERPS usually shows something in relation to the the search term. The only way to get google to show the meta-description is if you have no other text on the page (splash-intro page). However if you'll do that you are only going to show up in the ranks for what's in title-tag and on anchortext of incoming links to that page. It also has other draw-backs to do with distribution of PR etc.. You'll have to weigh what is more important. If you get more traffic through your content pages, I probably wouldn't do it.
The description meta-tag works just fine for me, as I believe it does for others too.
What I find is that for our sites, the meta-description only shows up if the meta tag contains the search text being used.
If the search text is not in the meta, it will show the relevant body text in the description.
content="blah blah blah keyword phrase blah blah blah"
that meta-description will show in the search result description.
If the meta-content is really long, you will only get the relevante meta-snippet.
I guess you're right! I'd never noticed that before. I think I need to go put meta descriptions on all our pages again. :)
I'd guess that they're still not used for ranking purposes though? Hmmmmm. You live and learn. :)
I'd guess that they're still not used for ranking purposes though?
Why do you say that? As far as I am concerned it is. In fact at one point I belive that I jumped above one of my competitors after having shuffled my keywords in the meta-description (all other on page factors of both sites were unchanged, as were my off page factors).
Also, don't go forgetting about other SE's, there's even one out there that says that it still uses the meta-keywords tag (though to what extend the importance of that is, or how they use it, is beyond me!)
[webmasterworld.com...]
I think it'd be worth a bit of effort to put them on all the sites again. I need to get into the Google forum more often. ;)
Wow, thanks tosspot, on those two sites that I mentioned here [webmasterworld.com], I believe that I went pretty slack on the keywords, I'm goin back to check it out...
