How Google Finds Your Snippet

[flexsez]

This may be old news to some but I think I discovered how Google
pulls the snippet for a webpage.

I have been tinkering with my page layout all month.

When the update officially began for September I noticed that
the G Bot had posted serps from my site from very early Sept.

The results were not at all what I had hoped for. I started to
analyze how the G Bot pulled the snippets from my site and others
that have high position in the serps.

It didn't take long to realize that the G Bot pulls the snippet
according to keyword placement on the page (I know that's not breaking news).

The real meat of the matter is that G Bot reads a page in Western English style. Meaning left to right and top to bottom.

If you are looking to get that all important snippet in the serps
may I suggest that you figure out a way to get that sucker as near
the upper left-hand side of the page as possible.

Don't even give the G Bot a chance to get confused finding irrelevant
keywords and bastardizing snippet.

[Grumpus]

On one or two word searches, that's the case. BUT, Google seems to like to pull just a single snippet where possible and not split it up. Therefore if you have a page laid out like this (assume more content than is shown - this is just an example):

<title>Blue Widgets and MyDomain</title>

NAME: Blue Widgets
DESCRIPTION: Funny little things that are nearly impossible to find, yet rank well in SERPS.<lots more content here>
PICTURES: <Photos of Blue Widgets>
PURCASING INFO: Buy from widget-affiliates.com for $49.95

Now, we search for "Buy Blue Widgets" and your snippet is likely to be something like this: "NAME: Blue Widgets DESCRIPTION: Funny...INFO: Buy from widget-affiliates.com" (And you won't rank very well because "Buy" comes after "Blue Widgets" on the page.)

But, if you change the purchase info to:
PURCASING INFO: Buy Blue Widgets from widget-affiliates.com for $49.95

Your snippet is likely to show NOTHING from the top of the page, but rather will show this from WAYYYYYY down at the bottom.(which, incidentally, is exactly what you want it to show...)
"...PURCASING INFO: Buy Blue Widgets from widget-affiliates.com for $49.95..."

G.