Promotion Tip:
Looking Good In Search Results

by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.

	March 2002 Vol. 5, No. 5  • Beginner Tip  • CSS Tip  • Promotion Tip

Every search engine uses a different method to display search results. Some rely on META tags like title and description and others pull keywords directly out of the text. Do you have a search results listing so interesting that searchers can't wait to visit the site? Or do you have a meaningless listing that confuses visitors?

In this article, we'll explain how some of the major search engines display results and give you some tips to improve the appearance of your listing.

Page Rank Isn't Everything

A high ranking is an important goal for search engine optimization, but once you get up there, how you look is almost as important as how you rank.

Consider this example: you operate a Web site devoted to natural pet food with information about nutrition and recipes. You've taken the our advice from previous newsletters and used Page Primer to optimize individual pages of your site for each topic, then deep submitted those pages to search engines. And congratulations! You've achieved a top 10 rank on several engines for your keyword phrases.

But what do visitors see when they browse through the search results? Even if you have a top rank, searchers need to be intrigued enough by the search results description to click on your link. That means that the few lines of text that describe your site contents need to be clear, concise, and compelling!

Unfortunately, there's not a single solution because each search engine displays results in a slightly different way.

Google Search Results

Google displays the contents of the title tag first as the site title, then selects the first instance of the keyword or keyword phrase in the page's content and displays that with surrounding text. Sometimes, Google will display multiple instances of a keyword if it appears several times. The search results can be confusing because searchers have to make sense of several sentence fragments and disjointed keywords.

An Open Directory Project (ODP) listing makes a big difference in Google search results. Google relies on ODP to provide secondary results listings and displays the ODP category and ODP editor's description along with its keyword phrase listing.

Look at these two search results for the keyword phrase "natural pet food:"

Example 1 (not in ODP):
The O&M Sample Store
... 1 lb. trial size of dog or cat food. This trial size is free, but there is ... Thank you for choosing Owen & Mandeville Pet Products. Click here to read our refund ...

Example 2 (listed in ODP):
Home Made 4 Life - All Natural Dog, Cat & Ferret Pet Food ...
Home ... ENTER the Home Made 4 Life All - Natural Pet Food web site, web ...

Description: All natural pet food, designed to be a complete meal for our carnivorous animal companions like dogs,...
Category: Business > Industries > ... > Pet Supplies > Pet Food > Raw Ingredients

Google's keyword results aren't that helpful, but Example 2's ODP editor description clearly describes what the site has to offer.

Note that an ODP listing will only help with one page of your site. Search directories like ODP usually only index a site's home page while Google and other search engines spider deeply into Web sites and index internal pages.

Pay careful attention to the text surrounding your keywords - especially on your internal pages. It needs to be relevant and coherent, not part of a navigation menu or a list of keywords stuck at the top of the page. The first few instances of the keywords are the most important to Google, so carefully optimize them to get readable search results.

Lycos Search Results

Lycos uses the text contained in the META title and description tags, so it's important to write a good, clear, keyword-rich title and description for each page you want indexed. Never just cut and paste the same information from your home page to the other pages in your site.

The same search for "natural pet food" on Lycos gives us this text for the top 2 results:

Welcome to Denes Natural Pet Care Ltd - Natural Pet Care since 1951 - Offers a range of cat/dog/kitten/puppy foods, herbal medicines, supplements & aromatherapy products. Advice from trained staff, animal welfare, health, food dietary requirements, Free pet care guides.

Precise Premium Pet Food - Precise super premium pet food for dogs, cats, and kittens, all-natural without chemical preservatives!

If you've neglected to include a description attribute, then Lycos defaults to the first instance of the keyword in the page content and searchers get a result like this:

SimplyNaturalPet Home - Natural Answer Pet Foods Inc. P.O. Box 615 Loma Linda, CA 92354 Phone: (877) 826-7937 Fax: (909) 796-3595 Welcome to Natural Answer Pet Foods Inc [ Home ] [ Products ] [ Promotions ] [ Where To Buy ].

AllTheWeb Results

Like Lycos, AllTheWeb (powered by FAST) looks for the title and description attributes in the META tags. If the description is missing, AllTheWeb grabs the first content on the page and displays that in its results section - even if it doesn't contain the search phrase.

Here's an example:

other major category of pet food ingredients, are the unrendered parts of the animal... A homeopath of our acquaintance, who specializes in animal health, recently reported that nearly all of her new cases are dogs and cats with cancer. This is a most unusual and alarming trend, she told us. One of the reasons American dogs and cats are...

The page title (and that's really what's in the TITLE tag!) is listed first, then the page content.

AltaVista Search Results

AltaVista displays the title attribute first, then the particular section of the description attribute that contains the keywords, and finally pulls the first section of page content that contains the keywords.

That's pretty good coverage overall, but - like Google - it can result in some odd-looking results. Here are the first two search results for "natural pet food:"

Natural Pet Food and Supplies
Natural pet food and supply distributor located in Temecula, CA. and serving Western ... You care, so we care Quality Natural Pet Food Delivered To Your Door Temecula, California Today is Saturday, ...

Natural pet food and raw meat diets for dogs and cats
Natural dog and cat foods based on meat that make sense for meat-eating dogs and cats. ... type NATPET in the yellow box at checkout! Welcome to Natural Pet Food It's your choice...which will it be for ...

These slightly jumbled search results again illustrate how important it is to include your keywords in context both in your description and early in your page content.

META Tags Are Important!

Here's a quick chart that shows what search engines look for and how they use META tags and keywords in their search results.

This shows how dangerous it is to ignore META tags! In the past, they were very important to determining your page's rank. But since link popularity and search engine themes have become a dominant ranking criteria on some engines, META tags have less impact on page rank than before. Many webmasters now believe that it's safe to ignore META tags entirely.

Well it's not. The META description and title tags help site stand out on the search results pages. It only takes a few minutes to include META tags on your page. If you're not sure how, NetMechanic's META Mechanic can help you create META tags for each page of your site.

Take the time to optimize your META tags and page content to give visitors a good sense of your site. You only get a few sentences to make your case on the search results page. You're competing with hundreds of other sites - if not more. Find out how your site looks to searchers!