Improving your website so that Google will favor it enough to grant you sitelinks in your search listings is a good practice, whether or not you are granted those sitelinks. But there are other ways to make your search engine results page (SERP) listings stand out, by optimizing your SERP snippets (the short lines of text that appear in your SERP listings). For those that are new to DIY SEO, here are two more ways to make your SERP snippets stand out and get the attention of users.
Option #1: Google Authorship
If you want your SERP listings to appear in an enhanced format, you can take advantage of the new Google authorship rules. If you are approved for enhanced authorship formatting, then enhanced SERPs snippets for your site will be generated when it appears in a search result.
Here is how it works: Google authorship rules allow you to send the spiders more information about your website’s content (images and additional data, for example). Google can connect that information back to your authorship data so that when your pages appear in SERP, they automatically include that extra information in your search listings. To help you set up your Google authorship on your own, you could use the information featured on the Google+ page for this topic – or better yet, trust the expertise of an SEO company that can do it for you.
Option #2: Enhancing your Meta Tags
Unfortunately, it’s not up to you whether Google will choose to approve your SERPs listings for sitelinks or enhanced authorship formats. What is in your hands, though, is the quality of the meta tag content throughout your site. You may have heard that meta tags don’t do much to improve your SEO anymore, but our Orange County SEO professionals beg to differ.
When you just paste the first couple of sentences from each page into the meta tag field, you are doing your site a disservice. If Google pulls the meta tag or title tag to form your SERP snippet (which it often does), you want that content to read well so users will be enticed to click through. Making your meta tags as engaging as possible (with the help of a professional SEO company) is the best way to ensure a quality SERP snippet appears in your search results.
Why Your SERP Snippets Matter
You need to use every possible opportunity at your disposal to improve your SERP snippets. Often, these few lines of text are taken for granted – but remember, they will see the SERP snippet before they even see your home page. Think of your SERP snippets as the user’s first impression of your business, and you will approach them as an important part of your Web development plan.
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