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When optimising a website, part of the process is to assess the "off-site" appearance of the website. The "off-site" appearance is how your website actually appears in Google (or other search engine) search results. The results displayed by search engines are fairly standard in their layout. They generally comprise a Title, a URL and a Snippet, as shown below: A problem we come across frequently is Google not displaying the snippet that our customers are expecting or would like to be displayed, such as the page description, or a snippet that is of poor quality. Displaying a poor quality snippet is not good for your website traffic. The snippet is like a mini CV for your website, so the text it displays should do your website justice. So why do poor or unexpected snippets happen? For a long time now Google has attempted to built snippets that show the search terms in use on the page, rather than simply blindly displaying the page description. The idea being that by seeing how the term is used in a website, a person can decide whether the page is truly relevant without having to click into it. To build a better snippet Google sources information from the following places on, or even off, your web page: Descriptive information in the title and meta tags for each page.  Page content Publicly available information—for instance, anchor text or listings from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) When Google finds a source that contains a search term, then it will extract a number of words from that source and place them in the snippet in order to show the term in use. If the search terms are spread between several sources, then it may take a little from here or there and place a ellipsis character (...) between them.  If it doesn't find anything relevant then it will fall back on the first few sentences in the page content or the meta description. Unfortunately Google's choice of snippet is not always our choice as web masters. When it sources from multiple locations it can really look as though it is displaying complete gibberish. So what's the answer? The answer comes in a classic test and one that we carry out as standard in off-site analysis. This is to enter the website domain name or part of the domain name, e.g. whatever.com as the search term. Searches on parts of the domain name are very common. In our analysis of web server logs we have found that when people look for a company they might have heard about it through word of mouth and therefore not be too sure how the domain name is spelt, whether it is a .com .co .org or .co.uk. So they will enter the name they know and see where it leads them. In fact you can expect that a good 60% of the traffic onto your website will be via this route. One website I came across recently displayed some very messy looking contact details from the footer of the page when I did this. Not a good first impression. After looking at the page source I determined that the footer was the only place on the page where the URL appeared, and was therefore the best place for Google to build the snippet from. So to get Google to display what we wanted, we made sure that it could only find the domain name in the places we wanted to be used. The places that we felt formed a good quality snippet. We removed the URL from the footer (there was no point in it being there anyway - it's displayed in the title bar) and we added the URL to some but not all of the page descriptions. You can see how this is done on our website: www.fiercelycompetitive.com None of the pages on our website have the URL in the footer or anywhere in the body of the page. A couple of the page descriptions contain the URL so we can push those pages to the top of the search results. But, not all the descriptions contain the URL, because we want those pages to be pushed to the top of the results for other searches. You can see that were the descriptions don't contain the URL they have still been used by Google because it couldn't find the search term anywhere else. Therefore each page still looks nice and serves a different purpose in selling the site in the search results. Conclusion Google building better quality snippets is a good thing for searches. So long as we respect and understand this and work with it we can make our websites look great in the search results. When conducting off-site analysis take your time to conduct searches on different search terms and see how Google is displaying the snippet for those search terms, Edit your page descriptions so that they include those terms, this will encourage Google to use your descriptions rather than other page content. DO NOT put the same terms on every page. Make every page work for different set of search terms with a unique and interesting description on each. DO NOT make your pages or their descriptions do too much: split your pages out and spread the load, get each page to deal with a specific topic and specific set of search terms, less is more when it comes to web pages. If you do this then your website will look amazing in the search results and quickly improve in ranking. William Coppock