Page 38 - Payout Magazine Online Volume 10.01

Google’s New Snippet Google has just made it possible for
Setting: Webmasters Gain webmasters to customize the snippets
Control Over Their Search that appear in search results. These new
Listing Display settings give site owners the ability to change
how their site’s snippet is displayed by using
38 PAYOUTMAGAZINE new robots meta tags and a new HTML
attribute.

This is something that many SEO folks
and webmasters have wanted for a long time.
Online publishers have long desired a way to
customize what content is displayed in search
results and how it’s displayed. After all, who
doesn’t want complete control over how their
sites show up in search results?

Google generates snippets based on the
content of a page as well as a user’s search
query. Previously, site owners had no way
of customizing this generated snippet aside
from disabling them altogether. With these
new settings, webmasters have more granular
control over how snippets are displayed in
Google’s search results. They’ll be able to
customize the amount of text, the size of the
images, and the length of animated preview
videos that are displayed in Google’s search
result snippets.

What Snippets Are

Google defines snippets as the description
of your page in its search results. Basically, a
search snippet is comprised of:

� The headline of the page.

� The URL listed below the headline.

� The text description is drawn from content
on the page.

You can also create what Google calls rich
snippets. These provide detailed information
to users searching for specific queries, such
as star ratings on products, and they can help
drive more traffic to your site. Keep in mind that
these changes are strictly for regular search
snippets and not rich snippets.

The Importance of Snippets

Snippets are important in marketing and
SEO as they’re a great way to help drive traffic
to your site. They can pass information from
your pages to actual search results, making the
result in the search engine more appealing to