Controlling text that appears in google search results
- by Mick
I have recently made a simple (pure HTML) website. The most important key phrase that I want to capture is "full reserve banking". Currently, if I type "full reserve banking" (without quotes) into google, then my site appears as the 7th item on the first page. I am reasonably happy with this as the site is so new. But one frustration is that the text that google displays in relation to my site is rather misleading. The main message I would like to get across is that my site is "A collection of resources for anyone interested in this alternative monetary system." and I have this as the first line of text on the page. Unfortunately, this important sentence is nowhere to be seen in the google search result. So my question is - is there anything I can do to fix this error?
Edit: I noticed that someone edited this question to remove the name of the website. I was very keen to leave it in because being able to look at it makes it far easier to diagnose what I did wrong. Indeed the answer suggested by "Su" clearly shows that they looked at my website and analyzed what it was doing which helped them give a clearer answer. If I am breaking some policy by including the name then please explain what this policy is in a comment.
Edit: I have now made a series of changes to my meta descriptions as inspired by the answers given here. On the homepage I now have the text:
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="A collection of resources for anyone
interested in Full Reserve Banking. What it is, how it works,
web resources, organisations, research papers etc.">
I am now very excited to see what will happen after the next visit by the google robots.
Edit: Result! I just did a google search for "full reserve banking", and the text that appeared was:
Full Reserve Banking: The definitive resource.
A collection of resources for anyone interested in Full Reserve Banking. What it is,
how it works, web resources, organisations, research papers etc.
www.fullreservebanking.com/ - Cached
By the way, I did originally have a meta description - but it was too short, it just said "full reserve banking". Google obviously assumed this was too little and so chose to use its own algorithms to cook up a different sentence from the main text.
