Deconstructing Google snippets

Most SEOs think the path to better snippets is writing a compelling, keyword-rich meta description tag. But that's only part of it.

Meta descriptions aren't going to help your rankings, but it's worthwhile spending time on them because they can -- and often do -- make their way into the snippet.

But did you know that Google snippets can contain meta description copy and page content? Yep. Here's an example. Do a Google search for "lord of the rings downloads" and you'll get the following search listing of the lordoftherings.net home page at #2:

The first part of the snippet, the part preceding the first elipses ("The Lord of the Rings Movie: Return of the King tickets.") comes from the meta description. The rest of the snippet ("shelob, and dark moria here. lord of the rings fellowship of the ring trailer movie downloads") comes from content in the page's HTML.

It was funny to see where this page content (which makes up the second part of the snippet) comes from... as it's not visible to humans on the page; it's actually keyword-stuffed hidden text embedded within a noscript tag. (Also note the mile-long meta keywords tag. Who woulda thunk... Peter Jackson is a black-hat! )

When I was in their HTML source, I also noticed that LOTR's meta description contains a keyword list, which I'm not a proponent of. A meta description tag containing repeated keywords or long strings of keywords separating by commas does not make for a compelling snippet. This is LOTR's home page meta description:

The Lord of the Rings Movie: Return of the King tickets. Official LOTR New Movies Site. Listings, Showtimes, Trailer, Pictures, Wallpaper, Swords, Pics, Film Exclusives, Characters, Screensaver, Desktop Theme, Art, Downloads and News.

Another tip... don't use the same meta description across all your pages. That makes for a lot of similar-looking snippets, which could potentially trigger Google's duplicate content filter.