Title & Description appearance in Yahoo and Google using 'site:YOURSITE'
Date Written on 06/02/2004Article Written by: Abe LaBonte
http://www.seoptimizational.com Staff
Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
You have complete control over your default title and description that appears in Yahoo and Google, and I would assume others as well. When you enter site:YOURSITE in Google or Yahoo it will show your site's default Title and Description. Their spiders grabs your site's <title> tag and uses it for your title, and then proceeds to grab the first bit of the text portion that it can off you site to display as your description. It will in fact even display the description as an ALT tag of a linked image is at the top of the html. site:http://www.seoptimizational.com is a good example of that:
Our main image, up top, in the header is linked with the alt
tag 'Free SEO / Search Engine Optimization Website Placement Promotion Services
- http://www.seoptimizational.com' and as you can see it's the main part of
the description. Where it has a comma, and then says 'Search Engine Optimizataion
...' Google was starting to add our <h1> header text which is the first
displayed text after the ALT tag.
In some cases the alt tag wont show up in search engines though, such as with
our sister site http://www.f-w-r.com,
the <h1> tag only, is displayed for the discription and google skipped
the alt tag of an image that was above the title which was 'Free Website Tool'.
So at that, there's not a 100% definate practice to get your descriptions exactly
as you like them but I think it seems to be reliable enough to focus on each
time one creates a web page.
