The importance of the meta description or “snippet”

The meta description or “snippet” is the text that appears underneath the page link in a Google search. It may also appear in other search engine results. Here is an example:

What to include in the snippet

The snippet helps to improve your search rankings for that page for any keywords (phrases) you want to be found for.

For your Homepage, it is a good idea to include the words “Christian Science” at least once.

The snippet should give people an idea of what they will find when they click on the page. It should be compelling. Consider including a “call to action” such as “Click here to listen to experiences of healing through prayer…”

Make sure it corresponds to your page content

You should also look at the text on your webpage and make sure the snippet gives an accurate reflection of what is written there. Google checks whether the text in the snippet matches the text on the page. If it is completely different, Google may penalise that page and rank it lower in the search results for anyone searching on those words.

Why doesn’t Google use my snippet text?

Google may ignore the text in your meta description altogether and instead use words from your webpage. This will depend on:

• what it sees as the topic of the page
• what search terms people are looking for.

To learn more about how to update the snippet, please go to the tutorial Editing the snippet.

For more tips on how to write your snippet, also read the article Introducing your topic.