Imagine the scenario. Someone out there is using Google. They’re looking for a company. They want to buy what you sell. Have you optimised your website for the key words they’re looking for? For the sake of argument, let’s assume you have. So your business is in the first few results. That’s brilliant. Except for some reason you’re not getting their clicks.

All this happens before the user has even visited your site. Before they’ve seen your fabulous design, read your professionally written content, browsed through your product pages with the wonderful photographs and seen your temptingly competitive prices. All this has happened on Google’s search results page. You aren’t helping your business get sales if your business listing in Google doesn’t look as good as it possibly could.

This is best illustrated with a couple of examples.

What the user sees first when they’re searching for a company to buy from is something like this:

abacus

Nothing in Abacus Media’s listing tells you very much about the business. While Abacus have a great looking website that clearly sets out what they do, a search engine user would have to click on their rather obscure and wordy listing to read that content. Few people will – they’ll move down to the next listing to see if that better matches what they’re looking for. Compare Abacus Media’s listing to another Newcastle company:

unionroom

This listing is for Union Room, a web development company. The difference is immediately apparent. Union Room’s listing clearly defines what they do, where they are, and even how to contact them. It’s a better description of the company by far.

Union Room have achieved this by making use of the META “description” tag in their page content. In contrast, Abacus Media have chosen to omit the tag so Google’s spider has had to lift the text for it’s listing page from the page content of the website. In situ the sentence might be fine but in Google it doesn’t work.

The description tag is the only META tag that Google pay any attention to these days as the others were abused by spammers in the early days of the internet. Keywords, authors, and so became worthless as measures of a page’s content so one by one Google started to ignore what they contained. Recently though there have been moves inside Google to start using page content in search listings again, just not META tags.

“Rich snippets” are well defined blocks of HTML content that Google look for in your website content. They’re a variation of a technology called “microformats”. What a microformat does is enable a machine such as Google’s search spider to understand what the content of a page really means. You, or more likely your web developer, designs the code for the page in such a way that when Google’s spider encounters it it’ll be understood better, and consequently displayed in Google’s listings in a much better form. Currently Google understands 4 different types of snippet; “reviews”, “people”, “products”, and “businesses”. You can find out how to use each one here: http://knol.google.com/k/google-rich-snippets-tips-and-tricks. If you decide to implement any of them in your website you can test that Google understand your code using the new Rich Snippet tool in Google’s webmaster suite: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets.

For search engine traffic the face of your business is what they see in Google’s listing page. Make sure it’s not ugly.