"Discover The Anatomy of Your Search Results"

.

Provide Users With The Most Relevant Results

Webmasters Do Have Influence

.

Google’s goal is to provide users with the best and most relevant results for their query. While your search is completely algorithmic and automated, webmasters do have quite a lot of influence over how their site is listed. However, Google does not guarantee whether or how any site will appear in our search results. A good understanding or search results is important in most SEM projects.

The first line of any search result is the title of the web page. This text is generally taken from the contents of the tag for that page (which is also the text that appears in the title bar of your browser. Occasionally (generally when the title tag is not meaningful or the page is not crawlable) Google will pull the title from the anchor text of a link to that page, or from the Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org).

Your page title gives Google additional information about the content of the page. Relevant, useful titles also help users decide which site to click in the results page.

A description of the content of the page. Google automatically attempts to extract the part of the page that’s most relevant to the user query. The snippet can be taken from a number of sources. Body text. DMOZ if we can’t find anything else. We pick the best information we can find for the user query, and search terms are highlighted in bold. Good meta descriptions make users more likely to click on your page in search results.

Watch a video on how Google displays search results.

Review information

Some sites, especially large-scale review sites, use RDFa or microformats to identify structured information—such as reviews, product data, or contact information—in their content. Where available, Google may add this information to a search result listing. This can be very helpful to users.

URL structure

The URL of your page. URLs that are intelligible to humans can encourage users to click on your site’s listing.

A site’s URL structure should be as simple as possible. Consider organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a manner that is most intelligible to humans (when possible, readable words rather than long ID numbers). For example, if you’re searching for information about aviation, a URL like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation will help you decide whether to click that link. A URL like http://www.example.com/index.php?id_sezione=360&sid=3a5ebc944f41daa6f849f730f1, is much less appealing to users.

Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.

Overly complex URLs, especially those containing multiple parameters, can cause a problems for crawlers by creating unnecessarily high numbers of URLs that point to identical or similar content on your site. As a result, Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all the content on your site.

Cached

Google links to the current version of a page, and also stores a copy of a recent version of that page so you can see what it looked like recently, or view the stored copy if the current page is not available. You can also view a text-only version of your cached page. Because search engines crawl mainly text, this is a great way to see how your page appears to Google. (For example, if important content isn’t visible in the text-only version of the page, it may be because it’s embedded in an image or otherwise unavailable to search engines.)

Once again thanks to our friends at Google for this information. Click this link to learn more details about this post.