What are SERPs and Snippets and how to make the best of them?

SERP’s is the Search Engine Results Pages you get when you do a search. The Snippet is the normal organic search entry in the SERP for a single web page.

The snippet is an opportunity for you to present summary information about your web page to searchers to get them to click on your website link rather than the others. So this is your marketing text in the search engine.

The Snippet consists of 4 lines and is usually made up of (although Google does change details sometimes):

• Page address or URL
• Title – taken from SEO Title (Meta Title) usually related to keywords in search
• Description – 2 lines taken from Meta Description or from the content of the page. Usually with keywords from search highlighted. If your web page has a Meta Description that is relevant to the search and your web page the search engine is likely to use it.

Generally speaking, the use of Keywords in a URL, SEO Title and Meta Description help to get a web page Snippet to rank well in the SERPs provided that the page content is good and relevant.

Note: Google does not always use the information you supply. It may decide something else from your page better fits the particular search. But this does not mean it is a waste of time optimising these items.