Ranking line words appearance

[tpeck]

Probably a dumb question, but how (i.e. where) can I place the words in an HTML page that will ALWAYS appear on the second Google ranking line?

[abduraooft]

Do you mean the description under the link?

[tpeck]

Yes, exactly. How can you always be sure to get the words you want to see happening in that search engine space...

[abduraooft]

AFAIK, Google and some other search engines takes the title of our document as the text for links and a portion of texts from the start of a document to be displayed as the description. This means , if we put a menu at the top, then the description might be the texts like home about contact etc.

You could place an h1 element at the top of your page with your required text, say
<h1 id="description">Welcome to my website ....</h1> , and then hide it from the normal users like
h1#description{
position:absolute;
text-indent:-9999px;
}

[Pepe, the bull]

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Your descriptive sentence or two goes here.">

This worked when I put it in for my website.

[tpeck]

I would have thought the description (in Google) would have come from the meta tag too, but it doesn't seem to always.

My friend's site http://maraboni.aapress.com.au has the description tag same as the title - but the description at this moment is taken from a hidden <div> element at the top of the page. So I guess that hidden divs take precedence over the meta tag.

I've now tried abduraooft's method, so in a couple of months or so, we will see of this makes any difference!

Thanks to you both.

[abduraooft]

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Your descriptive sentence or two goes here.">
Google won't look up for meta tags!
so in a couple of months or so, we will see of this makes any difference!

You could submit your pages via www.google.com/webmasters/tools/, which I think would speed up the crawls.

[tpeck]

Thanks - actually, the description changes depending on what I search for (stupidly, I didn't realise this - thinking the description tag would do.)

If I search for the person's name (Mara Boni) I get a different description than if I search for "maraboni" (which I do for speed). Since the concatenated version is part of the website address, maybe that is what is causing the wrong text to appear.

I'll use the Google tools as suggested.

[abduraooft]

And also note that your content should be semantic, to help search engines, see http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/semantic-HTML.cfm