Search engine optimalisations

[Jelle Mees]

Before I installed spiders on my forum, I made sure that the meta-data on my forum was correct:

<meta name="description" content="The Belgian Trackmania Community!" />
   <meta name="keywords" content="Trackmania, Nations, Forever, Sunrise, United, Belgium, Tracks, Skins, Downloads, Server" />

Strange thing is, now that my forum can finally be found on google, it displays this:

Trackmania Belgium - Index - 01:17
Talk about the "Trackmania Belgium Clan" in general. 0 Posts 0 Topics. No New Posts · Recruiting There are only 2 requirements; You have to be a Belgium ...
www.tm-belgium.info/index.php - 53k

Shouldn't it just display the discription. The discription is very relavent. Can someone help me with this?

[Oldiesmann]

It could take a while for Google to detect the changes. How long ago did you make these changes?

[Jelle Mees]

It could take a while for Google to detect the changes. How long ago did you make these changes?

Like I sad before, I installed the spiders AFTER the meta-changes.

[Nigel]

Hi Jelle Mees,

Google often doesn't display the meta description data, although it still takes it into account when deciding how high to rank a page. Instead it shows some text surrounding the keywords/phrase that was searched for.

Like Oldiesmann said, it can take a while for Google to index properly, but when it's more thoroughly analysed a page it's even more likely to show relevant snippets from that page. If you think about it, that's probably more useful to the person searching for those keywords than is a general description.

Nigel

[rsw686]

In most cases you will only see the meta data when doing a site:yourdomain.com search on google. For normal searches it displays the page text relevant to your site as the description.

[karlbenson]

If you use the same meta description for every page, google will ignore your meta description. (and show the first text instead)

Also note
using Site:http://www.yourdomain
in google seems to throw it in a quirks mode. And it shows the first text on your site rather than the description.

[NickC]

All you need to know, including an explanation of how google decides on what descriptions to use.

Google Webmaster Help Centre

Meta tag keywords haven't been used for years by any major search engine. The only way to get your preferred keywords to influence your search results is to use them in content.