Tweaking the Meta Descriptions for More Clicks....

Okay, the first thing to remember here is that the search engines DO NOT always pay attention to this. They will pull what they want. BUT, more often than not, this does work!

So smile and keep reading.

As I mentioned, generally, the first sentence or two, depending on length is pulled for the description. BUT, here is the actual first sentence of the article:

Yep, it begins with something totally different: "With the use of the World Wide Web...." yada yada yada, boring and needs a serious update.

BUT.....

WordPress also provides us with an Excerpt function.

See the Excerpt area here in my post editor:

UPDATE for Lena

WHAT? Excerpts box not showing up in there?

Step 1: Within your post editor, click this wee button in the upper-right corner, Screen Options as indicated here:

Step 2: Click to enable Excerpts (and go ahead and make sure All-In-One SEO is enabled as indicated here:

Okay, as you were! ;-)

And, as a reminder of the SERPs, here is the actual description that was indexed by Google:

And, BOOM, now you see the correlation between the two! The Excerpt overrides the All-in-One autogenerate function when I want it to do so.

Ya gotta love the flexibility of WordPress (although some would argue that these features create complexity. LOL!)

Okay, as I mentioned, there's more than one way to handle this. The Excerpt is one function. I'll show you another shortly. But, let me also enlighten you to what else this excerpt does for you.

Here is where this specific article shows up in my blog roll:

The image is pulled from the "Featured Image" function of the post (this is found on the right margin when you're in edit mode.

And, that wee description that visitors see when scrolling through all my article liistings (blog roll) is also pulled from the Excerpt function I mentioned above.

Now, on to method TWO of how to Tweak the Meta Description (snippet).