


One solution is to make sure that phrase appears in our META description for the relevant page. If Google can find the matching copy in your description, they're more likely to use the tag as is. It's also just a good exercise – figuring out what your core target keywords are and targeting them naturally in your META description (don't just make it a list of keywords, of course) will help you focus your overall on-page SEO efforts. In some cases, having too many pages with duplicate TITLE tags or META descriptions can lead Google to rank the wrong page or filter that META description. If you suspect that your search snippet is coming from the Open Directory Project (this would be more common on the home-page than deeper pages and long-tail queries), you can block Google from using your ODP listing with the following META tag: De-duplicating your TITLEs and META descriptions is a good practice anyway, but making sure that each page has its own unique and relevant description can also help insure that Google sees value in those descriptions. This problem isn't quite as common as it used to be, but it does still pop up from time to time. There's another, much more severe META tag you can use to block your snippet entirely: This directive will remove your snippet ENTIRELY, though, so use it with caution. In general, I'd only use this option if Google is taking liberties with snippets that could harm your brand or cause legal problems. Typically, these issues would be better dealt with in your on-page content directly. Google's attempts to match snippets to queries don't always work the way you'd like, but in general they're a good thing. Matching, bolded keywords drive click-throughs, and people rarely read the whole text of a snippet.
