We know how essential good SEO is to Web site success. One important and often overlooked element is the ’snippet’ of text shown in search results pages (SERPs).

Snippets are important. Really important!

There is a human factor involved here: you want people to notice your site’s entries on the search results page and click through to it. This underlines the importance of getting your page titles and META description tags right, not only for good SEO, but for humans as well.

This requires a copywriting skill which is just as important as it would be for crafting finely-tuned ad copy, which is critical for online PPC ads. Where you appear in search results is vital, and the copy which users see is also the copy on your free and very important ad.

As if that wasn’t enough, if your SERP snippet is not representative of your site, misled or disinterested users will land on your site then go straight back to the search engine and try another site or re-search. Google is smart enough to spot this, will consider it to be ‘lack of relevence’ and your pagerank will be degraded as a consequence.

So, if you don’t get your snippet right, it can have a negative impact on your pagerank, which affects search visibility and therefore reduces inbound traffic from search engines.

Snippet updates – take action early

Our next challenge is the lack of control we have over our SERP snippets. It can take weeks, or even months for updated page snippets to appear on the search engines.

If you are developing a new Web site, it is important to get a relevant holding page on-line as soon a possible, not only to establish the domain and provide content for search engines to find and index, but also to register an optimum snippet, which will not be easy to change once your site is finally launched.

Here is an example of a good holding page with relevant copy. There are plenty of bad examples too – this is a useless holding page.

Take a look at this search and you will see what unhelpful and damaging snippets look like in a search results page. Many of these snippets will persist in SERPs long after the sites have fully launched.