Leveraging Google Descriptions

So today, like many other days, I was looking for a phone number. So I went to google and typed in the search for the store I wanted to call. The results page loads and there is the store I’m looking for right at the top. I read the little description–just to be sure.

And then I get to thinking, wouldn’t it be great if more stores and businesses started to publish their phone numbers in their meta data descriptions, so when people do what I just did they can see that number right up front and centre?

It will only be relevant to certain business. But I’m going to start suggesting it. One thing to be careful of when trying to do this however, is to realize you don’t have full control over what Google will use to build the description. Sometimes Google will defer to DMOZ data from the Open Directory project. You can prevent this from by adding another META data tag to your site’s HEAD. Just add:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">

So put it all together and instead of seeing something like this:

You could see this:

Google Webmaster Help center has good article on the whole SERP, description thing and how google build’s your site title and description used on its results page.