The site description is the description of your website that will appear when your website is found through a search engine.
Think of it as a short "advertisement" for your website. It is a headline for your web site and needs to be descriptive and enticing. You want to write it in a way that will make the reader want to visit your site, but, most importantly, it needs to honestly describe what your site is all about.
The Site Description will appear under the link to your website in search engine results.
Here you see Kathleen Dunphy's Site Description:
plein air and studio landscape oil paintings by nationally recognized Northern California artist Kathleen Dunphy
Sitelinks, on the other hand, are awarded at the discretion of Google. There's nothing you really can "do" to get sitelinks other than have a site that gets enough searches that google warrants them and have your site properly structured. All FASO sites are properly structured and many of our artists do get sitelinks once google indexes their site.
Generally, if you don't use a site description (meta description), the search engines will use the first couple of sentences of text from your web page.
However, sometimes the first text on your web page has navigation links and other elements that are not actual content. It's best to take control and add a site description.
Add a Site Description
- from your FASO control panel
- click on Marketing icon (upper row)
- click on Use Marketing Tools button
- scroll down
- below Search Engine Optimization (SEO), click on Change Your Search Engine Settings
- click on Edit Home Page Metatags
- Add / Edit text in box under Site description for search engines
- Save Changes
NOTE: Due to search engine re‐indexing schedules (known only to them), it may take up to 60 days to see a new/edited site description. |
NOTE: Be sure to read the text at top of the Edit Home Page Metatags page, highlighted in blue. This text:
| These settings will change the title tag, the meta-description and the meta-keywords of your FASO site's home page. Meta-keywords and meta-description do not appear visible to humans on your page, but are looked at by search engines. |
Title tagChanging the title tag may affect your Google rankingsThink of the title tag as a "headline" that "advertises" your website. If you leave the title tag blank, FASO will automatically use the phrase "Your Name Fine Art" as your title tag. Perhaps you paint oil paintings of whitetail deer. In that case, you may want to use a title such as "Whitetail Deer Oil Paintings by Your Name". Do not make your title tags longer than 70 characters. |
Meta DescriptionChanging your description meta tag is unlikely to affect your Google rankings.Think of the title tag as the "copy" that "advertises" your website. Although the meta B5E1F7description will not help you rank any higher in Google, it can be useful. Google quite often uses the meta-description in the search engine results as the descriptive text to tell the user what to expect when they visit your site. So you can think of the meta-description as a way to expound upon what a visitor can expect when they visit your site. Do not make your meta description longer than 155 characters. |
Meta KeywordsChanging your keywords meta tag is unlikely to affect your Google rankings.Think of the meta keywords as "topics" under which your site might be "filed". If you've used a blogging system before, you know that you can "tag" your posts help people find certain topics and/or to understand more what the post is about. Meta keywords are similar to tagging blog posts, except that the "tags" are for search engines instead of for humans. FASO automatically includes meta-keywords for your first name, your last name, and the word "artist". You do not need to add these terms in your keywords section. Please note that excessive use of keywords can actually hurt your potential listings in search engines. Use no more than 10 keywords total in the field below. If you enter additional keywords we also advise that you use those words in the visible text of your FASO site's home page. While the keywords will not improve your rankings, they may help Google to understand a bit more regarding the subject matter of your site. There is also some evidence that Bing does look at keywords in a very minor way to assist in ranking decisions. |
| Here is Google's official position on the meta-keywords tag |
02152023