If you take a moment to pause and think about what we’re trying to accomplish with every SEO website we build, the challenge is quite remarkable.

We are attempting to take the one to three search terms entered by a user into Google search; display a 156 character snippet (in addition to the 70 character title and URL) in Google search results; and entice the user to click through to a landing page containing roughly 100 to 300 readable words. If we’re fortunate enough to pop near the top of millions of search results, we’ll have about one second to capture the user’s attention to the snippet, and roughly 30 seconds to get our message across on the landing page.  At the end of those 30 seconds, the user may respond to our call-to-action. Here’s what that looks like:

3 terms -> 156 char. snippet (1 sec.) -> 300 word page (30 sec.)  -> 5 word call-to-action -> contact.

Let’s think about this with regard to deep sea fishing for a moment. You hop on a 60-foot vessel, cruise out one mile into the 64 million square mile Pacific Ocean, drop in a .36 millimeter line to catch a one pound moving target in oftentimes less than pristine environmental conditions.

Fishing for customers on Google is a lot like deep sea fishing for dinner: every detail matters. This is especially true in the information-overloaded society we live in, where attention spans are clipped to consuming 160-character chunks of words in a fraction of a minute.  A snippet must display high enough within Google search results to even have a chance of reaching the user.

In order to test how high a snippet might display on Google, there are a couple of SEO testing tools available that may help, notably the SEOmofo Snippet Optimization Tool at http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html, and the SEOChat Keyword Density Tool at http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-density/. If there are other tools out there that you recommend, please feel free to share them here.