Our Google snippet should say “See an accountant and tax agent as soon as possible if you are starting a business in Carlisle.” which is a simple English sentence with a verb and a full stop even if viewed from a mobile phone. To influence Google to do what we want, we have made this sentence the lead sentence of our website’s front page, and we have also put this sentence in the Meta Description tag. Google will look at the joint correlation between the lead sentence and the description tag and infer what to put in the snippet.

Have a look at the source code of this page to see the description tag. Right click and select View page source. Note that all Google can ever do is to look at joint correlations for which it has plenty of computing power available. It cannot actually understand what it is doing in the human sense, so if we want to persuade Google to do things for us, we need to feed it with joint correlations. In the snippet sentence as provided here, we have made it a backlink to the entire website. Google will look at this in its efforts to work out what the website is about, and hopefully it will give us a better placement if somebody starting a business in Carlisle is looking for an accountant and tax agent.

It might look as if we have told our competitors how to keep up with us. Well, our compliments to those who do. Many of our competitors employ accountants who are cleverer than us, and computer programmers who are more able than us, but they don’t co-ordinate their efforts.