Changing a site title and description - Google

[HTMLBasicTutor]

This gets asked over an over again:

Why Don't the results show my title correctly...

Why Isn't my description shown correctly in the results...

Instead of going to look for this information again and again to respond to these questions, here it is in one spot right from Google:

Google's creation of sites' titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web.

We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the META tag for each page. Where this information isn't available, we may use publicly available information from DMOZ. While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't impact your ranking within search results. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL's content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.

While we're unable to manually change titles or snippets for individual sites, we're always working to make them as relevant as possible. You can help improve the quality of the snippets displayed for your pages by providing informative meta descriptions for each page.

Continued: Changing a site title and description

And here is the video to go with that page by Matt Cutts, Google Spam Dept.:
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Google guru Matt Cutts discusses how best to optimize your site for Google. Matt Cutts joined Google as a software engineer in January 2000. He is currently the head of Google's Webspam team

And BTW: Bing reserves the right to do the same thing.

[HTMLBasicTutor]

Page titles are an important part of our search results: they’re the first line of each result and they’re the actual links our searchers click to reach websites. Our advice to webmasters has always been to write unique, descriptive page titles (and meta descriptions for the snippets) to describe to searchers what the page is about.

We use many signals to decide which title to show to users, primarily the <title> tag if the webmaster specified one. But for some pages, a single title might not be the best one to show for all queries, and so we have algorithms that generate alternative titles to make it easier for our users to recognize relevant pages. Our testing has shown that these alternative titles are generally more relevant to the query and can substantially improve the clickthrough rate to the result, helping both our searchers and webmasters. About half of the time, this is the reason we show an alternative title.

Continued: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Better page titles in search results

[HTMLBasicTutor]

New video today where Matt Cutts tries to help you understand how titles are created/selected for your search results.

What criteria does Google use to change the title it shows in the SERPs depending on the query? Does schema influence that? Maybe headings (h1, h2..) have more weight?
Christian Oliveira, Madrid

Why Google search results doesn't show the current meta title of webpage? Instead of meta title search results show H1 tag from HTML page?
kbroka, Nepal

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