I plan to be in Crete for a conference this spring. My husband and I love Greece, so we are thinking of bringing our children along, and stopping in Athens for a couple of days on our way to Crete. Not knowing where to stay, I started with a Google search for "hotels Athens". Google returned 1,510,000 results. Gee, that narrows it down. So what will make me decide which results to click on?

Obviously, results on the first page, or first couple of pages, are the most likely to get looked at, so search engine optimization of your site and/or search engine advertising are crucial. But let's assume for a moment that you've done that successfully, and landed on the first page of results. Now what? The listings all relate to hotels in Athens, Greece. None of the headings particularly stands out over the others. All but one heeded Rule #1 of search engine advertising: make sure the search terms (in this case, "hotels" and "Athens") appear in the title, because they'll be highlighted when the results appear.

The next thing people will naturally look at is the description below the header. For most major cities, the first few results of ...