Google not displaying my page title and meta description

[seomanicster]

Google is automatically picking up random text from my page and displaying it in place of the page title and meta description on the SERP. What can I do to avoid this? I want my page title and meta description to show up on the SERP.

The url of my website is: wishpicker dot com

Thanks in advance!

[MichaelC-15022]

For starters, I'd add the NOODP NOYDIR meta robots tags to your pages.  That tends to do a pretty good job of keeping Google in line (i.e. using your meta descriptions and page titles in the SERPs).

Recently I've noticed that Google will often attempt to extract your company name and prepend your page title with it. e.g. if your page title is "Purple Widgets - ACME Inc." and your URL is www.acmeinc.com, Google will show "Acmeinc: Purple Widgets" in the SERPs for your headline.  This seems to be new as of a few months ago, and NOODP NOYDIR doesn't seem to stop it like it used to.  But I'd try NOODP NOYDIR because it does USUALLY still seem to have the effect you're looking for.

[KevinBudzynski]

Dr. Pete had a great article on this. Basically Google will show (what it believes) to be a better snippet/description.

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

What description are you seeing, are you able to send an screenshot.

Also when did you set up your meta description etc, is it a recent change or has it been there a while.

I can see that you have set up Meta descriptions etc correctly.