Page 2 - Importance of Meta Description tag?

Meta elements are NOT meant for people to read.

I'm pretty sure meta descriptions don't matter for rankings. You will want an efficient, captivating one however to get pick to be more likely to click on your site from the rankings page, however.

Interesting, isn't the description a meta tag?

Yes but people don't read them. Bots do - and they can do with em whatever they like (= most often: nothing). They can choose to republish them on the serps maybe.

My point is: a human being visiting a website won't ever read the metas. Metas are not "on-page".

Even the Google home page uses the META description. Does this mean we should all use it? NO

If I have sufficient content for snippets to be taken to cover my keywords and potential longtails, I don't use the META description. Google, to date, has done a good job of displaying good descriptions from our content.

However, if I have a page that does not have sufficient or coherent text, I do use the META description. Google, in these circumstances, usually uses the META description we provide. For example, we have a dictionary where the landing page has very little text, so we provide the META description for the search engines. They all use that META description.

Although Google does not give importance to the meta description, search engine crawlers use these meta tag as the page description for displaying results.

So you can include a good abstract of your content to your target (and some keywords!).

In my opinion anyone who doesn't use a Meta Description tag is just being lazy (and nuts). Here's why:

There are very few things on the Google Search Results that anyone (other than Google) has direct control over aside from the advertising which people are paying thousands to millions of dollars to write their own ad copy.

Google displays your Meta Description tag content in the search results right below your title. It is essentially your 'Organic Ad Copy' Now not to say that in many cases Google does a good job of taking snippets from your content if you have no Meta Description, but really, if you are given the choice of having FULL control or not of 160 characters of text that appears under your title, I think anyone is crazy not to utilize that control and carefully craft your Meta Description to maximize your click-thru rate.

In fact, when you use the tag and take control, you can run tests to find the Meta Description that maximizes your click-thru rate and dramatically increases traffic by changing the tag every few weeks, recording when you see Google update the description on the results then looking at your analytics.

Here's an excellent example of doing that:

http://www.geolocalseo.com/blog/the-power-of-meta-descriptions/

You should also use noydir and noodp in your robots meta tag (you can Google it if you don't know what it does):

<meta name=”robots” content=”noydir,noodp” />

Now there is an argument that letting Google dynamically build the description will include long-tail keywords bolded in the description and therefore maximize CTR for a larger group of keywords. It really depends on the page content. If your page is targeting dozens or hundreds of longtail keywords (lots of blog post or a product catalog listing), then letting Google generate the description my be more advantageous but I would still do a test to compare your traffic for the page between when YOU write the description and when they do.

In many cases I think people don't use the Meta Description tag because their page header may be dynamically generated and their content management system either doesn't allow them to enter a Meta Description for each page or they just don't want to spend the time doing it.

Best answer. I agree 100%

I want to control what appears in my listing. Allowing Google to assemble your description is just a fallback. Google WMT even tells you when the description is too short - to me that's a strong hint that they think you can do a better job than they can.

Ed

The person who posted saying that it's your 'organic ad copy' speaks a lot of sense...
When I started in my job, pretty much none of our webpages had descriptions. I work for a non profit and we get a grant from Google for PPC. One day I went through every page on the website and added a description which matched the keywords which were getting us clicks in AdWords. Our Ave. Position improved pretty much instantly and we were getting twice as many clicks overnight. The Google non profits adwords program doesn't let you bid more than $1 per click, so these changes clearly helped our QS and allowed us to get A LOT more clicks.

Meta description is effective to increase Google page rank,meta description tag is used by search engine to search it through its text/title,to view it in search result page, Well written description increases your page rank and attracts the viewer to visit your website

standard Meta Description Tag is written in this way:

140 Characters
25 to 30 Words
2 Sentences
Mention of your Company Name or Branded Product
Value Statement – highlight the primary benefits of what you are offering
Call to Action – think of things like “free trial”, “download”, “subscribe”, “see statistics”, “submit”,

hi,

Meta tad and meta description are the mot important for page is called on-page optimization. For seo purpose on page optimization is very important for getting good result in search engines.

Rajesh

I don't think so meta tag description is important for ranking to website.

Meta Description Tags do indeed matter. But, they do not help with keyword rankings. When done right, a Meta Description tag will be used by search engines as the text that sits under the clickable title/text on the search results page, AND the keyword that you targeted for that page will be in the text and bolded.

Meta description is the description about your website, it tell about your website, what you are doing, what are your services etc.. It is to be very precise and good so that it is easily readable and understood by the search engines.