Importance of Meta description tag

[raj_kumar]

Meta Tags are one of the most important thing in Promo link deleted by Mod Webnauts /Search Engine Marketing, In that "Meta description tag" is the most important one. The META Description Tag usually consists of 25 to 30 words or less using not more than 160 to 180 characters totally including spaces. The Meta description also shows up in many search engine results as a summary of your site.The META Description Tag is still an important factor in the overall equation of page development. Everything you do to that page will have an influence on something. i.e A description tag must explain the content of the page & what are they working with.

[danskapia]

Raj,

As I do believe it is important to have the meta tag description, keyword, etc.; I believe that some SE put less importance on this than others. For instance: I believe that Yahoo puts more importance on this than Google. Just an observation.

[Webnauts]

I agree with you both above. A general rule is: Use the description tags with care. They must be unique for every page and relevant to the page content. Otherwise Google for example will filter such pages as duplicated.

[Allen]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

I agree with you both above. A general rule is: Use the description tags with care. They must be unique for every page and relevant to the page content. Otherwise Google for example will filter such pages as duplicated.

Yeap, pepper keywords but always do so the right way. Describe the current page is the key.

But do it. I see a lot of sites I work with that have no meta tags, and I feel like the design company was just lazy.

[execubob]

At the Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago last December, there was a panel discussion with reps from Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Windows Live. All agreed that metatags were NO LONGER used for indexing and ranking webpages. (they stopped being relevent on 2005 when the algorithims changed) Yahoo admits to putting 'a little' weight on metatags, but not much. They all agreed that text based page content was where to put the appropriate keywords.
That and 'relevent' inboound links are what matters now.
This was direct from Google, Yahoo, ASK, and Windosa live reps on the panel in front of a couple hundred attendees.

[Webnauts]

I think you would also find this interesting: http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/metadata.html

[Eugene04]

I also consider metatag creation and important activity. But don't forget that meta tag is what a user see in search results. Thus a description and title are to be catch and well to the point.

[kobe248]

The meta “description” tag gives information about a web page. It is used as:

<meta name=”description” content=”This is the description of my web page” />

The first and the foremost reason is, that the content of meta “description” tag, usually called snippet, is the thing which most search engine extracts and shows up in search results.