No, the meta description is not a factor in SERPs, if by SERPs you are referring to the ranking rather than the displayed snippet. As quoted above, Matt Cutts of Google explicitly says, "We still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking." — http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
Just for the record, your meta description tag is your call to action and should be written in a manner that is compelling to entice the user to "click" while also containing the right keywords so that user feels there is relevancy at the end of his/her click.
I think so, mata keyword is not useful according to SEO prospective, but meta description is useful......
but we should have a good meta tittle because yahoo is still crawling it and relevant meta tag makes a good impression..... and for google we should have a desc with great keywords to make our serp more powerful .......
The meta description tag is not used by Google for indexing. If they determine that it is relevant to the page then it will be displayed as the "snippet" on the SERP (Search Engine Result Page). If there is no meta description tag then Google will make up the "snippet" from the contents of the page. This is how you see some strange "snippets" on the SERP. The meta description tag is just for marketing purpose... In my opinion it is good idea to have a meta description for each page of about 150 characters.
The Meta description tag is a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the <Head> </Head> section of a Web page. It usually is placed after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag, although the order is not important. The proper syntax for this HTML tag is: <META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Your descriptive sentence or two goes here.">
@ NL i know dear it helps to make your post better and read able but i was talking about crawling and indexing .....
I dont think that google stops indexing meta description. Becos a for a keyword on my meta description i got positioned on 9th position of google , moreover i dint place that keyword in any of my site title and keyword.
Meta keywords don't help your site's ranking in the SERP. Google din not stopped "indexing" meta description.
Correct, and you are wrong about that. Read the thread please. It has nothing to do with ranking. Or, as you put it, crawling and indexing. Nigel
Meta description is certainly important. Two things to consider in order of importance: 1. make sure you don't have two meta descriptions the same within a single website. Your description is meant to describe that specific page and if it is the same then you're basically telling google you have duplicate data. Not good. We have directly seen websites penalised strongly for this and bounce back once it was rectified. 2. make the meta description as relative to the pages content as possible and don't be afraid to use colons and commas to mark product prices, brands and sizes.
@ NL what do u exactly mean ?? meta tags are still indexed n crawl by Google ? m not getting ur point can u please explain it
The meta Keywords are ignored by Google. The meta description isn't. We have noticed that although having good meta descriptions don't necessarily increase listings, having poor ones do result in a penalty. By poor i mean the same meta description for your whole site on every page or a meta description that is not relative to the rest of the content on the page. We found that by solving this problem alone on some sites that have been around for 4-5 years, the listings increased substantially.
they confirmed that it wont help the site get high ranks on SERPS.. but I guess they never said that they stopped indexing the meta descriptions.
ya, you can put keywords in to meta description or use most important keywords in to 2 line description.