They might not be that relevant these days but why take the risk. If only one search engine uses them then it might help your traffic.
Indeed. It has come to my attention that Yahoo still noticed them, so why take the risk and disregard something that can be done so quickly and easily?
What little value they give as benefit in higher rankings is besides the point - which is in fact very little- The description tag is crucial to whether the visitor clicks in to the site. A crappy description tag may lose 75% of visitors viewing it.
they may or may not be beneficial for serps, but they are meant to give a glimpse of the page's contents to the viewer, so i think that they should be properly written.
It is very worthwhile. Another benefit it that it can help differentiate between pages that otherwise have very similar content, like recipe sites or directories.
I think it will help you a lot. Google still use it. And if you pages show up in SERPs, visitors will decide whether to visit your pages by reading your description.
totally agreed with the writer. Meta description is a great way to attract visitor to your site as if written carefully and attractively, it will help to get users to click on the site.
Never to leave anything in site.... just use the complete space and keep the things how much you can...
Summed up what exactly? You link leads to a brief generic definition of terms page. I think the point about why the description tag is important is far better summarized in Ward's article in the original post above.
http://www.v7n.com/forums/240035-post1.html Written almost a year ago but I think that Yahoo still places a bit of weight on meta description - enough that you can rank for keywords used only in your meta description and nowhere else.
You got to also take into account those backlinks with keywords that aren't anywhere on the page. Backlinks have a very high importance while the description tag is very low.
I don't know how much weight google gives it. but even if it's little it's worth then not having that weight consideration at google alg at all. I've build a flesh website once that showed up on google results only because of the description meta tag/
Backlinks were of course taken into consideration, and the statement was made that in Yahoo you can rank for a keyword on the basis of it being in the meta description still stands. That is to say, those keywords were not used in any other way, including backlink anchor text.
Even with yahoo you are unlikely to rank for anything even slightly competitive with just a meta description going for you. Yahoo may not know what quality is but they do know what a link is and they generally use that as the big factor as most of the big search engines do.