Hi, It is a long time that search engines and specially Google don't pay any attention to keyword meta tag but they still use the description meta tag as the description of the websites on their search result pages. Of course, in most search queries, Google displays a part of the body text that includes the search term. So the description is used in some cases only. On the other hand, I have seen many web pages that have no description meta tag, ranked properly. So my question is if description meta tag is still important or has lost its role? Is it effective in the ranking of the websites? Cheers!
It isn't still important for search engines like yahoo, msn and google but it's important for others. The best "description" is the page title , i still use meta tag but I pay attention only for keywords and Title.
Description is still important because if displayed in the SERPs, a good description can increase the click through rate. It's also help avoiding supplemental results in improving "pages uniqueness" (differente description for each page)