Is the META Description really important?

Hello,

Would you say that the META description is really important in terms of SEO?

I am starting to wonder as I have some pages that have the Description TAG and some that don't, and I still manage to get a good PR4 with each one...

So what do you reckon? Is it worthless to spend time adding description tags or not?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Ludo

 

Meta tags (keywords) are not considered of any value for Google.
Regarding the Meta tags (description) yes, but too little value for SE rank.

If you have enough time for your site its worth putting them, mostly for other SE excluding G.

Just my opinion

Prawin

 

Also depends on the content, say you have an image gallery/website that is database driven, you may have very little text on each page that differs.

Meta description can help stopping your pages being seen as duplicate content if they don't differ much. PR has no relation to your meta tags.

 

The meta description tag is used a lot of the time as your description in the serps. If you don't use it then the search engines will generate their own description which won't be as good.

Also PR is related to the number and strength of your inbound links so the meta tags have no effect at all.

 

prawin says it best,

"Why not?"

It really has very little effect, but if anything, lots of SE's will use meta descriptions as the description of your pages. Meta keywords really have little meaning on most engines, but I find other uses for them. I usually put 1-4 keywords in a meta keyword tag that I believe will be the primary phrases for that page. After a while, I track which ones do well, and any unexpected keywords that do well, and I tweak it a bit, and then add any keywords into that page where I think they could be used

 

Thank you all for your answers!

I will simply write the description when it can differentiate 2 pages or whenever I have spare time

 

Yahoo and MSN still use them (descripton tags) for ranking don't they, Google uses them soley for the extraction of desc for the serps.

 

Two areas of concern really:

1) The influence on ranking

2) The appearance in the SERPs

Ad 1) I don't think you will gain much ranking from the Meta description tag.

Ad 2) This is the real benefit. Just like you would focus on writing good and appealing Google Adwords adds, you should tailor each Meta description for your users to see in the SERPs. As mentioned, Google will take your Meta description and display it in the SERPs.

 

One thing that should be clarified is that Google prefers to use the description found in SMOX before it uses the Meta description tag.

 

As Tue said, use the description tag to target the visitors eyes. You are competing against other sites in the SERPS, even if you're #1, if #2 has a better description that seems more relevant to the searcher, that visitor will go to #2 before #1 with a lousy or non-relevant description.

 

stmiee what does SMOX stand for, i'm sure it will be obvious when you tell me.

 

Stymiee Made A Typo

Let's try: SMOX = DMOZ

 

ah dmoz ok, thanks for that. Yeah since dmoz is human controlled it should always take preference over a meta description. Mostly homepages only listed in dmoz though, so for internal pages meta desc (or quite often first few lines of text) are used.

 

The snippet that google chooses to show is decided only when you submit a query. Google chooses a snippet and tries to make it as relevant to your query as possible.

 

so is the snippet generated on the fly or does a couple of them exist I wonder.

 

It is auto generated. If someone searches for Blue Widgets and you have that text on your page, the description Google shows will be the text before and after the "Blue Widgets" keyword.

 

I see a lot of opinions expressed on the importance of meta tags (or lack thereof), but I don't think I've ever seen any research on the topic. The consensus seems to be that they're pretty much irrelevant for ranking in Google, and may help for ranking in Yahoo! and MSN. Since I don't have the time or inclination to do the research, I go with the consensus. I think the bottom line is that they still may be of some value, and since it's painfully simple to include them, there's really no reason not to.

Sam

 

You never seen research on meta tags??? Do you not read blogs/forums etc. I read hundreds of anecdotal stories from people saying this or that about why meta tags are used or not used.

But I do agree since its so simple to include them, then why not.

 

Well, to clarify what I mean by "research", it's not "hundreds of anecdotal stories from people saying this or that". I'm talking about someone actually testing the impact of meta tags on a website's ranking, based on statistical analysis. If you're aware of the existence of this type of research, I'd love to take a look at it.

Sam

 

So if Google doesnt bother with META description stuffing the description with keywords wont be penalised?