How much does a page's meta description tags play in ranking? Does the length matter? Is it correct that your primary keyword should appear in the first part of the description? Thanks, Adam
Meta description tags don't normally affect rankings in a direct way. They are used by search engines for the snippets you see next to your site in the search results so you need to make them attractive to humans. Make them the right length and don't stuff them with keywords. If your click through rates increase then your rankings might go up on the back of this.
Definately, humans can spot spam loads better than computers. If a spam site is at number 4 and gets no traffic then why should it stay there? Search engine strive to show the results people want and will react to the sites they don't want.
I also believe that meta description is better off optimized for the human eye rather than the search engine crawlers, See the meta description as your chance to write a catchy slogan for your site, that way you will get more visitors and most important of all: You will get visitors that´s interested in the content of your site
IMO the description tag and the title tag are very much used... If they were redundant then how could se's could have displayed your site information... Your site's TITLE and DESCRIPTION which is so important as viewers point of view... Manish
The title tag is not a meta tag. It is an important tag though. But ur right about the description tag. It is a meta tag that should be used, and it should be optimized for humans.
Thank you for red repu I wrote it redundant because this thread is in Search Engine Optimization category.And meta tags are redundant for SEO purposes
Well, the end goal is to draw traffic to your site...which will be easier if people see relevant description text in SERPs of some SE.