This article details how description meta tags are perceived in todays major search engines and offers recommendation on whether to use the meta tag when developing web pages.
Meta tags were once very important instruments in telling search engines about your web page. Nowadays many sites do not include either the description meta tag or the keyword meta (article coming soon) because the top search engine — Google — seems to place very little importance on them. Reasons for this may be that webmasters started to abuse the meta tag system, using techniques such as keyword stuffing to bump their site to the number 1 spot. This was of course unhelpful to web users, as most of the time they would arrive at inaccurate pages. Search engines changed their algorithms to focus more on link text, incoming links and quality of incoming links.
Yahoo and MSN (Live) still give weight to meta tags, less so the description and more the keywords. If you’re running a new website, Google will probably not offer you organic traffic to begin, they seem to place great emphasis on domain age and enjoy placing new sites in the sandbox. For that reason, it’s best to include meta tags and pick up traffic from the other search engines, even if the quality of traffic is not great. Whether, in Google’s eyes, meta tags serve a negative purpose is not entirely known. One thing’s for sure, the tags move your main content away from the top of the page and reduce keyword density.
Here’s where the description meta tag plays a big roll. A person searches for a term you rank well for. If you’ve included a description, you have the chance of attracting this person to your page with a absorbing piece of writing. If you didn’t include the description meta tag, the searcher may well find something like this:
“Your great title
random gibberish… keyword ….blah blah blah … keyword copyright your company”
Not very appealing and not very professional, is it?
In summary, if you run a new website, use both meta tags, but be accurate and concise. If you run an aged website, use the description to maximize click through rate, and use keywords if you want to attract more Yahoo and MSN visitors.