Ok,

After reading the thread on keyword density, i'd like to learn a little about meta description tags. Are they important- and how important are they. How much information should or can go in there?

META description tags are used to describe individual web pages. They have some importance in terms of ranking pages, but like a lot of on the page factors, not a whole lot of importance.

You can put as much as you want into a META description tag, but I try to limit mine to 200 characters or less (usually 80 characters), since 200 characters is approx. 40 words. That should be enough to describe most pages.

Like Adam said they probably won't have a major impact in where your page will rank, but they may have some. I've heard Yahoo likes them more than the other engines, but I've never really tested to see if that's true.

I would spend a little time writing a good description though regardless of how they might affect ranking. Assuming one of your pages does show up in search results there's a good chance your description is what will be displayed below your link. Your description can have a pretty big impact on whether some clicks on your link or not.

It can also lead to visitor satisfaction to read a description decide they should visit and then actually find on the page what the description said would be there.

You're descriptions don't need to be the world's best piece of writing, but they should accurately describe what's on the page and entice someone to click on your link. It might also be a good idea to repeat a keyword you used in your page title for any search engine that places weght on the meta description tag.

Meta Description tags help the search engines to display information about your site in the search results but without them the search engines will just use text found in the first part of the websites page.

They may still use a snippet from the page even if you have a meta description. Search engines, at least Google, will pick whatever they think is most relevant to the query. It may be your meta description, a snippet from the page, or your DMOZ description should your site be included in the DMOZ directory.

That is correct thanks for the clarification, also I dont remember what it is but since DMOZ makes you use really boring descriptions there is a meta tag now which will stop search engines from using your sites DMOZ description.

Yeah you can use <meta name=”ROBOTS” content=”NOODP”>. Both MSN and Google say they will honor it. Yahoo doesn't use descriptions from DMOZ since they have their own directory.

I think I've caught a few forum posts here and there where people have claimed using the noodp meta tag hurt their search visibilty in some way, though for the life of me I can't remember where or specifically what was involved. Just remember something about using the tag not necessarily being the best idea. I would imagine a few searches on it would bring up some of those discussions though.

Originally Posted by pats_mets

Ok,

After reading the thread on keyword density, i'd like to learn a little about meta description tags. Are they important- and how important are they. How much information should or can go in there?

META description are not usefull for nothing, just to put the text that some searchengines uses to describe your site. But for ranking are useless.

Well if they can help improve the click through when your site appears in search results I'd say they have a good amount of use. True they probably aren't doing much to improve your rank, but I do think they are a factor.

Still not everything you do is for a search engine. If writing a good meta description doubled the click through on the link that's a lot of potential traffic influenced by your description.

I have spend a lot of time reading on forums how meta tags are not useful at all anyway I'm still using them on my sites. There is so many meta tags generators on the web so it doesn't take too much time to create meta tags.