Is meta tag Description Worthless ?

Since yesterday there has been a small subject going on on DigitalPoint forums (search engine optimisation (SEO) thread) about rather meta tag description is worthless or not. Actually a member was interested if the weight on meta tags (meta keywords as well) is important or not but than the talk got a lil bit more expanded and we arived on the point to discuss if meta tag description is worthless or useful.

If the meta keywords considered by Google we already know the answer, no, but after all Google is not the ONLY search engine, hence i do use meta keywords in this blog as well. The funny thing is that Dan Schulz stated that meta description is worthless, he actually said

As for the META description, its only use these days is to provide a description of the Web page for search engine results.

I respect Dan and he has some good posts and articles on DigitalPoint but i simply can’t agree in this with him. What i can agree with is that the purpose of meta description is to describe the web page in short words but telling me that search engines (and especially Google search engine) doesn’t count and gives no weight to meta description on SEO Optimization matters is not something I can bite.

Later on that same thread Dan asked me to prove him (he has done that even before, but i was not feeling to prove anything) and so I decided to reply with proves that Google search engine does rely on meta tag description. I replied because i did not wanted a new SEO myth to be created on webmaster forums and confuse the newbies.

On the reply i attached two proves about meta tag description in SEO Optimization, and here they are both.

• I have a small web hosting business going and recently thought about targeting the keywords Cheap Web Hosting for my hosting, more than targeting i was actually trying to run an experiment on and prove it that you can do SEO by yourself too, even on competitive keywords. The web hosting site has the keywords ONLY in 3 places, title, meta description and alt image of the first image. If you perform a query on the keywords cheap web hosting you will find the site at 47th page of the Google SERPs (this might vary from country to country). In any case you will notice the bolder text in the SERPs for hs-hosting.net on title tag and on the description. The keywords in the description are the same as in the meta tag description of hs-hosting.net, and I can recall this as prove n#1
• As prove N#2 i took the SEO Optimization blog. The keywords SEO Optimization are present in the title, meta description, alt tag image and in the body content as well, yet in the SERPs when you perform a query for SEO Optimization you will get in bold the keywords that are found in the title of the blog and the meta tag description

With these two proves I can state that search engines (at least Google) DO give value to the meta tag description and that the mete tag description is NOT worthless as many state. Whats the purpose of the meta tag description is true, to describe the web page in few words and not to abuse of it, but heck a keyword here and there is no harm.

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