Importance of meta tag "description" for major search engines. See Google difference of SERPS without meta tag description vs with meta tag description

A recent error turned into a valuable feedback to bring a final answer to an often asked question or doubted value of the meta tags - in this case precisely the meta tag "description". After publishing and verifying my SERPS - I found myself with a particular page on position 72 - highly shocking and most unusual for any single page I publish.

I usually copy and paste the meta tags from a default template file I have created for various sections of my site. Thus I have all tags prepared but usually empty. In this case I simply forgot to add the description of the file published in the proper description meta tag.

A correction of the omission takes up to a few weeks time until Google re-indexes a new page. Hence to see the difference in SERPS between with and without description metatags took a while of patience.

Here the result in Google SERPS

• without meta name="Description"content="that's where I forgot my page-content relevant description" = position 72
• with proper meta name="Description"content="And here comes a properly formulated / SEO'd description" = position 12

Hence the answer to the question of usefulness and value of meta description tag clearly is YES !!!

To see how a proper SEO'd meta tag description looks like, look at the Google search result display and study the highlighted keywords of your search for the top 10-20 results displayed to understand the criteria. To view and study those factors yourself is much better than to give you a forumly here and now - because such formula may be valid today and become obsolete after next Google algorithm update. Hence you have to learn to write properly about a subject of your choice and to learn to present it in a machine friendly way without abusing any black hat method. Getting in Google top 10 SERPS is just a matter of education and editorial skills to be learned by each and every professional web publisher.

Love and Bliss

hans