Meta tag dicription
March 7, 2009IMO no ranking addition (may be wrong.) IF it’s off topic and unrelated to content does it hinder some Google score? We can almost certainly safely conclude you don’t get benefit from the tag.
Benefits then? If you don’t have content that reflects the site/page content/ search term, then a description tag will help. It also provides the impetus for more clicks then another result with an unclear description.
However most disagree whether this is actually true since tests are inconclusive. From my perspective it DOES help a small minority and is therefore beneficial for said reasons above. If you, however, have targeted content that will do well as a description, no need for the tag.
From my tests on eye-tracking and CTR the TITLE tag is usually what people will glance over not the description tag. Having said THAT we still have evidence that descriptions still work.
Case in point? an example used in the keyword density argument–Dell.com
Dell.com ranks for ‘computers’. Sure they have tons of links, but how on earth does Google find title and description tags with the KW computers?! if they don’t have it in their content.
The title tag is derived from a DMOZ listing (with ‘computers’), however, but the meta description is also used and contains the word ‘computers’. So it DOES suggest that if you’re a hermit and were searching for computers, didn’t know who Dell was, (and they didn’t have a dmoz listing), seeing the top ranked site with ‘computers’ in the description (and in this case title) may induce a click.
