I just saw something at Google Webmaster Central that’s of interest. It may be information you already know, but from what I see a lot of us haven’t been totally sure about this and it’s good that Google is telling us like it is.

While the use of a description meta tag is optional and will have no effect on your rankings, a good description can result in a better snippet, which in turn can help to improve the quality and quantity of visitors from our search results.

A lot of people find Meta tags confusing (I won’t pretend to be an expert myself) and from what I see a lot of webmasters don’t even use them at all. Google’s post is a good beginner’s lesson on the different meta tags and what they do. It also shows which ones actually make any kind of difference in search engine results - and why which is useful to know. If you haven’t already realized it there’s a link at the top of this post to the full article.

From what Google say it’s clear that the description meta tag is still one that should certainly be present on your pages and given some time and effort when you’re creating your page. If you do manage to get a 1^st page placement in Google and your description is pretty poor, how many visitors might you end up turning away?

If you think about the times you’ve read a poor description and not even bothered looking at the site you’ll know how important this is. On the other hand if you remember the times you’ve seen a great description snippet you’ll probably remember you clicked on the link before you even finished reading it!

The description snippet you put in the meta tag is like getting a free advert in Google - don’t waste it – interest and intrigue your prospective visitors and you’re likely to see more visitors.