Google and the meta description tag

Does google use the meta description tag? We have known for a while that google does not use meta keywords, but what about meta description? Does the text in the meta description affect SEO?

Well, according to Google's official blog, and the google webmaster guidelines, the answer is both yes and no.

Yes in the respect that google sometimes uses the text in the meta description tag in the SERPs, but no in the respect that whatever is in the meta description does not affect a sites ranking in google. That's right, your meta description, meta keywords and most other meta tags make absolutely no difference to your website's position in the search engine results.

So what is the point of labouring over constructing metatags if google does not use them?

There are 3 main reasons for spending time constructing keyword focused, user friendly metatags:

1. Other search engines still use the keyword and description metatags, most notably Bing, which has a small market share at present, but could become more important in the next year or so

[update: Yahoo has now announced that it no longer supports the keyword metatag - 7/10/2009]

2. Metatags are also used by other web services, not just search engines, for example, if you submit your site to aboutus.org then the wiki will read your metatags to generate a description of your website

3. Well structured and keyword relevant metatags improve the clickthrough rate when people see your site in the search results. There is some evidence to suggest that sites which have more people clicking on them in the SERPS are seen as more relevent, so could influence your rankings based on the number of clicks. Regardless of whether a good clickthrough improves rankings, the whole point of SEO is to drive more traffic to your site, and not to get your site to the top of the search engine rankings. I would much rather have a site on position 2 of google with 100 clicks a day, than a site at position 1 with only 50 clicks a day.

So there you have it, don't worry too much about whether the metadescription affects your rankings, because it doesnt much, but try to construct the metatags to be engaging calls to action, they need to tempt people to click on your result and not hte ones above or below yours. How you do this depends entirely on the type of site, although there is good evidence to suggest that having keywords in your meta description influences people to click on the link.