Search Engines and The Meta Description Tag

The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag don’t affect your page’s ranking in the search engines (for the most part), but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO campaigns. What Is the Meta Description Tag?
The Meta description tag is a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the Head section of a Web page. It usually is placed after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag, although the order is not important.
The proper syntax for this HTML tag is: META NAME="Description” CONTENT="Your descriptive sentence or two goes here.”
I used to believe that the purpose of the Meta description tag was twofold: to help the page rank highly for the words that were contained within it, as well as to provide a nice description in the
search engine results pages (SERPs). However, today it appears that, similar to the Meta keywords tag, the information you place in this tag is *not* given any weight in the ranking algorithms of Google, and only a tiny amount of weight in Yahoo’s.
In other words, whether you use your important keyword phrases in your Meta description tag or not, it won’t affect the position of your page in the SERPs for the words that are important to you. In fact, you could easily leave it out altogether. But should you?
Well, if you’re already happy with the “snippets” of text that the search engines post from your page in any given search query, then there’s no reason to have a Meta description tag on your pages.
However, it’s important to note that the snippet the engines use will vary, depending on what the searcher typed into the engine.
Let’s take a step back and look at what the search engines show in the SERPs. It can get a little bit confusing, but if you try out your own searches in the various engines, you’ll have a better idea of what I’m talking about. The search engines are constantly changing this sort of thing, plus they all behave in slightly different ways, as you’ll see in my examples.
At Google, if you search for a site by URL like this: www.highrankings.com, the snippet you see is the first instance of text on the page. Interestingly enough, on my home page, an image alt attribute tag is the first instance of words “on the page,” and that’s what shows up as part of my “snippet” for this particular search. (The image is a clickable image, so this jibes with my other theory of Google indexing the words in the alt attributes of clickable images. See this forum thread from Dec. 2003.
For this type of search, Yahoo displays the Meta description info. It’s important to note that generally the only people searching using URLs are site owners trying to see if their pages are indexed.
Therefore, you shouldn’t worry too much about what you see under those circumstances.
So let’s try something that a real person might search for when looking for what I have to offer – how about “SEO copy"?
In Google, my Nitty-gritty handbook page shows up second in the results with the following snippet: