How important is Meta.

[data_connect]

Hey everyone,

I have a question, how important is the meta description, i know title and keywords are important or fairly important but what about the description? At the moment i set the Meta title and description the same, is there a chance i could get penalised for this?

Thanks

[Keyboard Cowboy]

The meta description is the important one, of the two. The power of meta keywords has been declining since the 90's. Engines still lists your site based on the meta description. I usually do them both, as they are still a valid way of strengthening your page theme. Just make them relevant and non spammy, obviously

Don't make you title and description the same. This is the kind of thing G's webmaster tool would complain about

[accomatic]

meta keywords are not important anymore. meta description is important because google usually uses it as text snippets when displaying results.

[data_connect]

Hi,

Thanks for the replies. Thats intresting, was hoping you was not going to say it was important. The reason i asked, is take a look at this:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...oip+rates&meta=

Im in position 3 (www.chatlife.co.uk)

The meta information for this page is:

<meta name="author" content="Administrator" />
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
<meta name="description" content="Cheap Internet Calls, Cheap International Calls, Cheap Phone Calls, Best VoIP Rates" />
<meta name="keywords" content="cheap internet calls, cheap international calls, cheap phone calls, best voIP rates, voip rates, cheap phone, best voip, internet calls, checp international, voip retail, cheap national" />

and yet the desciption displayed in google is:

We also update our rates all the time to constantly give you the best real time information we can. Cheap phone calls using your softphone or VoIP hardware ...

Which lead me to ask how important it is, problem is i got a lot of pages indexed so going through each page one by one will take alot of time, so should i leave it or should i change it?

Thank

[accomatic]

Google thinks that meta description you have is not relevant to the search query asked, so it displays other text snippet in results.

Which lead me to ask how important it is, problem is i got a lot of pages indexed so going through each page one by one will take alot of time, so should i leave it or should i change it?

Just leave it as is. Changing meta description won't make any difference.