Importance of the Meta Description Tag

I saw a couple of posts today including one by Bruce Clay talking about a Google Group post by Vanessa Fox talking about the importance of the meta description tag.

"   Looking at your site in the search results, it appears that your pages would be well served by meta description tags. For most queries, the generated snippet is based on where the query terms are found on the page, and in those cases, your results are fine. But for some more generic queries, where a logical snippet isn't found in the text, the generated snippet seems to be coming from the first bits of text from the page -- in this case, boilerplate navigation that is the same for every page."

Ive always felt that the description meta tag was very valuable because of the fact that Google will use it to describe your site in the search results and it also may possibly add to your overall search score, I think it does.

Its important to see that she says that Google goes for "logical" page content but for some generic queries, they're using the first bit of text on your page. If you don't have a Meta data section, that first text is often your site-wide navigation and suddenly all your pages look duplicate.

Bruce Clay pointed out an important fact about duplicate content....

"By the way, the same problem with duplicate pages can happen if you do have a Description tag but you don't bother to make it unique to the page that it's on. Having the same Description tag on every page is duplicate content."

SO the bottom line is that its very important to have unique description meta tags on each page within your site.