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WHAT IS META DESCRIPTION

If you use Blogger custom templates, most likely you might have seen/added meta description tag in the head of your template;

<meta name="description" content="Template, tutorials, and articles to help Blogger users build a better Blogger blog" />

You can see the <meta> tag defines a description of a page. Search engines will use the text inside content attribute, in this case "Template, tutorials, and articles to help Blogger users build a better Blogger blog", as metadata when indexing that page. However don't get wrong here: Google itself doesn't use meta description tag to rank your pages. The only thing the metadata does is show up under the page title in search results.


META DESCRIPTION AND SEO

It does make sense but nothing to do with rankings. Aside showing the most relevant results for particular keywords, Google aims telling a searcher what the content is about on a web page. Providing a summary of the page on the SERPs supposes to help the searcher saving his time looking for the right information. Here meta description tags will play their role.

There are a lot of webmasters that misuse meta description tags to spam the SERPs. To promote their brands or services. They start stuffing keywords in the description to feed web crawlers and hope winning content relevancy. So basically meta description tags have been ignored when Google has started looking at the actual content of the web pages.
If the meta description is not present, search engines will display 150-character summary from any parts of the page content. I also noticed a few times that the summary came from visitor's comment.

Furthermore nowadays most social media sharing tools also will pick up meta description tag (if available) as a snippet - A very brief and concise summary (1-2 sentences) of your page's content. If not there, they will grab your contents directly.


INCREASE TRAFFIC WITH META DESCRIPTION

So why we should optimize this web feature?. Because having a page ranked on SERP isn't going to get you anywhere if no one clicks on it.

Meta descriptions for your web pages can improve the chances of your site being clicked on.