Description meta tag, effective or useless?

[Vahid]

Hi,

It is a long time that search engines and specially Google don't pay any attention to keyword meta tag but they still use the description meta tag as the description of the websites on their search result pages. Of course, in most search queries, Google displays a part of the body text that includes the search term. So the description is used in some cases only.

On the other hand, I have seen many web pages that have no description meta tag, ranked properly.
So my question is if description meta tag is still important or has lost its role?
Is it effective in the ranking of the websites?

 

[praveen61]

meta keywords is one which you can do away with.

but i have seen some "good" results when i add a meaningful meta desc.
pages have come out of supplemental and in some cases they have helped me to rank for certain keywords as well