Yes! The meta description is the snippet of text that is displayed in the search results under your URL. Here's why it is important:
Firstly the snippet acts like an advert or sales pitch. Searchers usually do a quick scan of the results before deciding which link to click. If your snippet, AKA meta description, is enticing and appears to answer the search query, they will click your URL. Therefore well written meta descriptions have a big part to play in ensuring a good click through rate (which Google and Bing monitor to gauge which links appear to satisfy the searcher most).
Meta descriptions have second, hidden SEO purpose. Most websites don't create a meta description for every page, allowing Google to select the first 185 characters of an article as the meta description. Google uses this tendency for their own purposes - it's far too CPU intensive for Google to compare the text of every single page on the web to each other, so as a short cut, they compare meta descriptions to check for duplicate content.
If you have fallen back in the search results, do a search for the first 185 characters of your article to see if more than one result is returned. Often scrapers will quote what is in Google (legally allowed under the "fair use" rule as it is only a snippet), and other plagiarizers will have copied your entire article. If several copies of the snippet appears in the SERPs, you know the root of your ranking problem. The simplest way to deal with this is to rewrite the first 185 characters of your article, and just like that, you regain uniqueness.
Duplicate content can also be a problem within your website. Wordpress loves to create multiple versions of your content - therefore all the posts on your site will appear in the admin folder as well. The category pages will also display the snippet of the most recent post in that category - which duplicates the snippet of the post itself.
These are easy problems to solve. If you are using a plugin such as All-In-One-SEO or Yoast, you can NoIndex the admin pages to ensure they are not indexed by the search engines. To change the meta description for Category pages, simply search for the WP Custom Category Meta plugin in your Wordpress dashboard. Once you have activated the plugin, click on "edit" for the Category concerned, and enter a unique custom category meta description for that category.
As the Google Panda algorithm actively looks for duplicate content, the above steps should help you protect your site from it.
Firstly the snippet acts like an advert or sales pitch. Searchers usually do a quick scan of the results before deciding which link to click. If your snippet, AKA meta description, is enticing and appears to answer the search query, they will click your URL. Therefore well written meta descriptions have a big part to play in ensuring a good click through rate (which Google and Bing monitor to gauge which links appear to satisfy the searcher most).
Meta descriptions have second, hidden SEO purpose. Most websites don't create a meta description for every page, allowing Google to select the first 185 characters of an article as the meta description. Google uses this tendency for their own purposes - it's far too CPU intensive for Google to compare the text of every single page on the web to each other, so as a short cut, they compare meta descriptions to check for duplicate content.
If you have fallen back in the search results, do a search for the first 185 characters of your article to see if more than one result is returned. Often scrapers will quote what is in Google (legally allowed under the "fair use" rule as it is only a snippet), and other plagiarizers will have copied your entire article. If several copies of the snippet appears in the SERPs, you know the root of your ranking problem. The simplest way to deal with this is to rewrite the first 185 characters of your article, and just like that, you regain uniqueness.
Duplicate content can also be a problem within your website. Wordpress loves to create multiple versions of your content - therefore all the posts on your site will appear in the admin folder as well. The category pages will also display the snippet of the most recent post in that category - which duplicates the snippet of the post itself.
These are easy problems to solve. If you are using a plugin such as All-In-One-SEO or Yoast, you can NoIndex the admin pages to ensure they are not indexed by the search engines. To change the meta description for Category pages, simply search for the WP Custom Category Meta plugin in your Wordpress dashboard. Once you have activated the plugin, click on "edit" for the Category concerned, and enter a unique custom category meta description for that category.
As the Google Panda algorithm actively looks for duplicate content, the above steps should help you protect your site from it.