Importance of the Meta Description Tags

Search Engines don’t give very high prominence to the Meta Description tag and may
generate a description on the fly while listing your web page in SERP. However, in some
Search Engines, a good Meta Description tag might help a page to rank higher for your
targeted search terms. This holds true for Flash, Frame or All Image sites that have no content
as well as some high importance websites, where the search term is not found in the text. In
such cases, some search engines pick up the exact Meta Description tag and display it in its SERP, just below the Title tag. Hence, it is important to write a crisp and enticing Description tag that includes your important keyword phrases and manages to interest your user.

the description given for the site should be on the basis of the keywords and it has to be utilized in efficient manner the description should be very exact and it has to be used very efficiently with the usage of keywords so the importance of description is very high

Meta description describes your site. It tells the spider what the site is all about. Meta description is absolutely necessary for the onpage optimization.

it sure would help. however there are other factor to take into account e.g. title, content, backlinks etc.

Meta tags are very important for your website. These are title tag, description tag and keyword tag that are put into website. Whenever crawler crawls the website, it first crawls meta tags. You can put your main keywords in meta tags so that they get crawled every time the site gets crawled and soon they will come into google ranking and your website will be visible in google for those keywords which is the main purpose.

Yes, meta tags are of no use these days if you consider Google. G is mainly considering keywords in domain...or tweets and retweets.

Though meta-tags has low value in search engine ranking, they still important to let the users to know about your site via SERP snippet.
# Always choose the right and relevant keyword for your web-page.
# Prefer to use user-friendly title, meta-keywords, meta-description.
# Stuffing the meta-tags with too-much keyword will make annoying to the visitors.

Meta description tags give a brief description of your page. Not all search engines use this tag.

Yet if it contain keywords and phrases you hope to be found for, it will help getting target traffic for you. But it should read like an introductory lead-in for the topic or service you are highlighting. Moreover, the description tag works like another call to action.

Meta Tags were considered to be important once when Google and the other search engines were not much advanced, they tended to rely upon meta tags much more than they do today. Currently, the top SEO experts argue, meta tags have less influence on SEO today than they ever have.

I agree from Joseph comment. In the present time Google changed own algorithm.