What is the meta description tag?
Meta tags are HTML tags you place inside the section of your web page. As the term already suggests, meta tags say something about your page. The meta description tag is supposed to contain a short description (a few lines or even just 200 characters as I read somewhere as a guideline) describing your page. Google and other search engines use this tag to summarize your page in the results list. In other words, if you supply a meta description tag, this is litterally used as the short snippet of text below the link to your site in the search results.
Here's what a meta description tag looks like:
<meta name="description" content="Blah blah blah my site about blah blogging and SEO and blah"/>
Humans
Search engines are computers, and ranking happens by algorithms. Whether people actually click on your link within the list of results is another. Try and observe your brain as you yourself scroll to pages and pages of search results and try to figure out what actually triggers you to click on them. Most likely, the contents of the short description was part of your decision process. Well, that is why the meta description tag matters.
What if I have none?
If you have no meta description tag, Google will try and 'make' one for you, based on a combination of a few snippets of your website text. Sometimes this may work out fine. Often, you can do better!
Meta description vs Ranking
So, the meta description tag is important for your click through rate (CTR). Does that in turn also affect the ranking of your site in future searches? Apparently, the answer to this question is not readily available. Bing supposedly admitted to incorporate this information and Google most likely does as well, in one way or the other. The overall effect though will probably be quite marginal compared to all other ranking parameters.
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