Can any of you Expert Yahoo SEO's out there give me an example of a well-formed, well written description meta tag for Yahoo that ranks well if the keyword phrase is, let's say, 'Boston Celtics Tickets'?

Would the following description tag be good or not so good and especially *how could it be improved *?

"Boston Celtics tickets offering Boston tickets - with 2005 regular and playoff NBA Tickets, Celts tix, hoops tickets, theatre tickets, including Boston Celtics basketball tickets, and cheap and sold out tickets online."

Also, is it true or not true that Yahoo doesn't give much weight at all to the descritpion tag?

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I wouldn't use that as a description tag. Reading that as a user is really hard. It just doesnt make sense, it looks more like a meta keywords tag. I would use somthing along this:

We sell 2005 season Boston Celtic tickets for regular season and playoff games.

There is no need to stuff every keyword you can in a description... the search engines dont look at it like that anymore. Make it more informative for your visitors, you never know when the search engine might actually use it in a listing.

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At the SES Conference in Chicago, the Yahoo engineer said that Yahoo uses the Meta Description tag for the "snippet" of information to be displayed in the search results.

I imagine it has maybe a .002 factor in the ranking algorithm.

But for good usage, put them in, since Google will use it too, if it can't find a title of your page (I can't imagine how that would happen except for in a CMS environment)

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If you want to covert people viewing the SERPs into visitors you need a well written description tag as it's much of what shows up after the title.

It won't have much effect on ranking though.

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It does in yahoo

A little, but not much at all. Your visible content will have much more of an impact than the description.

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i heard somewhere recently, that for it's indexed pages, yahoo's bot reads the title, around 70 characters from the description tag, and around 40 characters from the actual body text... if there's any truth in that, you should consider decreasing the amount of words in your description (or at least arranging your important keywords to appear in the first 70-100 characters), and have a keyword-rich first sentence (<h1> for example) in your body text.

I noticed that in the past two weeks, Yahoo! has included 4 lines of website content in their search results.

Regarding the phrase at the top, I agree I found it hard to read. Bring in the traffic with words that will inspire clicks - and remember that people like to read well crafted copy. Good luck!