Description Meta Tag

The description Meta tag lets you influence the description of your page in the crawlers that support the tag. The second example Meta tag shown in the text box, the one that says "name=description" is the Meta description tag for CNN.com. In general, the description may contain 200 to 250 characters, although only a smaller portion of this amount may actually be displayed. What you include as your description could be a word, sentence or paragraph. The description should be reasonably short and concise while still reflecting the contents of your website.

Not all search engines use the description Meta tag. For example, Google ignores the Meta description tag and instead generates its own description. Other search engines may support it partially, using only bits and pieces of the description you provide.