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A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about (1). Whereas a page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. Google Webmaster Tools provides a handy content analysis section that'll tel you about any description meta tags that are either too short, long, or duplicated too many times (the same information is also shown for <title> tags). Like the tag, the description meta tag is placed within the tag of your HTML document.

Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. Note that we say "might" because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page's visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user's query. Alternatively, Google might use your site's description in the Open Directory Project if your site is listed there (learn how to prevent
search engines from displaying ODP data). Adding description meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google
cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet. The Webmaster Central Blog has an informative post on  improving snippets with better description meta tags.
Words in the snippet are bolded when they appear in the user's query. This gives the user clues about whether the content on the page matches with what he or she is looking for. Another example, this time showing a snippet from a description meta tag on a deeper
page (which ideal ly has its own unique description meta tag) containing an article.

Accurately summarize the page's content

Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.
Avoid:

- Writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page
- Using generic descriptions like "This is a web page" or "Page about some thing" filling the description with only keywords copying and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag

Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain (e.g. searches using the site: operator). If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn't feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate description meta tags based on each page's content.

- Using a single description meta tag across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages

Remember: Use description meta tags to provide both search engines and users with a summary of what your page is about!