What is meant by meta description tags?

[sowmya]

A meta description tag is a short HTML paragraph that provides search engines with a description of a page’s content for search engine Index purposes. The meta description tag is not displayed on the website itself, and may or may not be displayed in the search engine’s listing for that site. Search engines are now giving less importance to meta description tags in lieu of actual page content.

[jamsen]

Meta description tags, while not important to search engine rankings, are extremely important in gaining user click-through from search engine result pages (SERPs). These short paragraphs are webmasters opportunity to advertise content to searchers and let them know exactly what the given page has with regard to what they’re looking for.

The meta description should employ the keywords intelligently, but also create a compelling description that a searcher will want to click. Direct relevance to the page and uniqueness between each page’s meta description is key. The description should optimally be between 150-160 characters.

[blessy_smith]

The meta description tag is intented to be a brief and concise summary of your page's content. Think of the Yahoo! directory. You see your site title followed by a brief description of your site or business. The meta description tag is designed to provide a brief description of your site which can be used by search engines or directories.

[webcreations]

Meta description tag is a snippet of HTML code in a web page header that summarizes the content that is on the web page. The meta description is usually placed after the title tag and before the meta keywords tag. When optimizing a web page for search engines (SEO), it is considered a best practice to use meta description tags. meta description tags, the keywords in a meta description could influence ranking on a search engine results page (SERP).

[bloodchadha]

Basically Meta Description is to short story of what your page is about. So with different meta description on different pages, it is telling Google that these pages are actually different from each other and are not dynamically created dulicate pages.