A Meta Description is specific type of meta tag which describes a page in a short passage of text. The Description is most commonly seen in the results of a search engine.

For example, in this result from Google:

The black text seen here comes from the Meta Description tag for this page.

Specifying a Meta Description tag

A competent Content Management System should do this for you, but if you need to specify a Meta Description in HTML, the code looks like this:

<meta name="description" content="Silktide specialise in website testing and consulting. We've been helping organisations improve their websites since 2001." />

Note that the end slash shown here is for XHTML only.

In Sitebeam

Sitebeam tests for the appropriate use of Meta Descriptions with the Search engine results test.