What is a meta description tag?

I know the meta tags are just key words? Not sure about the description tag?

There are different types of meta tags -- there's the title tag, description tag, keywords tag, even tags to tell the search engines if the page is to be indexed or not

Meta tag description is a statement of what the site is all about. When crafting one, think of the snippet from the search engine that you want to be seen, as most search engines pick up what you have stated in your meta description tag as your site description.

Here are examples of meta description tags

TARGET.COM WEBSITE
<title>Welcome to Target</title>
<META name="description" content="Expect More, Pay Less at Target.com, the official Target online retail site. Shop the latest in Women, Men, Baby, Kids, Home, Bed+Bath, Furniture, Sports, Toys, Electronics, Health and See All. Check out current deals and promotions, and the Weekly Ad, too.">

CONSTANT CONTACT
<title>Email Marketing Solutions from Constant Contact</title>
<meta name="description" content="Email marketing software that makes it easy to create professional HTML email campaigns with no tech skills. Sign up for a 60-Day FREE trial.">

From the above examples, here are the snippets from Google

Welcome to Target
Expect More, Pay Less at Target.com, the official Target online retail site. Shop the latest in Women, Men, Baby, Kids, Home, Bed+Bath, Furniture, Sports, ...
www.target.com/ - 94k - Cached - Similar pages

Email Marketing Solutions from Constant Contact
Email marketing software that makes it easy to create professional HTML email campaigns with no tech skills. Sign up for a 60-Day FREE trial.
www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp - 20k - Cached - Similar pages

Unlike the meta keyword which some search engines such as Google ignores, the meta description tag is important. Google for example looks first at whether the site has a meta description tag, and when it does they use it for their search engine snippet. If the site has none, then they pick up ODP's http://dmoz.org/ description of the site, if it has one.

When writing your tag, think of what you want users to know about your site, and what will make them click to your site

The description tag looks like this:

<meta name="description" content="Learn how to use meta tags and keywords on your website.">.

Here is more on how it works: http://www.richkahmer.com/meta-tags.html

A special HTML tag that provides information about a web page.

The tag present in the header of a web page which is used to provide a short description of the contents of the page. Some search engines will display the text present in the Meta Description Tag when the page appears in the results of a search. Including keywords in the Meta Description Tag can improve the search engine ranking of a page for those keywords. However, some search engines ignore the Meta Description Tag. There is no real difference between a meta tag and a meta description tag other than that descriptor tags may contain website author info if provided and how often a site is updated.

The title tag is what the user will see at the top of the browser window, as well as in the search results as the linked title to your Web page. Title tags help search engines determine your web page's relevancy for certain keyword phrases. Making a good title tag is pretty simple - by the end of this how-to, you'll have a snappy new title tag that will be part of your meta tag optimization arsenal.

http://websearch.about.com/od/quicktipsandtricks/ht/meta_tags_title.htm?terms=meta+tag

I did a search in Google for "meta tags explained" and this is the article that came up first. It covers not just the description tag (which often goes hand in hand with the title in the display in the search pages) but all other meta tags and when and if you should use them.

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