Some say that meta tags have no influence on your placing with the search engines
. Well that is nearly correct except for one " the description meta tag. Almost all search engines (including Google) do not actually take it into account for ranking purposes " yet " many use it in their search results.
The content of the description tag is used more often than not by Google when it displays the results pages for a keyword. It uses only the first 156 characters though so make sure if you are using it to check the length of the text. If you do not check the length your text will be truncated and it will look funny.
Microsoft Word has a great tool that will allow you to check the text length very quickly. This tool is visible on the status bar at the bottom of the page. To use it choose the text you want to control the length and then double click on the word count statistics box.
All meta tags should be at the start of the page inside the head tags.
Google is a little scallywag when it comes to using or not using the meta description tag. When it does use it you can have full control of what is displayed to possible visitors but it will often switch what it uses at will with sometimes it just plucking a piece of text from your webpage.
If you want to determine what Google exhibits then the very first 156 characters of text on a page should be highly controlled because if it does not use the description tag it will use this text.
If you have a flash site or just use pictures with a little text, you have a problem! We have seen Google pick up the alt text from an image and display this when it did not choose to use our description tag. This will tell you to ALWAYS have some text on your page even if it is only 156 carefully chosen characters (including spaces).