What is meant by meta description tags?

[tinaweb]

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.
Discuss how it relates in the field of SEO?

 

[Broderick]

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

 

[tobris]

It will help the website to tell search engine in short that what type of this page is all about.