Why is my site description displayed in Google not what I specified?

The site description you added to your web site may not always display in the Google search results. This is because Google will display a different description in its results pages, depending on the keyword phrase that was searched for. Because of this, it's impossible to completely control what will show up as you have no way of knowing every single keyword phrase that someone might use to find your site.

If you don't like the description, try modifying the area where Google is pulling the description, and see if Google will pick up the changes and use the new description as the snippet in the search results. Remember that the description of a page is important when it comes to increasing visits to your site. If your description is compelling you will get more traffic from search engines.

Here's some helpful advice from one of our customers, (Thank you Tony!)
"Google will pick up snippets from the DMOZ.  I found a couple of Google articles on this really helpful and have improved the snippets for our site as a result.  Also helped our page ranking as we could add more meaningful information in the description which google will index.

Firstly stop Google using the DMOZ as you have no control over what they have said about you.  See this article.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35624  I used the robots noodp metatag as it should affect all robots not just google.

Secondly add your own description meta tags – see this article http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/09/improve-snippets-with-meta-description.html  it can take a few days to take effect."

Please also see our article on Search Engine Optimisation.

And for detail of how to add and edit Keywords and Meta tags please see our article on Page Titles and Meta Tags