Thanks Gavin

Meta description will generally "control" what the engines will show on their search result pages, but not always, so it pays to keep an eye on the result pages as the site gets indexed. Sometimes the top paragraph of the page text is used, and sometimes it gets the description from parts of a page. I often see a footer being used as the description

Here is a good article to read
http://searchengineland.com/meta-keywords-tag-101-how-to-legally-hide-words-on-your-pages-for-search-engines-12099

It is quite in depth and gives a history of what has happened out there in search engine land

Peter