For example when you Google "stackoverflow" the first result links to http://stackoverflow.com with a description, "A language-independent collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers."
How is Stack Overflow or any other site working to set that description? I am about to put a website online and would like to get a good description of my site indexed. What steps do I need to take to accomplish this?
One way of achieving this is by using the <meta name="Description"> tag as such:
<head>
<meta name="Description"
content="A language-independent collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers.">
</head>
On SO, that tag seems to appear only when you are using a user agent related to a crawler.