Search engines ignoring meta description content and showing footer

I have a site that is very simple and has mostly images and a login form and a link to signup. No actual text exist in the body except for the footer which shows the link to usage terms and copyright notice.

My site is currently showing up on search engine results with the footer content showing instead of what I put in the <meta name="description"...> tag. Why is this?

How can I not allow the search engines to index my site with the footer content showing? Or at least show the meta description first? Do I need to put some text in the form of a title attribute or alt attribute somewhere?

Solution

As +Filburt pointed out, you could add your site to Webmaster Tools which will offer you valuable information about your site's presence on the web and in the Google Search results. It may also provide you hints about what do we think about your meta descriptions :)

Generally, you will want to

write the meta description to be as natural as possible, don't stuff keywords in it,
describe the page's content accurately in this tag,
and to have a unique meta description for each page.

While we can't guarantee that the meta description that you provided will be used as search result snippets, following the above tips will greatly increase the chance.

Here are some more information about the meta description tag: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35264