I have placed a description tag on the on the site and yet google reads the text rather than the description tag?????

any ideas?

http://www.google.com/search?q=iomx&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Maybe because the text is more important than what anyone puts in the description field? A preview of the page, so to speak. Rest assured, few will search for the term 'iomx' anyhow, so maybe you should gear things for a different term?

google isn't a 'meta' search engine - it pays no attention to the meta tags in a page.

Google does read and index the meta description, and that content plays a minor role in the ranking algorithms. Also it will display the tag as the page description under some circumstances, such as when there is no text content on the page (an all-Flash site, for example). But normally the approach Google takes is that "snippets" showing the search terms in the context of the returned page gives the user a better feel for whether the page's content is really what they're looking for -- because too often the description tag is not an accurate or useful description of the page or site content.

Basically, Google considers the meta description to be not very important because it can and has been misused by too many webmasters and "optimizers" -- the same reason most search engines ignore or discount meta keywords.

Because anyone can abuse the description/meta tag system, so google looks at your actual content (that means you flash people don't count nearly as high).

Look at your site with a text browser such as lynx to see what most search engines see. Or try the search emulation emulator. It shows summary view, header view (h1, h2, h3, shoudl all be used to structually and logically lay out data and modified through CSS, coding well does have its advantages), as well as full text view. Try it here:

http://www.delorie.com/web/ses.cgi

It looks at your description for the homepage usually. Title, filename, and content are basically all google cares about. Domain name is a big part of it too.

and link popularity, probably the most important.
google generally takes snippets from the body copy/meta description and disiplays it under the site's results along with the google directory description which is powered by dmoz.

in terms of link popularity, does google also crawl urls that you may have on your site?

IE a list of XXX customers you may have, put them in a html file, make sure its linked from the index page....will it also index and add those sites as well?

Googlebot crawls static ahref links.
So with that in mind if you have static ahref links on your site Googlebot is likely to crawl those links and theirfor going off to the linked ahref page and crawling that site also.

If theirs anything that is stopping googlebot from navigating your site such as flash, non-ahref links and other such things your site will have trouble being deep-crawled.

Linking and getting links from similar themed sites will help in the ranking a fair bit.

BTW Just so you know google also runs off the title of your page.