As the title says, Google is showing snippets of my page as my description rather than my description metatag and I don't feel this is doing my page justice. How do I tell Google to use my description and not a snippet? Thanks Steve
There is no way to force them to use it. Your best bet is to make it relevant to the page and unique, I usually have problems if I dont keep my meta descriptions at around 2 sentences or more.
The snippet changes depending on the keywords used in the search. So if you rank for some variation of your description then most likely it will be your description that is shown. However, if it is a long tail term from your page then the applicable text will show. The important thing about your description is that it should contain the keywords that you want to rank for and also be a "call to action" that makes people want to click on the link when they see it as the snippet.
Excerpts from Google's Webmasters guidelines "Google's creation of sites' titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the META tag for each page. Where this information isn't available, we may use publicly available information from DMOZ. While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't impact your ranking within search results. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL's content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics. While we're unable to manually change titles or snippets for individual sites, we're always working to make them as relevant as possible. You can help improve the quality of the snippets displayed for your pages by providing informative meta descriptions for each page."