The META tag: Controlling how your Web page is indexed by AltaVista
In the absence of any other
information, AltaVista will index all words in your document (except for
comments), and will use the first few words of the document as a short
abstract.
It is however possible for you to control how your page is indexed by
using the META tag to specify both additional keywords to index, and a
short description. Let's suppose your page contains:
<META name="description" content="We specialize in grooming pink poodles."> <META name="keywords" content="pet grooming, Palo Alto, dog">AltaVista will then do two things:
AltaVista will index the description and keywords up to a limit of 1,024 characters.
Источник: AltaVista