SEO for Category pages

Hi! Searching turns up a lot of useful resources for SEOing individual post pages, and maybe the index.html page, but not so much for SEOing category pages. And so I have a two-part question.

1. How do I get the Description tag of a category page to actually include the category description? (I can guess at one line of php code that might do it, but I’m a php novice and would rather leave the question out there than embarrass myself by publishing my guess.)

2. Are there any other useful tools or tips for SEOing category pages?