Adding correct metatags

And the eternal questions... adding meta tags? Is it going to help? Is it "mandatory" to get a good ranking?

Let's start saying that Meta tags are one of the best ways for webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites. Meta tags are valid for any search engine. The only difference is that each system processes only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest. Meta tags are added to the section of your HTML page and generally look like this:

/!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"

html

head

META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Author: A.N. Author, Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: £9.24, Length: 784 pages"

META http-equiv="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"

META NAME="verify-v1" CONTENT="+nxGUDJ4QpAZ5l9Bsjdi102tLVC21AIh5d1Nl23908vVuFHs34="

title>Example Books - high-quality used books for children

META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow"/


We can divide this text into parts like this:

"meta name="description" content="A description of the page" : This tag provides a short description of the page. Very often, this description is used as a part of the snippet shown in the search results. To show sites' titles and descriptions (or "snippets") the bots read the site, a function that is completely automated, and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. As we all know the content of our sites is changing all the time, so the best way to get some control or influence our website description, it's to make sure that our webpages effectively deliver the information you want in the search results and follow these strategies when you design your content:

* Place descriptive content near the top of each webpage.
* Make sure that each webpage has a clear topic and purpose.
* Add a website description to a Description tag. For example:

"META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Sample text - describe your website here."

And as I have to go just now... I'll continue later on!