It’s a good idea to add meta elements to all of your web pages. Think of these as the web equivalent of the title page of a book– it’s not part of the book itself, but a place to put standard, formatted, descriptive information about the book.
And, like the title page, that meta information is used primarily for cataloging and indexing. One meta field is called description, and many search engines like AltaVista use this in the results list display. If there is no description, they use the first few lines of the page, which may or may not be a good description. Remember that although some people will be visiting your web site and exploring various pages, coming in through the front door, others will be hitting on individual pages through search engines. Good description fields will help people quickly identify your pages in a long list of results, and decide whether or not they are relevant. A good description is short, usually a phrase or two or a single sentence, and mentions the name of your library. For example, “A list of recommended mystery books for children, selected by the staff of the Whatever Public Library.” (You might want to make that the Whatever (MA) Public Library.)
You can add meta elements to your pages by hand, using this format:
<meta name=”description” content=”About the Nobletown Public Library”>
If you are using an HTML editor or web-publishing program, you can probably enter these through some kind of fill-in-the-blank form. Look for a menu item called something like “Page properties” or “Document properties.”