Titles and Descriptions - Useless or Valuable?

[Simon]

Okay, so that's not the whole question.

But it got you here, plus it has Useless in it.

Now on to the actual questions...


PREABMLE:

Since we're pretty new to building free sites, I'm always interested in learning ways we can improve them. One thing I've noticed is that while pretty much all of the free sites that get accepted to link lists do have a title for the site, and most submitters would've entered a description on the submit page, they often seem to be lacking any meta title and meta description tags in the html...which kind of surprised me.

I'm thinking that those are probably the only two remaining meta tags worth using (aside from the GooglePray tag of course LOL), and that using them well can help quite a bit when search engines index your free site pages. (some info here http://www.highrankings.com/issue139.htm#stuff)

Okay, here we go...

QUESTION ONE:

My first question is whether you think the meta title tags and meta description tags are worth spending time on for free sites. I guess the answers here may vary depending on whether someone builds for link lists only, search engines only, or both. We do spend some time on those two tags for our hosted free sites, and I'm trying to decide how much time we should allocate to this part of the process.

QUESTION TWO:

My second question is about the "best" length for the title and the description that are used to submit the site to Link Lists. I've been looking around at some Link Lists' rules to see what's acceptable, and I don't find much about this anywhere. Only Penisbot seemed to have something published in their rules ("2-5 words titles and descriptions up to 70 chars length"). So I'm wondering if you have a good 'average yardstick' of what you consider the perfect length for a title and description you're submitting to a Link List. Or for Link List owners, what lengths do you like to see on submitted site titles and descriptions?

Thanks in advance for any feedback you can offer.

Simon