Megan — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 20:23:47 +0000

Um, well, it's not really true that meta tags are all that important (most of the time). Title is, if you call that a meta tag. Description is nice to have but not essential (and mainly because it's sometimes shown to users in the search results). Keywords and description are also helpful in preventing duplicate content problems but, again, they're nice to have and not essential. Two others you should have are content-type (tells the browser what type of document this is and which character set it's using), and content-language. They would look like this:

Some people seem to classify tags as meta tags - they have a variety of uses as well such as providing a favourites icon (favicon) and alternate stylesheets for your site.

Here's a full list of meta tags. Most of them either have very specific uses (telling browsers what to do, such as redirecting a page), are only used in certain circumstances by certain services (description/keywords), or basically aren't used for anything other than providing extra information for no reason (author, generator).