What are the important meta tags I must put in my

Question

There seems to be huge number of meta tags you can set. I'm guessing that some of them are more important than others.

What are the most important metatags to supply and why?

Do I even need meta tags? (looking at the stackoverflow homepage there are none)

Answer 1

The most important meta tag you should use is:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

adjusted to suit. This ensures that, if you ever need to transmit that HTML document via something other than a web server (e.g. working on it locally, sending as an attachment), the user-agent is aware of its mime-type and character set. Just make sure your server headers agree.

Answer 2

I would make sure you have a title, description, keyword, and revisit-after tag in your web pages. Although Google doesn't weigh keyword tag as much, it may still be used by smaller search engines.