There are dozens of meta tags. Some are generated automatically by your HTML editor, others help you with SEO, and others do nothing at all (or even cause problems).
Review this list of meta tags to see which ones you might want to add to your web pages.
Meta Tags List
| Meta Tag Name | Short Description | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| abstract | A one sentence overview of the entire web page. | Optional |
| author | The author of the web page content. | Optional |
| content-language | The natural language of the web page. | Recommended for non-English pages. |
| content-script-type | The default scripting language of the page. | Not recommended |
| content-style-type | The default CSS language of the page. | Not recommended |
| content-type | The MIME type and character set of the web page. | Recommended |
| copyright | The copyright date and information for the web page. | Recommended |
| date | To note when the web page was first written and posted. | Optional |
| description | A short description of the web page. | Highly Recommended |
| designer | To indicate the web designer who designed the web page. | Optional |
| distribution | How the web page should be distributed. | Not recommended |
| expires | The expiration date of the content on the page. | Optional |
| generator | The HTML editor and version that created the page. | Optional |
| Information for the Googlebot about how to index, archive and follow links on the page. | Optional | |
| keywords | The keywords associated with the page. | Optional |
| language | The language of the web page. | Recommended for non-English sites |
| msnbot | Information for the MSNBot (for Bing) about how to index the page and what description to use. | Optional |
| PICS-Label | Rating of the web page for child safe programs to use to show or block the page as appropriate. | Recommended |
| pragma | Force the page to not be cached and reload from the server. | Not recommended |
| publisher | The HTML editor and version that created the page. | Optional |
| rating | Content ratings for parental controls. | Not recommended |
| refresh | Reload the page from the server or redirect to a new location. | Not recommended |
| reply-to | Provide contact information for the web page. | Do not use |
| resource-type | The type of document the page is. | Not recommended |
| revisit-after | This tag is only supported by one search engine to indicate when a page should be revisited by the spider. | Do not use |
| robots | Provides information to search engines about what they can index and follow on the web page. | Optional |
| set-cookie | Set a cookie in the web browser. | Not recommended |
| subject | The subject of the web page. | Not recommended |
| title | Sets the page's title — similar to the TITLE tag. | Not recommended |
| X-UA-Compatible | Tell Internet Explorer what viewer to render the page in. Values can be: IE=EmulateIE7 and IE=EmulateIE8 |
Optional |
