Meta Tags : What do you use? Why?

[Todd W]

What META Tags do you use and why?

I find I mostly just use Keywords and Descrption now...

Looking at sites I've done a LONG time ago I see:

<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache">
<meta http-equiv="no-cache">
<meta http-equiv="Expires" content="-2">
<meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache">

<META name="resource-type" content="document">
<META name="description" content="desc">
<META name="keywords" content="kws">
<META NAME="category" CONTENT="Recreation & Reference">
<META NAME="author" CONTENT="ToddW">
<META name="distribution" content="Global">
<META NAME="reply-to" CONTENT="email@site.com">
<META NAME="rating" CONTENT="Safe For Kids">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW">
<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="7 days">
<META name="verify-v1" content="su2XgdRT5DXE2K2Ox/cl+hOtGrSbW10BJI9zwhMElck=" />

What do you use and why?

[MaxS]

I don't bother with anything but description/keywords.

Why? I don't have a good reason. Most of them seem outdated and useless.

[agua]

I sometimes use this one to get rid of that things which Windows XP pops-up over photos

<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no">

And Description, sometimes Keywords.

[polspoel]

description, keywords, and revisit-after could be handy if you don't have google sitemaps.

The others, especially reply-to are not needed.

[stymiee]

revisit-after is useless. no search engine uses them. Plus Google sitemaps has that built into the sitemap so an extra meta tag wouldn't be necessary anyway.

[Johnny Gulag]

description, keywords, imagetoolbar and MSSmartTagsPreventParsing are the ones I add.

[Chris]

don't forget noodp

[stymiee]

don't forget noodp

If you can get in.

[KLB]

Here are the typical meta tags I use. Some are legacy, but oh well.

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css">
<META NAME="copyright" content="1995-2007 Kenneth Barbalace">
<META NAME="doc-rights" content="Copywritten Work">
<META NAME="Author" CONTENT="{author's name}">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOODP">
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="{page description}">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="{page keywords}">
<META NAME="language" content="en-US">
<META NAME="revisit-after" content="15 days">
<META NAME="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">

[Johnny Gulag]

<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css">Oh yeah I use these too, but forgot to add them to my list