Which meta tags matter?

[bendj]

Does anyone know, or know of a page/thread the following? I am compiling some meta tags and trying to optimize my page for search engines. It seems there are quite a few meta tags out there. Which should be used? Now I know the obvious keywords and descriptions, but what about the rest?

Examples of meta tags: keywords, description, publisher, copyright, robots, language, document type, etc.

[cbpayne]

Title

[bendj]

Are you saying that the title is the only important one? Basically I am wondering which to include, because ive seen many pages with only title, description, and keyswords... while other have the entire list. Which is better?

[deejay]

Title (not actually a meta), description and keywords will do it.

The others won't add anything in particular.

Title is essential - it's the heading for your SERP listing.

Description is often used by directories, etc as your snippet, so make it good.

Keywords in particular is paid rather limited/no attention by some engines, but is also used by a number of others, and a lot of smaller directories, etc, so is worth retaining.

[bendj]

should these be placed in every page or just the main index.html?

[Eldorado]

Use your keywords here:
Title tag : every page you have and
also,
meta keywords and meta description.

[deejay]

Use all three on every page, and customise all the tags to the content of each page.