Key:

Remember: Less is more! Don't go crazy with these tags. They exist simply to help indexing, and do not have much of an effect on your rankings. Additionally, every single page on your site should be different and unique. Therefore the metatags on each page should also be different and unique.

Here is a good rule of thumb: you should never have the same information in two different metatags on the same page. It's spam.

An example of this would be to create a description for your site (perfectly acceptable) and then copy that and use it as well in the dc.description tag. Why? You only need it in one place. Same with keywords, the other highly abused tag. Never duplicate content in your metatags. Each one is unique and has it's own reason for being, so the information should be unique as well. If it's clear that the same information should be in two different tags, then it's clear that you don't need one of the tags.

For example, currently Google ignores the keyword metadata. Yahoo and MSN use them to a degree, but only for inclusionary purposes, rather than ranking purposes. For example, if you put a common misspelling into the keywords metatag, then that will tell Yahoo to consider you as a page to be shown for that keyword - but it will have no effect on it's rankings.

If you are not sure what to do or what to fill in, leave it blank - it will generate perfectly acceptable code if you don't fill in everything, and I recommend that you do skip the specialty (and "not recommended") areas unless you have a need for them.

You missed some tags?!

What about revisit and VW96? These tags were invented for the use of ONE search engine - the SearchBC engine, run by Vancouver Web Pages, that is geographically restricted to British Columbia, Canada. That's it. This site offered one of the first metatag generators on the net, and as a result there are a lot of sites out there that use these tags. Unless you are geographically located in BC and interested in being included in this one search engine, these tags are useless. SEOConsultants has stopped accepting SEOs who use the revisit tag because it's a clear sign they don't know what they are doing.