Well, first thing I tell people is the TITLE element is not a meta tag, but it's required nonetheless. Once that's out of the way, I tell people to use these META tags. <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css"> <meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no"> <meta name="description" content="A brief description of the current page goes here."> <meta name="keywords" content="keywords, go, here, only, once, page, content, has, been, finished"> Code (markup): The first one declares the character encoding (which must match the character encoding the page has been saved as as well as the HTTP headers sent out by the server the site is hosted on). The second one sets the content style type for the stylesheet (especially useful if using X(HT)ML). The third one removes that annoying popup toolbar in IE that appears whenever you hover over an image. The last two are the ones that tend to get attention by SEOs. The description tag gets used to provide a brief (yet dead-on accurate) summary of what the current Web page (note I said page, not site) is about. The META keywords tag tends to be ignored by the major search engines, but can still come in quite handy for local site searches (if you have a built in search engine, like what WordPress uses for example*). * = I am not claiming WordPress uses the META keywords tag for its page/post searches; I am merely citing it as an example of a local search engine (ie: site search feature)
Generally 3 tags are necessary one most important is title tag, then meta description and meta keywords tag. All of these tags are important tags for all search engines. Others are not necessary but optional depends on the special need.
No problem. I consider it far more in the realm of proper Web site development than SEO though. And for anyone thinking you need to add index,follow to your META tags, drop them. That's the default behavior of the search engines, of COURSE they're going to index your pages and follow your links (unless you specifically tell them to do otherwise, of course). And don't even think about telling them when they can/should crawl your site - they'll do so when they damn well please, and there's nothing we can do about it.