important meta tags to put in website

Question

There seems to be huge number of meta tags you can set. I'm guessing that some of them are more important than others.

What are the most important metatags to supply and why?

Answer 1

<title>{{pageTitle}}</title>
<meta charset="utf-8"><!-- html5 version of http-equiv="Content-Type"... -->
<meta name="description" content="{{description}}">
<meta name="keywords" content="{{keywords}}">
<link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/{{googlePlusId}}" />
<link rel="canonical" href="{{pageUrl}}" />

these are the meta tags used by search engines and browsers