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When authoring site meta data, if targeting an international market of English-speakers, is it better to use the common en_US, or simply en, or is there some locale code for specifying that the region is global?

Additionally, when I use the broad term "better", in the case that "more accurate of description" and "more effective for SEO" are not necessarily the same thing, please elaborate on the differences.

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    en_US specifically means English as spoken in the US. If you do not need to specify a given country, don't include it in the locale.
    – Patrick Mevzek
    Jan 6 at 4:15
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    @PatrickMevzek OK. Is it always valid to specify simply en? Or is there a global region code I should use?
    – Mentalist
    Jan 6 at 4:40
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    en is a valid language tag (as is en_US of course), only the first part is mandaty (en) the rest, like a country, is optional. No need of a global region code.
    – Patrick Mevzek
    Jan 6 at 7:50
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    @StephenOstermiller I explicitly used a comment because I didn't want to answer the "SEO" part in the second paragraph as I have nothing useful to say there. I don't know how to address the "better" part, I just added a technical point that en is valid and means "all around the world/no specific country".
    – Patrick Mevzek
    Jan 6 at 12:57
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    @Mentalist What is the context in which you are using this locale? Is this in the HTML tag's lang attribute or in a hreflang, or somewhere else?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Jan 6 at 13:08

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