Seach engines barely care about meta tags.
This doesn't mean that you shouldn't have any, but that compared to other factors, they're the least important.
So where are meta tags in the whole scheme of search engine importance?
Title (Title)
Most Important Thing Used. Do not Over Optimize - Do Not Make It Spammy.
A good rule of thumb is to keep the title at or less than 8 words long.
Header Tags (H1, H2, H3...)
This is the second most important thing, but only if used once or twice on a page. Over use invalidates the effectiveness of this tag.
Links (a href=
[A href="http://www.yoursite.com"]http://www.yoursite.com[/A]
)
It is linking that gives you the greatest power and flexibility for coming up in the SERPS Use linking to capture tons of phrases, and link to pages in your site that are actually about the link title. Then on those pages having good optimization and even a few outbound links to relavant, well optimized (high ranking for the phrase you want to capture) is how to best use linking for good SERPs
Bold, Strong and Italics Text
Use bold, strong and italics within your body text to highlight phrases you want to rank high for. do not over use though, meaning, bolderize some text that you dont care about so that your page isn't over optimized.
Main Content (Any visible text on the web page, bold tags and italics help this)
Do not be afraid to have lots of text on your page. Used to be, this was the best thing in the world for homepages. However, lately (Fall, 2006) Google and Yahoo have been favoring fairly light (in contnet) home pages.
Alt Text (Text used to describe images  - hold mouse over image)
An image is invisible to search engnies unless there is an 'alt' tag. Be sure to include them in your images!
Meta Description
They're at the bottom of the list, but shouldn't be ignored. Simply create an accurate description of one or two sentences.
Meta Keywords
Choose no more than 15 keywords and you should be fine.
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