Meta Tags

Even now, nearly a decade after Altavista, Lycos, Hotbot et al were all big search players, some SEO consultants cling to the myth of meta tags to boost site rankings.
Whilst it has been demonstrated that the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and to a lesser extent - MSN) will largely ignore the content placed there, and instead rely on the actual content of the page. There have been too many webmasters with too much spam in their meta tags to rely on a small snippet of information these days.
Whilst they do carry a lot of weight with search engines, and it's usually worthwhile adding the to your pages, laboring over them as though your site's existence depended upon it is usually misguided. Stuffing keywords in the meta tags will hurt your rankings badly, so it's best to stick to the basics - list your main keywords, a short and well-written description, and that should be all you need.
One place where care should be taken is the title tag - this is used very extensively by the Search Engines, and will prove critical to SEO success. Increasingly, though, the meta tags are being left behind, and will most likely lose all meaning in the near future.