Some slightly related from Technorati and Google.
[SEO Today - SEO Toolkit, Google SEO, SEO Tips, SEO Services, SEO Help, SEO News] Screwed: Is this an Inevitability in SEO?: I can't believe it's even been used as an excuse for why an SEO company hasn't achieved decent rankings for you. But alas, more than one SEO company has told potential clients of ours that the reason they are not ranking well, or why their search engine optimization campaign is not effective, is because someone else has been sabotaging the site. Some of the clients who have been told this are small businesses, like bed and breakfasts or pet sitters. We always explain to these potential clients that the likelihood of someone even having the initial idea to sabotage a web site, the site in question would have to be a fairly large one, and the target of a lot of hatred.
[Willie Crawford's Marketing Insights] A Guaranteed Top Ten Ranking And Other Myths: on the keywords and description metatags. Without these tags in your site's code, your ranking on MSN will suffer. Just as importantly, if your keywords and description metatags don't use proper language...://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/1.html#A2 "MetaTags Are Not Important Anymore" Sure
[Metamend.com] Meta Tag Optimization Services: Meta Tag OptimizationMeta Tags are lines of HTML code embedded into web pages that are used by search engines to store information about your web site. The standard ones are the keyword Meta Tag, the description Meta Tag, and the Title tag, which are present in almost every web page. These Meta Tags, (sometimes just called "Tags"), contain keywords, keyphrases, descriptions, site author information, copyright information, site titles and more. There are other important Meta Tags as well, which is why Meta tag optimization must be part of any web site optimization service.
[Htmldog.com] HTML Meta Tags - HTML Dog: The reason why meta tags used to be so important was because they were relied on by search engines to build a profile of a web page. The keywords meta data was used extensively for example. Nowadays however, most search engines use the actual content of the page itself, rendering most meta data useless beyond conveying information to someone who is physically reading the HTML.
[Homepage.ntlworld.com] Meta Tags Optimization: All HTML pages should then have (<HTML><HEAD>) followed by the Title (<TITLE>Keywords Targeted on This Page</TITLE>), what to put as your title was dealt with on the first SEO Tip page on the Search Engine Optimization. Then we come to the Meta Description Tag (<meta name="description" content="This bit should describe what the page is about">). Although the contents (the keywords) of this Meta Tag are not counted when Google determines where to place your page in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), Google sometimes uses the Meta Description Tags content as the description it shows to searches. Google will only show the first 138 characters, so not much point adding a small essay here as it will be a waste of bandwidth, especially when your site has 10 000 pages each with a Meta Description Tag and 2 000 000 plus visitors a year!!
[Webrankinfo.com] Using Good META Tags - Web Rank Info: description: this tag is used to give a description of the site (or better, the page). Prefer one or more sentences correctly built with a series of keywords.
[Instant-web-site-tools.com] Build A Website Blog | Meta Tags: In general terms, the meta tags are used to describe the type of code you are using on the page, the author (optional), the description of the web page, the keywords used on the web page, instructions to web crawlers (yes, including search engine spiders) on whether they should spider your page and how often, and much more.
Reflected tags on Technorati: Blog, Meta Tags, Keywords, Plugin, Plugin, Keywords, SEO Files
