I've seen many threads on this issue and decided to put my thoghts here: 1. Meta Tags are very important. They have to say both to Google and to web serfer what will they find on the page. The more relevant to content are Meta Tags (Title, Description, Keywords), the more useful is the web page. 2. Create different Meta Tags for each page. No one creates web site of 200 identical pages. If they copy each other then they are useless. The same with Meta Tags. They have to be different for each page. Of course it is a good ide to have the name of the website on Meta Tags which belong to each page. This is important. 3. Keywords - Do not repeat them They have to be unique for each web page because its content is different from other pages of a given website. This means that any search robot is better to find the most important words and phrases from page content in the keywords section in Meta Tags.
MetaData is important, just not as important as it once was. Many years back you coudl through a keyword in the meta data and be ranked on the first page of google for it. Content is the key. Meta data can help, but it must of course be closely related to the content. Don't try filling your meta data will words, that can have a negative effect.