Meta titles - how if the title tag is paramount?

That's certainly what he's saying - but I've yet to see that work. Keywords work for MSN-search, so that's one reason to use them. They also make a difference for Yahoo and a bit of difference for google. Meta-key-words tag will get ignored if it is too long and repeats keywords. It is useful for getting variant spellings in there and things like synonyms and stuff, though in the case of synonyms they can usually be inserted 'naturally' in the text as well.

The keywords meta-tag is really on the bottom of the list for SEO, but it does still make a difference.

 

The only way I can understand this is if you are talking about those weird MFA-links-pages. From what I've seen many of those are actually search-results turned into pages. Which means that to the extent that they count for page-rank, they just give the websites already on top a bit of an extra boost. But since no respectable site is going to link to such sites, they are unlikely to actually make much of a difference for serious pagerank.