My sites are doing pretty well in the search engines for the keywords i've chosen, but all of the articles i write or have had written seem to get nowhere. I've been a bit sloppy with the meta tags and meta descriptions in my SEO panel - is this something i should correct, as do they make a big difference to the search engines? If so, for the Meta Description - do you just put an excerpt from the article or do you put the keywords you want the article to rank for in there (obviously so it makes sense and not a case of keyword stuffing.) Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.
Yes you are overlooking a valuable step. The most important thing for onpage seo is your websites title, then second is your meta description. You need to include your keywords there in order to rank better. You should definitely write a unique meta description and dont copy from the article. Hope this helps