Using Meta Tags - What is your Opinion Please?

Which is why I tell people that first impressions are so important. But it's not just for PPC, it's about showing the visitor that your page is the most relevant to what they are searching for, regardless of whether the page was MFA (made for ads) or not.

I don't buy that. If the keywords are all the same and being repeated constantly, then yes, but that's keyword stuffing, which is relatively well known. Having the most relevant title element content (the title of the page followed by the section title if appropriate and then the Web site title) is optimal, and if you can squeeze a rich and relevant keyword in there then by all means do so! Give yourself extra props if you can make the keyword appear to be organic as well. As for the meta and page content, they need to align - but as I've said before, it's best to write for PEOPLE, not search engines, which is something most people either never bothered to learn or just forgot about in their quest to have the top spot in Google.

But they're still not worth much.

Search engine spiders will crawl your site when they feel like it, not because you tell them to. That particular meta tag is worthless in this regard. The best you can do is tell the search engines that you have new content available to crawl, but they'll still get around to you when they can.