to META or not to META?

I get asked about meta tags quite often, here is an average question.

Q: Should I use meta tags on my site? I heard the main search engines don't use them anymore, About how many keywords should you have in your Meta tag? There are so many that relate to my site but I don't know how many is too many. Advice would be appreciated.. i'd probably stick 1,000 keywords. would that be good for SEO and boost traffic from all keywords or make each less important?

A:  Well meta tags do 'help', but maybe not in the way we might think they should work. There are different types of meta tags, do some research into which ones you need to use, ie if you are building a medical site there may be specific tags you should use to make sure you are picked up by any topic specific search engines....(that is an example I have no idea if there is such a search engine)

Meta description may be a good one to use as this may be used by search engines when displaying the page in search results instead of getting content from the page itself, this can help to make people click through to the site.

Keywords, well better to have them and get any +ve SEO rather than not have them and not know if it makes any difference.... catch 22
If the page you are working on has 400 words, there would be no +ve benefit for dumping 400 keywords. Google only read a few hundres characters anyway, but KISS. (Keep It Simple & Structured)

Key to meta is to remember the meaning of meta (from wikipedia.com):

Meta (from Greek: μετ? = "after", "beyond", "with", "adjacent", "self"), is a prefix used in English in order to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter.

so what ever meta tags you use keep it 'about' what is on the page as an addition, to explain what the searcher should expect to find.

SEO is not all about getting search engines indexingf and ranking your page, getting people to the content they are looking for as quick as possible is also a big part - NOTE: if you use google analytics (or maybe google toolbar?) google will know EVERYTHING about your site....time on page, bounce rate,

Rule of thumb is meta tags won't hurt (if done properly ie keep it brief and realtive) and might help if you are lucky.