Significance of Meta tags and Key words

How do search engines relate Description, Keywords ,Title and Content in the Body of web page:

Search engines are continuously 'spidering' crawling the web. When they visit a web site they note the URL (universal resource locator) of the web page, Title of the web page, Description Meta tags, Keywords Meta tags, as also Keywords in the text or the body portion of the web page When we submit a search query to the engine The job of a search engine is to find the content which most suitably fits the search query, the engine links up these words with what it has stored in its memory. Depending upon the occurrence of these words in the web pages already spidered by it the results are displayed. It is very essential to understand that different search engines respond differently to the Meta tags. Some use only the Title tag, others use description tag and few others the keywords. So all three tags are important and also all three must have similar content.

Pitfalls of using unrelated Keywords in Meta tags :
It is a common belief that if a Web master has the right keywords his page would figure in the top 10 of a search engine. Meta tags are important as they do help in search engine listing but they are like a double edged sword.Most search engine look at the Keywords, Title and Description of the web page and then they try and relate these to the Actual Content of the page. It is vital that the Title, the Description and the Keywords are in unison with each other as also with what is appearing on the web page. Having a too long description (it wont fit in the description window of the search engine), Keywords should not be repeated. If there are to many Keywords and unrelated to the content on the page the search engine will classify it as spam and put the page out of its listings.

And one final word-please, please don't steal keywords from a popular web site, it is Illegal..