The meta elements used to matter years ago when search engine bots were less sophisticated and relied on the meta description and keyword attributes to help them.
When this was taken advantage of by spammers, search bots started giving less importance to meta elements.
Google takes no notice of keywords.
Having said that, it doesn’t hurt to include the meta description element.
This is the text used in the description of your site. Try to limit yourselves to 200 characters, keep it simple, grammatically correct and include relevant keywords. Keep the descriptions unique for each page.(nettuts)
And if the bot can’t get useful info out of your site’s content it will display this in the search results as default.
Net tuts Search Optimization 101
dated: September 2009
By Siddarth
Links
WebpageSEO 101