A wonderful Cre8asite Forums thread has an SEO discussion around meta data and SEO.

As many SEOs know, Google and other search engines want you to submit and tag your pages with meta data so they can better understand the context of your pages. This is done from using XML sitemaps, to marking up your pages with microformats for Rich Snippets or even using standard HTML tags that are interpreted in a certain fashion.

Administrator at the forum, IAMLOST, said:

eKstreme, another Cre8asite administrator touched on the what and whys of meta data. He added:

This conversation is a very useful one and I’d recommend all SEOs check it out.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.