Strangely, I'm not much clearer on this. Are we saying just use the tag and dont worry too much about what you put in them. The three things I went back and changed were based on the following three mistakes;

1) Not seperating keywords and phrases by commas.
2) Keyword stuffing
3) Place irrelevant keywords in the tag defined by the fact that if you enter keywords that do not appear in other tags or in the body text of the page, then it is deemed irrelevant by the bots.

It appears that the general consensus of opinion is that these things wouldnt lower my rankings. Or have I got this totally wrong?

I posted in someone elses thread that I am also trying to get an answer to on this theme;

Does it matter if the keywords are sperated by a space i.e.

keyword,keywords
versus
keyword, keywords

Thanks for everyones patience on this. Newbies need this stuff spelled out.