I have been doing some SEO for a couple of sites. They are getting really nice rankings. However the other day my employer asked me to include "special characters" for expanded phrase matching. I.E. = [keyword], "keyword", -keyword, *keyword*.
He saw this in a book "Definitive guide to google adwords.

My question is that if I put this in the meta tags won't it take up valuable space? Also, does this work?

I think that this is just a way to work the adwords campaign and not natural searches.

Am I wrong?

Thank you
mjancosek