But don't expect that to necessarily be enough to put you in the top ten. Meta tags are mainly a design element you can tap into, a crutch for helping information-poor pages better be acknowledged by the search engines. Meta tags are not a magic solution. Meta tags provide a useful way to control your summary in some search engines. Meta tags can also help you provide keywords and descriptions on pages that for various reasons lack text.
Examples are splash pages and frames pages.
They might also boost your page's relevancy. However, simply including a meta tag is not a guarantee that your page should suddenly leap to the top of every search engine listing. They are a useful tool but, as said above, not a magic solution. There are several meta tags, but the most important for search engine indexing are the description and keywords tags. The description tag returns a description of the page in place of the summary the search engine would ordinarily create.