Do not use the meta keywords tag. Many people still think of this as a quick fix for SEO. It's not, It only benefits your competition!! how so? well back then search engines used to rely on Meta Keywords to guess which keywords were relevant to a webpage , now the search engines are sophisticated enought to examine the keywords in the body of a webpage.
by placing Meta Tags on a page your giving your competitor a list of important keywords.can then use these keywords and buy PPC ads or optimize their own site for your important keywords. Why give them this sort of business intelligence? Having invested time and money on exhaustive keyword research to identify the important keyword phrases to use for your own SEO and PPC efforts, why on earth would you make a list of your high value keywords public?

Read the whole article at: RankNumberOneOnGoogle.com/blog.html
This website blog is a great source to rely on if you want to learn to get lots of free traffic to your website. and rank high on the google search engine fast.

Sorry but this is lousy advice. MSN & Yahoo still seem to use the keywords meta tag.

Any good competition can find your target keywords more effectively than just checking your meta tags. They can see the anchor text of all your backlinks and they can see the keywords that are used prominently on your pages. These are your actual target keywords and it is very public.

You have to accept that competitors will know what keywords you target. Forget about the secracy and build up enough backlinks and content that they can't compete with you even if they try to target the same keywords.

I don't think so. I think meta keywords is important of SEO, you can views source of more than hight page rank.

There is no disadvantage to use META tags. You need to compete with your competitors not by hiding your keywords, but providing good content your site.

I agree with Jeremy that Yahoo and MSN still use the keywords tag.