[thelist] Importance of Keywords, Description

[Syed Zeeshan Haider]

Hello Experts,
I have more than a hundred web pages of an under-construction web site
on my hard drive. All of them have same keywords and description in
<meta> tags. I was thinking about changing them according to the page
content, which is quite cumbersome for such large number of pages.
Before doing all this, I want to know that:
What is the importance of keywords and description in <meta> tags for
the search engines?
To what extent search engines depend on keywords and description in
<meta> tags while searching?
Thank you,
Syed Zeeshan Haider.
http://syedzeeshanhaider.faithweb.com/