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Google...
Google now ignores the "keyword" meta tag so optimizing this tag is not going to help you with Google. Google is the largest, most used, most subcontracted by other search engines and best search service on the internet and most search engines follow their lead in how they spider and index web pages.
What is important to Google:
1. Title: The name of your page in the
Make sure your most important keywords are in the title and try and keep below 60 charactors in length.
2. Keyword Density: Make sure keywords used in your title are used several time in pages content. Placing these toward the top will help.
You may even want to consider intentionally mispelling the keyword(s) if there are common misspelling of them.
3. Link Popularity: Sites linking to your site with your keyword in the link. Google figures that if other sites are linking to you using a keyword in your title then your site must be well regarded for that topic. This helps quite a bit. Google will give as much as 1/3
Image alt"" tage: Should not be empty. Fill these with relevant keyword information about your site.
AltaVista...
Very similar to Google although you should optimize your meta "Description" tag with keywords used in your title.
Likes to see your keywords used close together within the pages content.
Will also give more weight to your page if other sites are linking to it with relevant keywords.
It is important to note that AltaVista will not give any more weight to keywords in the meta "keyword" tag than the general content of your page, if you have keywords in your keyword tag that are not used on the page, your page will be penalized.
Things to Avoid With Any Search Engine Optimization
These practices are and can be considered as search engine spam. You might want to avoid these on your page since as search engines will block sites practising such tricks.
Extremely small text, hidden text, etc: these are typically used by webmasters to inflate the number of occurences of keywords appearing on a page.
Pages with excessive keywords: presumably if your keyword density is above a certain threshold, AltaVista will consider your page to be spamming the index.
Duplicate content: this includes mirrors of your site as well as identical content appearing from different domain names. If you need a mirror from different domains to distribute your bandwidth around, you may need to create a robots.txt file to forbid the search engine spiders from indexing your mirror sites. | 
