Not necessary, but valuable.
You are correct. They are not necessary, and no one sees them. No one, that is, except search engines. And some search engines very carefully consider the description and keywords when evaluating where to place your page in search engine results. So let's talk about them.
First, your metatags go in the 'head' of the page, which means you should put them somewhere between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> lines. The two tags should look something like this:
<meta name="description" content="page description goes here">
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3">
Description
Your description metatag should have lots of terms in it that you think users might search for. The description for the page you are looking at right now is: Metatags And Webpage design: Description and Keywords are two metatags you'll need to use when optimizing your web page for search engines..
If you look at that text, you will see the following phrases people might search for: webpage design, metatags, description and keywords, optimizing web page, and search engines.
The length of the description tag should not be overly long; some search engines start to penalize pages if their description tags are over 150 characters.
Also, you should consider using some of the same phrases as the page title.
Keywords
The name 'keywords' is deceptive, because keywords are not nearly as helpful as key phrases. Fill your keywords metatag with phrases you think people might use when searching. having "webpage design" as a keyword is much better than having "webpage" and "design" as two separate keywords.
Be careful not to repeat words or phrases too much, however, as some search engines will penalize you if they find the same word more than three times in your list.
I haven't run across a "limit" on the length of the keywords metatag; I generally just fill it up with as many reasonable phrases as I can think of, and I usually end up with somewhere between two hundred and four hundred characters.
One Last Piece of Advice
Make sure that the key words and prhases you use in your metatags also show up in the text of your page. No search engine is going to be impressed if your page title, description, and keywords all have the phrase astronaut training program, but that phrase doesn't show up once in your page content. When it comes down to it, though the metatags are important, what's actually on the page is the most important of all.
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