Need Some Quick Advice Please

A couple of questions I really don't know the answer to. I have built a site, and need to know exactly the best way to use my keywords in the meta tag. For example, my site is using a long-tail keyword such as "the best italian garlic bread". Would I be better off using the phrase in my keyword tags, or separate words like best, italian, garlic, bread, etc.

The reason I am wondering is that I am using 3 or 4 long-tail keywords on my homepage, which only allows 200 characters in my meta tags. It seems that if I could use the words separately, I could have more options for keywords on my home page. Does this make sense?

Also, when placing articles on your own site. Is it best to place them all in a category titled "articles", or is it best to place links to your articles on the page that it is related to? My site is about home based business, and I have many pages related to certain products. Should I put the links to the articles that are optimized for the "home based business" type keywords on that page of my site, or just lump them all together in an articles section?

Hope all of this makes sense! Thanks for any help or opinions.

Tess