In many instances several outbound links are fine, but you should also have a significant amount of your own content. I've seen those "thin" sites where people have very little content of their own and they link to everyone else's site (including affiliate links) and that's probably what that site was referring to. In that case, you have very little info for the search engines to crawl.
For example, say you have a 5-page site with 78 links total and 70 of the links go to external sites and you have very little content. In this case, you don't really have a site. It's more like a doorway to other sites.
And I'm sure there are some very heavily trafficked sites with lots of outbound links, but at the same time they have their own content or useful features that draw people to the site. And of course the exception would be a directory site that would obviously have more outbound links.
Now, as for improving your search engine by keeping them to a minimum.... I suppose you could say that it helps indirectly. Just understand that is only 1 factor that is used to determine a site's rank. Assuming you've done other things well then yes, it is certainly better to have a lot of your own content and interlinking your own pages, than just creating a site that links to everyone else's.
But I will say, other than Ad Networks, I do like to keep my outbound links to a minimum on my homepage though. I've just always felt your homepage should be the entrance to YOUR pages, especially since so much weight is put on the homepage by the search engines.
Yes, you should definitely use meta tags on every page to describe the contents of that page.
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