This story from Paul illustrates that just because meta keyword tags aren't so important, that doesn't mean that all meta tags should be ignored.
Someone said the meta description tag isn't important ... they lied.
A while back I had only 15 or 20 sites in my portfolio. I created a page on my site, as many do, to show my work and offer links to clients sites. But rather than just a simple link, I created a unique page on my site with text and links, and of course meta tags. I figured that giving them a page rather than just a simple link would help them in the search engines. And, it does.
To save time, I use an existing client's page as a template, change the graphics, text, and links and I'm done.
After a few weeks I checked the new site in Google and was very happy to see that the page I created on my site was listed on the first page of the search. I figure, it doesn't matter how the client is found, just that they are found.
My joy ended abruptly when I read the description on the search page. The site in question was for a newspaper, but the description was for a railroad site. Yeah, you guessed it, I forgot to change the meta tag and the search engine used the description meta tag as the search results description.
Of course, I corrected the error but it took a lot longer for the search engine to re-index the correct page than it did to index the page the first time.
So as you can see, meta tags really are rather important.
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