Anchor text is still an important factor in google rankings, meta tags are not quite as important for google but there are other search engines that use them.
Totally agree with kingofsanda, anchor text is very important, also to use different combination of anchor text is very important, not use always "buy my product online", sometimes use variations like "read a review from my product", "my product advantages", etc. play with different combinations. Meta tags are devaluated for Google.
Appreciate all of the insight everybody. You would not believe how much that helped. I am going to be a content-writing, article submitting, social bookmarking posting , link building fool tomorrow!
Perfect example is do a Google search for "click here" You'll see adobe reader comes up number one. Why? because 1000's and 1000's of sites say "you will require adobe to open this pdf file if you do not have adobe, click here to download it for free" (or something to that effect) with the click here (the anchor text) going to the adobe site
Anchor text is an important relavency factor as far as Google is concerned. Meta tags are almost useless in Google but still carry some value in Yahoo.
Of course anchor text is on of the most important element in SEO to get better rankings. While, meta tags has still little value on other search engine.
sounds like your new to this seo thing. check out this link http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization
SunDevil, being new to the seo thing is an understatement. I definitely appreciate the link that you dropped on me. You are a sanity saver.
Anchor text is important. The only meta tag that is important is the description meta tag. And title tag is very important.
Yes it is , go and make few searches and you will find that most of them were anchor texts in different posts . Their are so many people those are using different keywords as anchor for their websites and blogs to get back links .
I feel that its not as important as it once was and you also have to consider that different search engines consider anchor text, meta tags etc differently, so its best to air on the side of caution and include them in your SEO efforts.