I prefer to use Meta description.. They help in click through. However no search engine officially told that Meta tag do not play any role in ranking.
Well, even though many are saying that it's not important, it doesn't hurt much to add it on your site, right?
An interesting question. I think that yes there is a benefit to a meta tag, but that this is primarily for visitors looking at your site in search enginee results pages. You can define what they get to see. However i have seen a number of websites ranked no1 for keywords with absolutely no meta tags becausethe content on their page is so good.
Yes i can say that META TAGS are important for any sites. While crawling Meta tags are first crawled by search engines spiders. So always use page relevant meta on your site.
No. They are both important. Your title tag should include the keywords for your site. If you don't do that, you might not get into the right Google search listings...
There are lots of thread about your question, Read it here http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=177733
I heard somewhere, probably a video from matt cutts, that Google no longer uses meta keywords as it can easily be manipulated. They do sometime uses meta description as the SERP snippet if it's relevant to the content.
Meta Description is a helpful tag. It shows up often (not always) below the blue link in searches, and if so it allows you to describe your site to the searcher. Meta Keywords is generally not considered important nowadays. But it takes me less than a minute to add Meta Keywords to a new page, so I do it. Can't hurt, might help. P.S. The Title tag referred to in several posts above is not generally considered a "meta". But it is very, very important.
Only description meta tag is important. Title is not a meta tag but it is the most important tag. Keyword tag will affect your SERPs inversely. Don't add keyword meta tag. Buy backlinks with your keyword anchored in them if you need to get ranked for a specific keyword.
Honestly speaking, I did not find any importance of metatags as far Google is concerned. But it seems Bing and Yahoo is still giving importance to metatags in their search algorithm.
Most people don't aware this inverse effect and they add keywords randomly to their pages. Each page must be optimized individually. Who can do it for big sites with thousands of pages? Even if we choose our keywords carefully according to our domain names, keyword popularity on our pages, page titles, page urls, etc. can we know the fluctuating demand (search volume) for some of the phrases/keywords on any of our pages individually? So, only the search engines can determine which keywords/phrases can bring the best possible value to a web page. Because they market our web pages more professionally than any of us here and they make huge profits from finding valuable content for their customers (searchers). I should mention that I didn't test to remove meta tags from highly specific sites with a few pages. (i.e., sites for selling digital products by only 2 pages, homepage and checkout page). Using meta keywords for those small sites might bring positive effect on better SERPs or better conversions. I have no idea about this.