Some search engines display your description in their SERPs, so you can think of your tag as an "ad copy" for your site. Results with descriptions that make sense are more likely to be clicked than those that look like gibberish.
You should definately still use meta tags, although the keywords meta tag is just about worthless. Anyone that says don't use the meta description tag is an idiot. Yahoo seems to use the meta desc tag the most and there is a definate benefit for using it within google and msn as well. so IMO, use both the meta desc and keywords tag. It can't hurt and it doesn't take that long to impelement anyway.
wow, this is what i was expecting from this thread. i will soon start using the meta ones in all my sites.
Overall, meta tags are not a vital part of your webpage. However, they can mean the difference in a good ranking or not.
hello i want to know the importance of <Meta Name="Keyphrase" content="...."> is this has same importance as met keywords have please give me answer thanks
I have found meta tags very important for my pages in http://www.technoworld.com , but only seems to work for google. Also it is not a big task so no harm trying as in most cases you just need to try and 1 day it will work. My keyword laptops is in position 12 so not bad for a beginner.
I don't think Google relies on META tags so much any more since they have the facilities to index all the content (huge datacenters). Where as smaller search engines that are still used might only add the META tags to their index, so to maximize your SEO, you should definately use META tags.
I believe in them...especially custom metas for each page! an example is from one of my sites. I used to be on a host that allowed limited metas except for some of the major pages (mostly about 5-6). Now that I've changed to os commerce though, many of my sub-sub-category pages are getting ranked in google for those more specific keywords. That didn't happen before since there was a "default metatag" for those sub pages.
My 2c, Title=Very Important Description=Somewhat Important Keywords=Good to add them, can;t hurt. Everything else, NO.