The Value of META Tags

Update: On October 6, 2009 Yahoo announced that they no longer use the keywords meta tag for their ranking algorithm.

This was disclosed at SMX East and reported by Barry Schwartz.

Update: On September 21, 2009 Google officially announced that they do not use the keywords tag in any way for indexing pages.

Complete details on Google's use of Meta tags is available from their site. 

Meta description continues to be useful and should contain interesting, unique, compelling content.

Below are several videos from Matt Cutts, Google's director of search quality.

See also: Google Help > Meta Tags