Importance of meta tags

[kamalsh01]

Hi,
I want to know importance of Meta tag in prospective of search engine ranking.
Thanks

[htdawg]

Do you mean title, decription & meta keywords tag?

1. Title tag = The most important tag which search engines read.
2. Description tag = also very important (I have seen cases where google will use the decription if there is not enough content (text) on the page.
3. Meta keywords tag = the least important, does not help with ranking.

[josjongejan]

Looking at a competitor's meta keywords tag is still a great way to find out what's apparantly important to them.

And descriptions indeed are used by google, just google for <snip> and you'll see a good example.

[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 8:31 am (utc) on June 27, 2008]
[edit reason] No specific keywords, please, as per charter [/edit]