In short Not as important as they used to be. The Title tag technically not a Meta tag remains a central part of most search engines' ranking calculations. The Description Meta tag still plays a minor role in the ranking procedure. The Keywords Meta tag, however, is mostly ornamental at this point in time. Of the major search engines, only Yahoo! even indexes the Keywords Meta data from listed pages; it is unclear how, if at all, this data influences the search engine ranking. The other major search engines simply ignore the Keywords Meta tag. Note that many smaller search engines continue to pay close attention to all Meta data.
