Death of Meta Tags?

For those who've never heard the term "Meta Tags", the brief explanation is this- back when websites started, meta tags were little bits of text embedded in a web page to help with search engine results. If you put keywords hidden in your code, like "free money, prizes, pizza, sex, etc", that would help your site rise to the top of the search engine heap. Meta tags also did other things, but generally people are talking about page descriptions and keywords.

But for a number of years now, that approach has been downgraded, to the point where you wonder if search engines are looking at these meta tags at all? Or is ancient history? 

One authority on the matter, Search Engine Watch, proclaimed the 'death of meta tags' way back in 2002. So do they have any value at all today? 

What to use

One meta tag, 'description', still is the text that will appear under a search engine result for Google. If you search my site, for example, the text that shows in Google under my domain URL is the same text I've entered for Meta Tag Description in my page code. 

Meta tag 'keywords' on the other hand, I'm told that the major search engines don't even look at them. What do they look at? Content. The words on your page. If you want to be found for a particular phrase, then write about it. On the page, in plain text and in conversational tone. Without repeating the words too much, Google knows when you're trying to fool it (and it will penalize you for it). 

• Search Engines