HTML meta keyword/description element, useful or n

Question

Does filling out HTML meta description/keyword tags matter for SEO?

Answer 1

Google will use meta tags, but the description, to better summarize your site. They won't help to increase your page rank.

See: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=79812

EDIT: @Petr, are you sure that meta tags influence page rank? I am pretty sure that they don't, but if you have some references, I'd love to learn more about this. I have seen this, from the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, which is what leads me to believe that they don't:

Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking.

Answer 2

Those are two of the things that are used by search engines. The exact weight of each changes frequently, they are generally regarded; however, as being fairly important.

One thing to note, care should be taken when entering values. The more relevant the keywords and description are to the textual content of the site, the more weight may be given to them. Of course there are no guarantees as nobody outside of the search engine companies really know what algorithms are being used.

This post talks a bit more about some aspects.