I disagree, especially for local search marketing. If you are a local business specializing in say the Louisville, KY area. Adding the term Louisville to your title and meta descrip will help smaller businesses gain an advantage in search engine rankings where they may have been pushed out by larger companies that don’t focus just on local areas.

Note: Google does not list the keywords meta tag as one they use.

The only meta tags that’s got any value that might get you a little more traffic from Google is the description meta tag, BUT this tag does NOT increase rankings, no meta tag increases rankings in Google.

From Google about the description meta tag:

“This tag provides a short description of the page. In some situations this description is used as a part of the snippet shown in the search results”

This means when a Google search results shows your page at number 3 say for a search IF you’ve wrote a compelling description that is more likely to generate a click (think of a well written advert) than a random snippet of text from the page then you might get more traffic (more people click your link rather than those at 1, 2, 4, 5….. What it won’t do is increase that pages ranking, no matter what you add to that meta tag it isn’t going to change it’s actual ranking.

In my WordPress theme Talian I’ve set it up so the meta tag is either the title of the page or if a page has an excerpt (WordPress posts and pages) it will use the excerpt. If you haven’t written an excerpt it uses the automated excerpt.

So meta tags have no ranking value.

David