Back in the day, one could often attain high search engine rankings simply by filling the meta “keywords” tag of their website with targeted (or untargeted) terms.
Of course, search engines became hip to the fact webmasters and spammers were trying to game this system and largely started to ignore or at least de-emphasize the importance of the keywords tag in their algorithms.
Now, Google has hopefully once and for all confirmed that the tag has no influence, at least in their search results.
According to a post on their webmaster blog today:
“Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don't have any effect in our search ranking at present.”
Google’s Matt Cutts explains further in the video below: