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

[{'answer_id': 53093, 'author': 'pkaeding', 'author_id': 4257, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/4257', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Google will use meta tags, but the description, to better summarize your site.  They won\'t help to increase your page rank.</p>\n\n<p>See:\n<a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=79812" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&amp;answer=79812</a></p>\n\n<p><strong>EDIT</strong>: @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 <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this</a>, from the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, which is what leads me to believe that they don\'t:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n  <p>Even though we sometimes use the\n  description meta tag for the snippets\n  we show, we still don\'t use the\n  description meta tag in our ranking.</p>\n</blockquote>\n'}, {'answer_id': 53096, 'author': 'palehorse', 'author_id': 312, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/312', 'pm_score': -1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>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.</p>\n\n<p>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 <strong>know</strong> what algorithms are being used.</p>\n\n<p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5373/do-comment-permalinks-with-anchors-hurt-you-for-seo#5381">This post</a> talks a bit more about some aspects.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 53103, 'author': 'Nick', 'author_id': 4949, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/4949', 'pm_score': 4, 'selected': True, 'text': '<p><a href="http://searchengineland.com/070905-194221.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">This article</a> has some info on it.</p>\n\n<p>A quick summary for keywords is:</p>\n\n<p>Google and Microsoft: No</p>\n\n<p>Yahoo and Ask: Yes</p>\n\n<p>Edit: As noted below, the meta description is used by Google to describe your site to potential visitors (although may not be used for ranking).</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 106106, 'author': 'Rich Bradshaw', 'author_id': 16511, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/16511', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': "<p>Keywords: Useless</p>\n\n<p>All major search engines don't use them at all.</p>\n\n<p>Description: Useful!</p>\n\n<p>Replaces the default text in search engines if there isn't anything better. Use this to describe the page properly. Not perhaps useful for SEO, but it makes your results look more useful, and will hopefully increase click through rates by users.</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 106129, 'author': 'Zack The Human', 'author_id': 18265, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/18265', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>If your pages are part of an intranet then both the keywords and description meta tags can be very useful. If you have access to the search engine crawling your pages (and thus you can specifically look for sepcific tags/markup), they can add tremendous value without costing you too much time and are easy to change. </p>\n\n<p>For pages outside of an intranet, you may have less success with keywords for reasons mentioned above.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 574677, 'author': 'Rimian', 'author_id': 63810, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/63810', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>The problem with keyword meta tags is they are a completely unreliable source of information for search engines. The temptation for people to alter search results in their favour with misleading keywords is just too great. </p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 1637694, 'author': 'Lachlan McDonald', 'author_id': 132164, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/132164', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>If you want your users to share your content on Facebook, the meta tags actually come in handy, as Facebook will use this information when styling the post.</p>\n<p>See <a href="http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Share/Specifying_Meta_Tags" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Facebook Share Partners</a> for more information.</p>\n<p>Edit; whoops, wrong url. Fixed.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 26011090, 'author': 'masmrdrr', 'author_id': 4021991, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/4021991', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>The description meta is important as it is displayed ad-verbatim on Google search results below your site title. The absence of which, Google pulls and shows the first few lines of content on SERPs. The description tag allows you to control what SE users see as a page summary before clicking. This helps in increasing your CTRs from Search. </p>\n\n<p>The keyword meta usefulness is still inconclusive, but SEOers continue to use them. Avoid using more than 5-6 keywords in the tag per page to avoid Google from detecting and penalising due to any suspected keyword dumping. </p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/53081', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/1897/']