If you think META tags still rule, you need to read this
manual

Some not so honest webmaster that came before you in the 1990s used META tag spamming
and other web page manipulation techniques to get higher rankings. The search engines got
the message loud and clear, and answered back with a set of algorithm changes that are still
evolving today. The Meta tags were slowly phased out as reliable ways to determine the
relevancy of a web page by the major search engines by the late 1990s. Currently, the META
description tags only real value is for website owners to succinctly describe their sites in the
search results. It no longer has any ranking relevance at all.

So now the search engines have the upper hand, and dishonest webmaster have a much
harder time manipulating the search results. Of course there are still a lot of people out there
who can game the search engines for at least a few weeks or months until their sites are
penalized by the engines. At that point, they simply register a new domain and start over
with a new link farm, blog spamming, or a new hot off the press "black hat" SEO technique
the search engines haven't discovered yet.