meta tags used to be THE way search engines would index a site. They were abused and developers went on to weigh other methods heavier than meta tags, but meta tags still definitely play a roll in search engine ranking, or at the very least, how the site is listed *after* it is ranked.

These days I find the factors that weigh the heaviest into a page ranking are:

how many other sites link to you, and the ranking of those sites
what words or phrases used to actually make the link play a big factor
the title of the document

This is by no means a complete list.