How important is meta tag and meta description for your site?

It is a myth that meta tag and meta description is taken into account by google to rank your website in search result. I know you are surprised but this is the truth. Google itself announced that it does not consider meta tag for optimization.

Meta tag and meta description are only ways to get indexed by googlebot. Providing a good meta description may bring you good traffic. If your description is catchy people may click on your link and visit your site.

Consider for an example I have a target keyword and google indexes my page for that target keyword. Now if I have only meta tag and meta description without any content on my page google should bring my page up if it considers them for optimization. But it does not do so. You can check it out yourself.

So if you want to rank your site first in google stop concentrating on the meta description and meta tag if you want to optimize your site. Again if you want more traffic to your site then these are good options.Also  meta tag  is the least important place to put your keywords when compared to title tag, body content, meta tag and meta description.