Meta tags are important to SEO for a couple reasons but the most obvious one is the meta description, seen below. The meta description is the only tag that may actually seen by a googler on a SERP, so it has to be SEO friendly and personable at the same time. I’m not sure how the info companies actually treat the zip code tag but it runs clean through w3 so I think if you’re a local business it can’t hurt.
There is no need to use the meta keywords tag as it’s no longer on the list of tags Google-bot understands and to quote Matt Cutts of Google:
“you shouldn’t spend any time on the meta keywords tag, we don’t use it…”.
This following markup goes in the head section of your HTML file.
<meta name=”Description” content=”This is the important text that ends up displaying on google search returns pages under the title.”>
<meta name=”zipcode” content=”65079″>
<meta name=”application” content=”/my-forum”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”all”>
<meta name=”google-site-verification” content=”*you need to get your own number“>
In a very unscientific test, I put a couple sites online without adding any of the above code and they did almost as well in search as other sites, but my sites with meta tags did do a bit better. Also, remember to use as few keywords as necessary and only use words that are actually in the content of your page.
That is all. Stephen James Hall
Edited 1/30/15
Ref.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_element