Does Google Use The Meta Keywords Tag To Calculate Your Websites Rank?
No.
Confirmation from Google employee Matt Cutts:
Just to clarify, there are many different types of meta tags, the 3 most common are:
1. The title tag (The text appears at the very top of the web browser window). Eg:
<title>Welcome to my website!</title>
2. The meta description tag (Where you provide a summary of the contents of your webpage, and sometimes Google displays the contents on the Search Engine Results Page)
<meta name=”description” content=”A summary of your webpage” />
3. The meta keywords tag (Which has always been a dumping ground for any keyword you can think of, but I haven’t bothered with for 2 years because my experiments showed it was ignored)
<meta name=”description” content=”keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword” />