Why Not Meta Tags?
Search engines don't have a whole lot to work with when trying to figure out which sites to show in their list of results for any given keyword search. Considering this, it's actually quite amazing how relevant most search results tend to be, given the sheer number of pages on the Internet these days.
For an internal search engine that just searches through pages or products on your site, the information provided in the Meta keyword tag can really help to narrow down the most relevant pages that one of your site users might be searching for.
Unfortunately, the differences between an internal search engine and a public one such as Google are many. For instance, with an internal engine, there are only a relatively small number of pages or products to search through to find a relevant page. Plus, the content and Meta tags on the site are trustworthy, since your goal and that of your internal search engine is to help people find exactly what they're looking for on your site.
On the other hand, with major search engines, their database contains basically every page on the web that they know about. They can't necessarily trust the Meta tags they find since a site owner's goals may not necessarily be the same as the major search engines' goal (i.e., you would like your site to show up in the search results as much as possible for as many keyword phrases as possible, but the search engine would like to show the most relevant pages, whether those are yours or someone else's).
This makes changing or adding Meta tags on your site neither a quick fix nor a slow fix. It won't fix anything and it won't have any effect on your search engine traffic.
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