What is the importance of the keywords in SEO?

[sakuntala]

In body copy you can not stuff keywords but can be used in different phrases.

[hoprick]

I think I read somewhere that a lot of spam sites use keywords to get top-rated so search engines (Google, Bing etc) aren't focusing their searches using that tag. By all means use keywords, but don't go overboard and you'll have a better chance of your site being indexed as not spam.

[♥toyicebear]

Major search engines like Google don't "reward" your sites use of meta keywords..at-least not in a "positive" way. They will at time penalize you if you miss use them though.

 

Straight from the horses mouth: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking