The most important thing is how others link to you (with what anchor text).
That’s why is the white house’s homepage (George Bush’s bio) at the first place in google for keyword “miserable failure”. 
(Bloggers were about testing the anchor text importance in Google, so they linked on their page to this url with the above mentioned anchortext. The page itself doesn’t even contain this keyword (none of them) and it is in the first place on Google.)
Meta keywords and description could be good to show the SEs what are your pages about. WHen you do a Google search with “site:www.mydomain.com” and all of the pages use the same keyword and description then there will be only one unique listing. If you differ your meta data then Google will see your pages individuals. So it can help, but not so important than it was years ago.