Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Question:

It used to be. Back in the earlier days of search, AltaVista used meta-tags to index a site with keywords in the meta-tags section of a page. Then you would submit it and have a reasonable chance of being listed. However, it was soon evident that this could be abused (with meta-tag stuffing, spamming etc) and also not very useful as users would get to a legitimate site and not find the pages they were looking for. Google and other search engines followed with algorithmic criteria that made the search experience much more relevant.